Discovering Denmark: Unhealthy Thursday!

Unhealthy Thursday is what my host sister has dubbed every Thursday lunchtime. Every Thursday, instead of taking the 5 minute walk from the bus stop, through the various schools that share our school campus, to our section the school, we take a shorter route to a large shed sitting just behind the first school building. This shed is a wood-works shed.

For a week, I believe, half of the students in my usual class, combined with half of the students from another class, were working in groups of four to build bridges that would be judged for design, creativity, a comparison of a drawing, balsa wood model, and the finished product of the bridge, as well as strength. One of the members from Natacia's group was away, so I was a stand in. I hammered a few nails into the balsa, and screwed a few screws in with the drill (hopefully these screws were helpful), and helped with the power saw by holding the wood still as someone else took charge of the sharp end.

After working for only an hour or two the bridge was complete, so we walked over to the canteen (or tuckshop, as we Aussies like to call it) to buy some food for lunch, hence the 'unhealthy Thursday'. While sitting down to lunch one of the other groups made their way over to the canteen as well. During this break, one of the group members, Nikolai, asked me the usual questions we tend to get over here, 'where are you from?', 'why are you here?', 'is it very different here in Denmark from Australia?' 'do you live with Natacia?', 'how is school different?' etc. So I was quietly talking to Nicolai, Natacia, and Signe about various aspects of Australian life, and how it's different, when we started talking about schools, and with only the two groups from our lesson in the room, as I was talking, the whole hall fell silent to listen. This was a pretty bizarre experience, as I thought some of the other things I'd already said were more interesting than talking about the fact that I had finished my high school education, and that some of the work that they were doing I had done in younger grades or had only just finished myself, but they must have found that pretty interesting.

We then got onto the topic of money, and seeing as none of us really knew the conversion rates from Australian Dollars to Danish Krone, we just discussed what coins and notes we each had, and their values in relation to each other. Luckily I had one of every Australian coin in my wallet, except for $2. I took each coin out, in ascending order of value, explained what was on the front, and Nicolai, Natacia, and Signe passed them between each other, thoroughly fascinated. I didn't have any notes to show them, but I explained that the notes come in $5, $10, $20, $50, $100. Once I was finished, Natacia showed me most of the danish coins, except for the 2 krone (coincidence much), and they all had a good laugh at me, when I thought the coins with the holes in them were rather funny.

All too soon, the teacher came over and told us that we had to come back to the classroom as the others had now finished and it was time to test the bridges. Nicolai, still fascinated by the fact that I had finished school, continued to ask questions about things like, "Because you are finished school and going into university, does that mean that you would be able to study at places like Danish universities? Because you've finished high school?" I explained that sometimes Australian university students study abroad, but generally they just study in Australia. He also found it very interesting that my school contained both boarders and day students. Most students found this point very interesting, they also found it very odd that I had attended a school only for girls, yes that means there were no boys.

We soon made it back to the shed, and commenced the judging of everyone's bridges. Our bridge held the most weight, though overall it came second. We all agree that it should have come first, because the bridge that won broke with only a few people on it. Once the prizes had been awarded we were free to go home.

Something that is very different between Danish school and Australian school is school finishing times. In Australia we finish at the same time every day. In Denmark they don't, and David (another Australian exchange student) has noticed the same thing. My school finished some days at 3:25 and others at 2:15, but most interesting of all, Thursdays finish at 1:05, unless we finish our work early. Today we left at 12:00. Below are some pictures of today.

My Awesome (ugly) clogs- with reinforced toe!