Hvordan går det? Det går rigtig fint for mig, men jeg er rigtig træt nu. In otherwords, I am doing well, but at the moment I am pretty darn exhausted.
Wanna know why? dun dun duuuunnnnn *drumroll please* FUNDRAISING. That's right folks, the lovely act of selling things, doing lots of silly and strenuous work, and getting money out of it. Let me explain.
So, it is a big part of second year of gymnassium in denmark to take a 'studietur' or 'study tour'-- basically you go to a different country for about a week and do minimal school and lots of fun stuff. This is possible because, again, in Denmark you take classes with the same group of people all the time, your class is really YOUR class. You have the same teachers, schedules, homework...basically you get to know your peers really well. So basically you can take that group of people on trips pretty easily. This is a big plus to the danish school system. Anyway.
So, being in 2.g(second year) myself, my class is also going on a trip. We are going to Rome, Italy(yay!), in March. To raise money for these trips though(the initial cost is pretty low) for things like admission to concerts and museums, for example, all the classes of gym having kind of 'parties' to raise money. All the 2nd year classes in the school get about two class rooms, and they kind of have free range. My class decided to make one of our class rooms into an 'italian restuarant' kinda thing, and the other into a room with 'guess how many pieces of pasta are in this jar' and face painting and some games for kids.
For the 'restuarant' part, though, we decided we needed about 100 pizzas. Actually, to rephrase, not *about* 100 pizzas. ONE HUNDRED FREAKING PIZZAS. My friend Noah and I stayed over at our friend Emil's house to make this ridiculous number of pizzas. We calculated it would take about 8 hours to make them all, but I think it ended up taking more like ten hours.
It's a pizza pie-l! (pizza pie mixed with pile...get it? PUNNY!;)
Pretty much we did nothing but make pizzas for a whole night and morning.
Then the next day, we had to go to school pretty early to get the classrooms ready for the fest. Then the actually 'støttefest' was about 8.5 hours long. Then we had to come the next day(today) pretty early on to clean up the classrooms.
Needless to say, it was pretty long/tiring. HOWEVER, the idea of a completely-student-arranged fundraising party is very danish. Kids and youth have a lot of freedom here, a lot of trust, and definitely a lot of responsibility. You want to have a good trip to Rome with your class? Well, you make it happen.
Something else interesting and very danish happened with school as well, recently. So, this last week, again, all of the 2nd year classes had a sort of 'project week' called AT. Being the bad exchange student that I am, I am not entirely sure what that stands for, but in summary, you work with two subjects to create innovative projects/designs for items/ideas that could better the school and the community in an environmentally way. My group decided to work with the idea of food waste in our cafeteria, and how we could lessen the amount of food/impact of the food that ends up being thrown out.
We spent the week researching, interviewing, creating presentations, and attending meetings. At the end of the week, we had a kind of 'fair'(think science fair) with all the different presentations, and we had to go around and vote for our favorite. The group that I was in ended up winning(woot!), and after that all the winning groups had to go the a big room where we had another sort of 'fair'-- but this time with each winning group from each class. Then we voted again...and, well, we won again! Basically it was a very different type of school for a week, and now I have a free ticket to the cinema.
A.T is another great example of why the danish school system is unique. It is common to take time out of the regular curriculum to refresh the students, employ some critical thinking skills, and gain other types of experience.
Because of these two things, my week in general has been kinda hectic, really interesting, super busy. Also the christmas season has already made it's way into Denmark full-force, so everyone's already starting to get exciting for the holidays.
Thanks for stickin' with me, and vi ses! Write more soon.
Much love
-Rowen
