Study Tour: Møns Klint 2

from Tuesday, September 3

all pictures from Lauren unless otherwise noted due to my lack of foresight and my camera's battery dying

I woke up to a lovely breakfast buffet: fresh bread, butter and jam, nice cheese (at least by American standards--it included Brie and blue), yogurt, muesli, and juice. And this is a motel!

We started the day with an extremely strenuous hike to one of Denmark's highest peaks, which towers over the surrounding valley at an astonishing 150 meters (500 ft) or so above sea level.

Hiking carefully down the grand peak. Half Dome was nothing compared to this.

Misty rain + spider web = pretty

We walked through the little valley between the little hills, stopping now and then to take pictures of snails. I like traveling with scientists; we gather around critters, plants, and rocks.

Trevor's Smurf, though used only for scale, reminds me of my dad's Bigfoot.

At the end of the valley we got our first glimpse of Møns Klint. Then we entered a misty forest and walked down quite a few stairs.

More snails!

The beach at the bottom of the stairs

With only my iPhone camera, whose quality I (wrongly) doubted, I turned to my sketchbook to capture the beautiful scenery.

Photo of sketch taken from my camera

Same part of the klint from farther down the beach

At the next stop, a couple hundred meters down the beach, Sune made hot chocolate and pulled some cookies out of his magical backpack of delicious food. Then we walked a long stretch of a few kilometers along the beach. Our class of 19 + 2 profs slowly separated into smaller groups. I stayed with the stragglers who stopped to take more pictures and made a rock sign:

Eventually we had to climb back up 492 stairs for lunch (an impressive salad) at the Møns Klint Geocenter. We spent the afternoon at the Geocenter;  three hours flew by with two dinosaur archeology movies, a glacial ice movie, and exhibits on local geology and a Greenland dinosaur expedition. That was the end of organized activity for the day.

But the fun continued! Back at Stege I went out for pizza with Lauren and my roommates Audra and Brytne. We should've gone to the other pizzeria, but it was still a nice meal, and I got to practice some Chinese with Audra! 

When we got back to the hostel we found two of our classmates struggling to uncork a bottle of wine. The hostel's corkscrew was just a screw without any handles or anything for leverage; it took three of us holding the bottle and one person yanking the screw to get the cork out! 

As people trickled in from dinner, we started a game of Cosmic Wimpout, a rather complicated dice game, then moved on to an intense game of Spoons with about 15 people (including Trevor and Sune!) and two decks of cards. We had warm homemade (though rather salty) cookies for dessert, baked by a few ambitious classmates. And then we trickled off to bed.