Discovering Denmark: 36 Hours Awake, 15 Hours Asleep

Friday Morning: 5:55 am: Time til next sleep time: 36 hours.

Friday morning marked the start of a very interesting weekend to come. When we woke at our usual time of 5:55 we knew that we had a long weekend ahead of us. We were taking one of the Danish Scout badges. This badge requires you to stay awake for 36 hours straight (with the exception of an emergency 20 min power nap). So we went to school, as normal, and I sat through the Danish lesson. Then came English! Yay! This English lesson was different. In this lesson I was going to present to the class about Australia. The presentation went swimmingly, and I'm pleased to say that I saw some degree of surprise on every single students face at some point in the lesson. The teacher was very helpful, asking me to clarify thing the students may not understand, asking me questions about things that I may have just touched on in not enough depth. The students had a good laugh when I told them that in winter the temperature was between 15-20 degrees Celsius, and we thought it was cold. Once I had finished the presentation the students were able to ask me questions. Most of them were pretty good questions, but some of them were pretty funny. One student asked, 'Seeing as you're so small, could you fit in a Kangaroo's pouch?' and as much as I think it would be great if the answer was yes, I had to say no. When the next lesson of English began we moved onto answering the homework questions, which the teacher hadn't sent to us, so they weren't done. So instead we got into groups and created a brief summary of different sections of the text that we had read for homework.

After English we had lunch, and following lunch we had Biology. In Biology we were meant to be dissecting mice, but unfortunately we weren't. The storm, Bodil, had caused all the bridges to be closed, so the delivery of mice hadn't arrived. Instead we just watched the documentary, Super-Size Me. Watching a movie is not a good thing to do when you need to be staying awake for a long time, When the movie ended I was exhausted, movies make me tired. After school we walked into the city to buy some supplies for the weekend ahead, then we caught the bus home. Once at home we quickly got ready before jumping on the bus to go back into Slagelse to have dinner with our classmates at a Chinese Restaurant before they all headed off to the school for the Christmas Gala. All the guys looked positively dapper, while the girls looks absolutely stunning!

When Dinner was finished my host parents collected us as dropped us at the scout den with enough chips, lollies and soft drink to last a lifetime. We needed it, though, to keep awake. The other scouts were already there, waiting for us. The first thing we did was make some Christmas stars and hearts, which was quite confusing to do. there were strips of paper going everywhere, but by the end of the weekend I had completed two stars! After the decorations we played a game, similar to the chocolate game, but with presents. everyone put two presents in the middle of the table, if you rolled a six then you took a present. and the dice went around the circle until all the presents were gone. Then we played for 7 minutes more, but if you rolled a six you took gifts off another player. The dice was in my favour that night, but silly me ended the game with two of the presents we had bought and only one of someone else's. I didn't mind though the presents we bought were very cute little Christmas figurines.

We then moved on to playing the cup song, and teaching Natacia and one of the other girls how to do it, and I cracked open a packet of Tim Tams... which they all loved. Once we were bored of the cup game we moved on to playing human knots. In this game you stand in a circle and grab hands with two other people in the circle, you then need to untangle your hands, without letting go, til you make a perfect circle again, holding hands with the people on either side of you. After this we moved onto card games, such as 'Fish' and 'War'. This was quite fun. We then played a card game called 'Bubble' which is a little bit like a game we play in my Scout group called 'Spoons'. This was also a nice game to play. We then moved on to bake a cake, but with handicaps. Two of us couldn't use our hands, so had them tied behind our backs, Natacia could only use one hand, one person couldn't talk, and one person 'couldn't hear us'. This was quite funny, but in the end a cake was made. Though it was rock hard when it came out of the oven, despite being just golden on top. We then spent the rest of the dark hours from about 4-7:30 on the kitchen floor, trying not to sleep, eating lollies and chips and drinking soft drink. At about 8:00 my brain shut down and forced my body to take my 20 minute power nap, which i had been resisting for so long. At about 8:30 we made baked some bread rolls and ate them for breakfast, before heading up to the shops to buy our dinner. It was going to be home-made pizza, yum!

When we returned to the Scout hall we sat in the kitchen, ate and drank some more, and waited for time to tick by. At 2:00 pm Natacia's parents came and collected us and we all went back to the house to finish the badge, as other people needed to use the hall. We had an early dinner at 4:00 pm then started getting ready for bed. The original plan had been that we would take an Australian Scout badge over the weekend as well, but this proved too difficult to arrange, so I presented them all with a Scouts Australia, Australian Flag badge. They all seemed pretty chuffed.

By 5:30 we were all lying in bed in wait. At Six O'clock on the dot, Saturday evening we could sleep. When six O'Clock came i have never seen a light get turned out so fast. Two of them, at the same time, jumped at the switch, said the quickest 'goodnight' ever and we were all asleep.

We slept until 9:00 Sunday morning, that's 15 hours! It was so good. We crawled out of bed at 10:00 am and warmed up the left over bread rolls for breakfast. After breakfast the others packed up their sleeping gear and waited for someone to come and pick them up. Once they were gone Natacia and I showered and got ready for the rest of the day.

Once we were clean and fresh the family and I climbed in the car on our way to visit my Host Mum's Brother and his family. This was a little bit of a drive away, and there were many pretty sights along the way. On the way home we driving along and I was happily looking out the window, then I looked over at Natacia and all of a sudden out of her window I saw the beach! I had no idea we lived so close to the beach! It was so exciting, we drove closer so that I could get a good photo. They then drove me so I could see the bridge between Zealand and one of the little islands of Denmark. The bridge is over 18 km long and 250m above sea level. When we got to the bridge we all got out of the car so I could get a better picture, and it was freezing and raining, and windy. But after about ten minutes we were absolutely frozen and I had an adequate amount of pictures so we all scrambled back into the car into the warm.

On the way home we stopped at a new outlet store that had just recently opened up, just to have a look around. Then we stopped at a shop to buy food for dinner and then headed back home.

Being Sunday, it was now the second Sunday of Advent. Natacia's Grandmother had send presents. She had given me the most beautiful bracelet. With a lovely card, written in English.

After watching the Christmas Calendar shows we eventually made our way back to bed, where we talked for ages, not really tired after our huge sleep the night before. Then finally we slept.

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