Weekend Adventures

So this past weekend was a very eventful and tiring one. It started with sports day at the Gymnasium, which was a blast! Instead of having classes on Friday, we all signed up two different activities that we wanted to do for about and hour and a half each. I signed up for yoga (of course), and square dancing, but something must have gotten mixed up because instead of yoga, i was put on the list to do combat, which is some sort of martial arts/self-defense mixed with dance... quite interesting, but it actually turned out to be really fun, but very tiring! Then at the end of the day, they had a class tug-of-war contest. My musical class is not the strongest, so weren't too concerned about winning. For the past 2 years, the sports class has won this competition, but this year, Søren's class, the "nerd" class, beat them. It was the most intense game of tug-of-war I have ever seen! So everyone in the gymnasium was very excited that the sports class was beat. Afterwards there was a café in the basement of the school. The teachers were selling beer to the students, (which still just blows my mind that that's normal for them) and they all thought it was weird of me to have chocolate milk instead, but they've got real good chocolate milk in Denmark!
After the café, Søren headed to Copenhagen for the weekend, and I met up with Missy, the other Rotary student from Minnesota, at the train station, and we spent the weekend at my house in Ringe. Missy is living in Faarborg, a town about 30 minutes away. I told Niels and Susanne that we would make them an American meal for dinner, so the first thing we did when she arrived was head to the grocery store in search of some American food. We didn't find much. We were planning on making hamburgers with baked beans and potato chips, and brownies for dessert, but we couldn't find any baked beans, so we settled for beans in tomato sauce, and we also couldn't find any brownie mix, so we decided to rice krispie bars instead. Also, apparently Oreos are a new thing in Denmark, because at the grocery there was an Oreo stand and the woman there was giving Oreos to people to try and she was telling them how you're supposed to twist them open and then dunk them in milk. It was quite entertaining to watch! Ben&Jerry's ice cream is also new in Denmark, so it's very expensive to buy at the stores, and they only have like three flavors of it. We probably spent almost an hour in the grocery store, looking for different ingredients and such, and since neither one of are that good at cooking, we had to call a few people for advice, but it all turned out delicious! The burgers were nice and juicy, and we taught Niels and Susanne to eat the beans with potato chips :) Then we brought out the dessert and they had never seen such a thing. They seemed a bit skeptical about it at first, but they both ate it, so I think they liked it!

The next day, Missy and I went shopping in Odense, but we got there at 3pm, and apparently all of the shops close at 3 on Saturdays... so we just walked around and bought some ice cream while we waited to meet up with my parents and some neighbors for dinner. Missy and I arrived to the restaurant before everyone else, so we were sitting around waiting and a waitress came over and asked us if we had reservations, and then we started talking to her in english and we told her we were meeting some other people here but we didn't know how many or if we had reservations. Once everyone else got there, we were looking at the menu and Susanne was trying to describe what all of the food was, and the same waitress came over and handed us two english menus, which made the process much easier. The food was delicious and it was fun to visit with all of the neighbors and test out some of our Danish with them.
The next morning, Missy's family came and picked us up at 8.30 and we headed over to Billund to Legoland. It. Was. Amazing. Everything there was made out of legos. They had huge Lego statues all over the park, and they had a "Miniland" which had famous villages and buildings from all over the world, made of Legos.




There were more than 20 million Legos in the miniland alone. The Mount Rushmore statue in the picture was made up of over 1.5 million legos. Then there was also rollercoasters and other rides that you could go on, and they were all decorated with Legos and they would take you through paths that had different Lego themes with more huge Lego sculptures. It truly was amazing that everything was made of Legos, and on a lot of the sculptures it said how many Legos it took to make it, and how long it took. We spent the entire day here, and once again, it was exciting, but so very exhausting. I slept very well that night.
-Heidi