Hej everyone!
Well, as of last Thursday (Torsdag) I have officially been in Denmark for a month. Pretty crazy huh?
Sooo much has happened, starting way back in January just after I wrote my last post. On the 30th of January the 54 awesome rotary exchange students in Denmark all travelled to Bjerringbro (In north Jutland) for a week of meeting new people, danish lessons, watching handball and a danish film, dancing, bowling ,shopping, a little bit of sightseeing and endless games of marfia. During the camp we took two trips out of the boarding school in which we were staying- to Viborg where we saw this beautiful cathedral and to aarhus where we visited this art museum, went shopping and discovered Baresso coffee (which is so good!) The food at the camp was amazing and even Danish lessons were fun! We learnt mostly basic stuff- i.e "Jeg hedder Jacquie og Jeg kommer fra australien..." and numbers, colours, etc. but also a bit of grammer which I think will be useful.
I could go on for pages to say just how much fun I had and how great all the other exchange students are, I could even go into huge amounts of detail on all the funny stories from intro camp, but I get the feeling that they are mostly 'you had to be there' moments.
But now...I am back (actually I have been back for a while, I just haven't blogged in a while...is that a word, blogged?) and it was back to school. School is slowly getting easier, there will be days when I still cannot understand a word of what is going on, and there will be some days where I understand quite a lot (of course this is usually due to the fact that I have studied the material before, and not my amazing Danish skills.)
At the moment I am taking language classes in Odense (40mins north of Svendborg) with some of the other exchange students from camp, twice a week after school...I hope this helps! My biggest worry at the moment is the language. On one hand it is great that everyone speaks such fantastic english, on the other hand I am not picking up the language as fast as I would like to.
As for getting to know Svendborg... I think I can say that I know my way around. It is not a big town so if you walk around lost it will only be for a minute and having spent quite a bit of time there after school I know where I am going.
The weather...It is freezing cold! Seriously. On Friday it was -10 degrees! But on the plus, it snowed last week so it is all beautiful and white here. This also gave me the opportunity to try making snow ice-cream with my oldie Claire, who comes from Alaska and has been here 7 months. It tasted amazing! Pity we dont get snow in Australia.
I am still getting along really well with my host family. The other night we went to the movies to see 'the tourist' and then on Sunday we went along to watch Camilla in another show-jumping competition =).
Yesterday I also helped a bit around the farm, feeding the cows and horses and stuff! It is a totally different lifestyle here...but I love it! I also went with my host mum to her horse carriage riding lesson and had a go at riding the horse and cart!
The food here is also reaaally good. My host mum is a really good cook! On Monday we made 'Roulade' which is a Danish dessert made from sponge and jam. Apart from a few things- like danish Rugbrød (a dark rye bread which Danish people have for lunch (we make Smørrebrød which is where we put things like fish, salad, meat, egg ect, on it) I don't think the food is too different. The other day I also made dinner for my host family so they could try some real aussie food- made some lamb and potato salad and of course a pavlova!
Okay, so this has been a really long post. Hope it makes up for the month without anything. Winter break has just started so I am sure I will heave heaps more stories to tell later!
Farvel
Jacquie xox
