On Tuesday morning when I left to ride my bike to school, it was -7 degrees! The gears on my bike were frozen, and with no way to change it from a really hard gear, I ended up having to push my bike up the hill. After school, just as I walked outside to get my bike and ride home, it began snowing. Riding my bike home while it was snowing was quite an experience! While it wasn't heavy enough to stop me from seeing where I was going, it was heavy enough to be a bit annoying, hitting me in the face as I rode along.
This week at school, my class is working on one of their big assignments. So every lesson this week is spent learning about it and then completing the task. As I don't have to do the assignment, I have been able to spend a lot of time working on my Danish. I have finished reading 3 books in Danish now and completed a lot of my 'På Vej Til Dansk' workbook. I really enjoy going to language school on Tuesday and Thursday nights. This week will be my last week in the same class, next week I will start in a class that is up one level.
My gym membership allows me access to a few gyms in the town, so on Tuesday afternoon I tried going to a different one. The gym uses a technique called 'Circle/Circuit Training' where all of the machines are arranged in a circle and you move from one to the next. They have buzzers that go off every 45 seconds so that you can keep track of how long you are doing each exercise for.
On Wednesday morning I woke up to look out my window and see the street covered in snow. Overnight, it had snowed almost 10cm, so there was a nice white coating over everything. For a little while after it has snowed, when it is cold, the snow sticks to the leaves and branches on the trees, this looks very beautiful.
I went school with Claes on Wednesday. He is 15 so he is in Year 9 and attends the Danish equivalent of a middle school/primary school (they have grades Preschool-9 in the one school in Denmark). His school is called Viborg Privat Realskole, and is a private school in the middle of the city part of Viborg. They also don't have a uniform, but in class they have more rules and the teachers are a little stricter, a bit more like in Australian schools. In each year level, they have around 3 classes. They all do the same subjects, but are broken up into classes for each, depending on the level that they work at. It was cute to see all of the little children playing on the playground at lunch, in the snow wearing big puffy onesies.
Wednesday night, I went to watch my very first handball game with Natalie. Cleopatré Darleaux, a girl from my language class is a professional goal keeper and was playing for the Viborg team, so she let me borrow her game cards to get free entry, which also let me go in and get free drinks and biscuits at half time! The game can be quite rough, but it is a great atmosphere, with music being played every time a goal is scored and people being very passionate about their cheering! The Viborg team won by 13 points!
On Thursday, I went to work with Eva and Arly, to their medical clinic. Arly works as a GP, while Eva works as a nurse (in addition to being a politician in the local council). I was able to sit in the room during consultations, while they talked with patients, performed tests and even while they did blood tests, needles and acupuncture; during which I found a nice spot on the opposite wall to look at. I learnt a lot about the way that general practitioners in Denmark work, and also nurses who can have their own room and their own consultations with patients. Compared to Australia, they perform a lot more tests; if someone comes in with what seems something like a throat infection, they will take samples of fluid from the eyes, nose and mouth, or even blood, to send to the laboratory for testing, rather than simply using the results of an examination to diagnose and prescribe. I found it quite interesting to see, and very lucky to have the opportunity to have such a first hand experience of this.
On Saturday I met up with some of the other exchange students from my school. We played some air hockey and pool, had some hot chips and played a game of bowling. It was a great afternoon to just relax and have fun with other exchange students.
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| Charlotte (Honduras), Pinar (Turkey), Me, Daniela (Moldova) & Cameron (Australia) |
I had ridden my bike to town, as the weather had been ok in the morning, but while we were inside it had snowed a lot and was still snowing. So I rode my bike home in the snow again. It wasn't that bad, this time I knew to put my hood on and ride slowly so that the snow didn't get in my face too much. But it was definitely nice to get back and sit in front of the fireplace!
This weekend, Natalie's host brother Matt and his wife Emma both from Australia, visited Denmark. So we ate a lot of traditional Danish food this weekend, which was good for me to try too! On Saturday afternoon we all went outside and built a snowman. The temperature had dropped, so the snow wasn't sticking that well and our snowman didn't end up being as big as we had hoped. It was still a lot of fun to make but! The dog, Vilje loves playing in the snow, even though her ball is covered in snow and partly frozen!
On Sunday, we went to church in the Viborg Domkirke, which is the Viborg Cathedral. If you visit the church to just look through it, you have to pay, so we went while church was on and had free entry. There was a traditional choir singing with an organ and the whole service was in Danish of course. The entire ceiling and many of the walls are covered in intricately detailed paintings that each depict a different biblical story or figure. As well as many stone pillars, there were stone lions and other carvings on the interior. On the outside of the church, there are two lions carved into the stone walls, they were made in the year 1100! The church is very beautiful and is surrounded by gardens and courtyards where Kings and Queens once used to be crowned hundreds of years ago, when the town was the capital city of Denmark.
I really can't believe that it has been 2 months now that I have been in Denmark! Looking at photos, it feels so long ago that I was in the Brisbane International Airport about to leave; but at the same time being here has gone so quickly! Even in 2 months, I feel like I have learnt so much, not just about life and Denmark, but about myself.
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| Brisbane Airport 2 months ago |
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