day 100Did you know that I can happily spend over an hour looking for Livejournal icons instead of working on an assignment due in 24 hours? Well, I can! Now I have plenty of Christmas icons to make my journal warm and festive for the holiday season, which is obviously much more important than, say, graduating from college.
Today is my 100th day in Denmark! Huzzah! Only 17 days left. I'm looking forward to a lot of things when I come home (like leafy greens and salad dressing that is neither creme fraiche nor thousand island), but it's sad to think that my time here is almost over. Even though I'm home all the time, I still feel like I don't spend enough time with my host family.
Socializing with Danes
This weekend was my host sister's 24th birthday. She started opening her gifts early in the morning. Her parents fulfilled her wish for a stor sort bedstemorcykle -- big black Grandma bicycle. It's lovely. She also enjoyed the skildpadder I gave her. The entire family came over for dinner, including her brothers and her brother's wife and oldest child. My parents made duck, fleskestag (roast pork), boiled potatoes (see? not kidding!), gravy, carmelized potatoes, and red cabbage. My host mom also made two chocolate cakes, but cake was served before dinner with tea and coffee. We also ate nachos with dip and soda as an appetizer because that's what my host sister really wanted. No candles, no birthday song, just straight to the pigging out and presents. That's Scandinavian efficiency for you.
My host family is really nice about including me in these events. They always make sure I have a place to sit when everyone is socializing in the living room and my host dad will say a few things to me in English so I'm not always just sitting there. But more often than not, everyone is speaking Danish and I can catch small bits and phrases but I don't know enough to contribute to the conversation. I felt awkward so I milked my paper as an excuse to be antisocial. I really did have work to do, but I also just felt completely out of the loop.
I find it really interesting that everyone in my host family speaks English and knows that I don't speak Danish, but no one really makes an effort to talk to me -- other than my host dad. I don't think anyone is trying to be rude or to exclude me, but Danes are notoriously difficult to get to know because their social groups are very insulated. They find it hard to meet new people and accept new people into social circles. Americans are great at introducing each other and making small talk because we've been trained to do it, but Danes haven't. I think a lot of this stems from the fact that growing up, Americans met 30 new people every year in grade school. We were always making new friends in our classes. Danes start school around age 7 and they stay with the same class of people and the same teacher for nine years. That's really hard for me to imagine.
Vi Elsker FCK
Last night I went to a football game (that's soccer for Americans) -- my $40-ticket was paid for by my program, otherwise I don't think I would have gone -- and it was pretty crazy. There were over 30,000 people in attendance, most of whom were drinking $9 cups of beer. It was Copenhagen vs. Copenhagen -- FCK (Fodbold Club København) vs. Brøndby. FCK is the squeaky-clean, affluent city team while Brøndby is the grease-smeared, hard-hat-wearing suburban team. My Danish teacher explained to us that FCK fans yell really terrible things at the Brøndby fans like, "We pay your welfare! We buy your beer!" Of course my program bought seats for us on the FCK side.
While the people I was sitting with were pretty calm, the section just to my left was full of guys who stood the entire game, yelling and chanting and waving flags. When Brøndby scored the first goal, all of the FCK fans just stood there shocked with their jaws hanging open for at least 30 seconds before they started jeering and flipping off the Brøndby fans. On the Brøndby side, they lit flares and threw them down onto the field to show their... enthusiasm? The haze in my pictures isn't the glare of the stadium lights; it's all the smoke from the pyrotechnics on the Brøndby side.
School
I just turned in my second (and final) architecture paper; this one was about a sustainable ecovillage here in Denmark (not far from where I live, actually) where they use mussel shells as a roofing material and pee in separation toilets so they can save their urine to use as fertilizer. I don't have class today, but I'm helping a friend study for Danish this morning and then I'm going to work on my final assignment for my history class. Tomorrow I have to take an exam on Danish culture ("they're humble and they like meatballs and boiled potatoes"), turn in my history assignment, and listen to a Nordic mythology lecture on Njal's saga, which I still haven't had time to read because I've been very busy with homework, Facebook scrabble games, LJ-icon hunting and frequently checking the non-profit job ads on Craigslist.
On Wednesday I'm taking the Carlsberg Brewery tour. Thursday is my last day of my other architecture class. On Friday I have my Danish oral final (oh noez! must practice with my host parents -- maybe I can record my monologue for my readers? yes/no?) and classes. This weekend is full of all kinds of Christmas fun -- going to a Christmas market in Elsinore and having a sleepover with my friends at my house, where we will eat popcorn, do each other's make-up and strip down to our underwear for a good ol' fashioned homosocial pillow fight.
Labels: day 100
