November has been quite the busy month. I cooked an American dinner for my host family. I made, from scratch, Mac n' Cheese with chicken, green onions, tomatoes, and ranch dressing. Luckily I had my wonderful Danish mom, Mette, to help me with the preparation. For dessert I made root beer floats. They loved it! I had such a great time introducing some not so healthy American foods to them. In the middle of November, I moved to my next host family. I was very very sad to leave my family. However, it is a new adventure and that is what my year in Denmark is all about. School wise I have changed my schedule, so I no longer have biology with my class. It was just to difficult to of my class for my level of my Danish. I now have a Spanish class with Esther, which is so awesome! It's a little crazy with three languages though. hehehe
Classmates asks me, "Como te llamas?"
I say, "Jeg hedder... no no whoops um um me...llamo Alex".
I also have a different PE class with 3.m. So far it has been a lot of fun! We're currently doing parkour, also known as free running, where you run up walls and do other kinds of crazy stunts. I know youtube has some awesome clips about it. The next Thule is tomorrow, and I'm so excited!
Winter is officially here in Denmark. The sun doesn't come up until 8:30, and it goes down at around 4:00 everyday. It did nothing but snow for the last week and a half of November, and the temperature has not risen above freezing for the past two weeks. In fact it is currently -6ºC, about 21ºF. Brrrr! However, the snow makes everything feel more like Christmas. Hjørring is getting ready for Jul (Christmas), the walking street is decked out in Christmas lights and trees and there is Christmas tunes playing in every store. The Danes have so many awesome Christmas traditions. Advent, which is the four Sundays before Christmas, started this last weekend. On every advent everyone gets a present. I got the warm socks for the first advent since my host family was worried about my feet due to the lack of winter boots. The Christmas food is amazing! I seriously don't know how the Danes stay so thin. When I went with my new family to a family gathering, I tried æbleskivers, which taste like waffles that were rolled into a ball. They are also served with powdered sugar and jam. I also tried gløgg, which is warm red wine with spices of some kind. It also had chopped almonds in the bottom of the glass to add flavor, I think. It was a little weird, but it tasted so good! I'm sure I will be learning more of these Jul traditions as well as enjoying more amazing Christmas food.
The title of this blog, a quote from Matt in 2.w, illustrates just how I and the other exchange students feel about the Danish language. About three weeks before I switched host families, I realized that I was never going to completely learn Danish if I didn't speak it. I decided from there on out that I would speak only Danish with my families and classmates. It's very challenging, but I am so lucky to have the support of my Danish family and now my second host family in this difficult endeavor. I think it's quite amazing much better my Danish has become since then. I know longer form sentences in English and then translate them to Danish. The Danish just comes, but I still have so much to learn. The language barrier has made it harder to make friends than I thought it would. It has been really tough getting close to my classmates, but I keep trying my best. I've made some friends outside of my class which is great, and I have always had Esther, another exchange student and my best friend, and Julie, my sweet and amazing Danish sister, to hang out with. Being an exchange student has its ups and down. There are times that I really miss my first Danish family and I feel quite alone, but there are also times where I'm excited about getting to know my new family and meeting new people. Even at the toughest of times, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world.
