Hello there, my lovely readers. It’s been a while, huh? I’m sure you are all wondering where I have been since the last time I blogged. I’m going to enlighten you, but first I would like to talk about what happened this morning because not only was it funny, but it should go down in the books. It’s about my bike.
This morning Christina and I were on our way to the train station and everything was fine and dandy. I was eating my breakfast of champions (bread and butter because I was a little slow this morning) and we were on a role riding down the bike lane. When suddenly…Christina, who is riding in front of me, stops because a car wanted to go into a parking lot we were about to pass. I didn’t hear her breaking and I realized I was going a whole lot faster than she was. I quickly slammed on my break (you have to pedal backwards to stop) but I knew I wouldn’t stop soon enough, so I jerked to the right and proceeded to crash to the ground. Not too much damage came from the crash, but I have a pretty good gash on my knee that is not going to be fun to look at tomorrow or the day after. My bike? It is alright but I had to readjust the handlebars because they had been twisted and my basket is a bit wonky looking now. All in all Everything is in working order. My host dad is going to have a look at my bike just in case.
Alright, now to where I have been these last couple days. This week for DIS was called Core Course Week. This means that we don’t have classes and we travel with the people in our core course class to somewhere outside of Copenhagen. So, because I am in Child Diversity and Development as my core course, I spent three wonderful days with a great group of ladies plus one boy. We had crazy schedules, but I will try to tell you about our day to day activities, starting with Monday, February the 4th.
Monday
We needed to be on the bus in Copenhagen at 7am. I slept until 7:40am. Do you see the problem with this situation? I had set my iPod to a crazy early time because I had a few clothes that I needed to pack still since they were drying from the night before. And I didn’t hear it. Let’s talk about the alarm on my iPod real quick. It sucks. It decides when it wants to go off and half the time that means it doesn’t go off at all. Figures. (I’m getting my new phone tomorrow, so this will not be a problem anymore.) Plus I’m sick and when I’m sick I’m def. So, anyway. I missed the bus because they left without, which I knew could happen and has happened in the past. I frantically called Jennifer (one of the teachers for my program that was going with my class on this trip) and she was very nice and understand of my situation. She helped me figure out how to meet up with the group in Kolding. I had to take the Regional train, which was actually pretty nice:
Very comfortable indeed! Andddd to get to Kolding (pronounced Cooling) you have to cross two bodies of water as you can see on this map
Once I got to Kolding I went to the Koldinghus to wait. In case you don’t know what that is, let me show you:
Yay, for castles! It was really fun to go inside once the bus of my classmates got there!
Once we were done at the castle, we went to the hostel in Kolding. This was so exciting because I have never been to a hostel before. I’m told that hostels in Scandinavia are really reliable and nice like the one we stayed in. This was my reaction to my first hostel:
Once we had our rooms and were all set we had a very nice dinner together as a group and then it was lights out.
Tuesday
We got up early and had a nice breakfast at the hostel. It was sooo super tasty! Breakfast here is amazing. There is a lot of cheese, bread, fruits, vegetables, yogurt, oats, boiled eggs…mmmm. So good! After breakfast we drove to Odense (see the map previously shown) and we went to a school called the H.C. Anderson Skolen. It was really cool to go into the school and hear the teachers explanations of what the school is like before we went on a tour of the school. It is in a more lower income part of the city and it is known for being a troublesome, yet their idea of low income and “ghetto” as they said, was nowhere near what we think of as “ghetto” in America. The school was still really nice because of the welfare system in Denmark and how much money is put toward education. We talked with some of the older students their and helped them with the projects they were working on, which was fun. I helped one group talked about American football.
When we were done visiting the school we had lunch and then went to the Vollsmose Kulturehus and made some fun masks:
After we were done with our masks we went to our hostel in Odense. Once we were settled we went on a scavenger hunt around the city center! It was great and we saw some amazing churches and gardens.
When we finished the scavenger hunt we had dinner at a Turkish restaurant to prepare for our trip to Istanbul in March, just a few weeks from now! We stayed at the restaurant for a while and then went back to the hostel for bed.
Wednesday
Another morning of yummy breakfast and I actually ran into Christina because we were staying at the same hostel. That morning we had some time to ourselves to explore more in the beautiful daylight. That town is amazing and is great in the sunlight! Our whole group met up around 11 and went through the H.C. Anderson museum, which was really fun and cool to see. In case you don’t know who he is, he wrote fairy tales, such as The Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, The Emperors New Clothes, and more. We even got to see and walk through the house he was born in!
To keep with the fairy tales, we ate lunch at The Ugly Duckling (a tale which Anderson wrote) and had some wonderful Danish food. It was so great and there were some things I had never had before, like mint jelly. After lunch we went to an art museum that was awesome. It had many exhibits in it that we got to see, but the reason we went there was for one particular exhibit. It was one designed for children dealing with the senses and it had some fun things in it.
It was so funny to see all these 20/21 year old’s running around and having a good time with this exhibit. The rest of the museum was fun too, they had some really beautiful photographs there and some nice sculptures made of glass from the 1970’s.
The last thing we did before heading home was stop and get tea/coffee and cake at a place called the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was very delicious! This is what I had:
Yup. Be jealous.
The ride home was about 2 hours and most people were asleep for that bus ride. When we got home we were welcomed with a nice snow fall that was really pretty and sparkly. And extra nice ’cause it didn’t stick! haha
Well, that was my weekend in a nutshell. I’m sorry it’s a bit rushed! If I’m friends with you on Facebook than you can go look at my pictures from the trip (which totaled to be more than 360 photos)! Thanks for reading, everyone!
P.s. For my Babajo….I will go back and edit this tomorrow. So, I’m sorry if there are really bad mistakes. I’ll fix it, I promise! :DD
Dishing Denmark 