Week Two – Fødselsdagfest og Udvekslingstudent Sjovt!

Jeg er stadig træt, men jeg vil skrive. Jeg har en anden uge fremad. Det vil være godt.

My first week of school was very exciting, but school wasn’t the only new experience I had this week. I got to eat dinner with my second host family, walk around Haderslev and go to a cafe with my friend from class, attend my host father’s 60th birthday party, and spend some time with the other exchange students at my school!

On Tuesday, I met up with two of my host siblings from my second family after school. I tried iced tea with elderflower flavoring, which was delicious. After the drinks and watching my host brother Søren and his friend consume an impressive amount of fries, Iben – my host sister – and I headed to Vojens to get ingredients for the night’s dinner.

Making dinner turned out to be a lot of fun, though I confess that all I did was cut the chicken up. It turns out that Lukas Graham released some albums before he released his international one, so we got to listen to those. Not long after dinner, I made the mistake of showing my host brothers the video of the calculus “Holly Call” (look on my Facebook or Instagram to find it). I don’t think I will be able to escape that now with four host brothers! I am really glad to have such nice, friendly second host family, and am excited to experience having a lot of host siblings.

Friday afternoon turned out to be a lot of fun, as my friend Lærke – who’s been on exchange in Texas – and I got to hang out in Haderslev! I find it crazy that I managed to get a sister in each of my first two host families that went on exchange to the US, but I don’t know how I lucked out and got another friend who went on exchange to the US in my class. I also got to try the second coffee shop in town with Lærke, as well as increase my total t-shirt count to four. Lærke helped me with my Danish too, while walking around in a park in Haderslev. Here are the pictures!

Hanging around with Lærke was a really good way to see Haderslev, but what was yet to come was the most Danish thing I have experienced yet. My host dad had his sixtieth birthday on Saturday at the Agerskov Inn , which was unlike anything I have ever experienced before. I’ll start you guys off with the pictures.

As you can tell, there was a lot of delicious food! We started off with the fantastic fish with almonds pictured, and after a lot of singing and speeches, we devoured the second plate of food pictured. I discovered that Danes really like eating a lot of food and drinking a lot of wine, on a much different scale than Americans. After a second serving of food (I took another piece of that delicious meat with the mustard sauce) and some more singing and speeches, the dessert buffet appeared. As you can see in the pictures, it was really quite spectacular, and I am not sure I have ever eaten so much dessert in one sitting.

The night definitely wasn’t over yet. We headed over to another room for some coffee and those cute cookies pictured in the bottom right corner. The rest of the night was spent dancing, and I have now learned that Danes really know how to party.

I may have gotten to bed around 3ish the previous night, but that didn’t stop me from going to the Haderslev Katedralskole exchange meet up! Susanna from Italy arranged for a meet up in this adorable little park in Vested. We made these bread treats over the fire – like pigs in a blanket but without the hot dog – which tasted great with Danish ketchup. Also, I am not sure why we got these, but some delicious pastries came our way.

About nine of us came, which resulted in a pretty fun time. One of the first things we did was split into teams and guess the names of items in Danish, which we did pretty good at, if I do say so myself. Besides eating a lot of food and talking a lot, we also went to the lake, where we saw someone snorkeling and got to see Mateus from Brasil show us his impressive rock skipping skills. It was a lot of fun getting to know everyone better, and I am so lucky to have such great other exchange students at Haka!

The rest of the pictures are up on my Facebook page!

Jeg er meget glad for at være i Danmark, det har været godt. Denne uge, jeg vil spise mere mad og løbe et løb. Vi ses senere, farvel mine venner.