To start to truly fit into the fabric of life in Norre Aaby, I needed to have a good look around. Luckily on Sunday, Rene took me along with Maggie around the town, highlighting some of the historic buildings and a bit of the town's history. As part of our walk, we visited the local Scout Hall where Jakob is a member. The hall is rather different to that of Mount Lofty Scout Hall as there is no 'hall' in the building; instead there are a series of classroom like rooms where the Scout meetings take place. In the large outdoor area as well, they have built a few things like a fire hut and a bunker style structure which can accommodate a number of people. In summary, Norre Aaby Scout Hall is quite different when compared to my scout hall though there are some similarities such as an excellent kitchen.
Speaking of Scouting, I went along to my first Scout meeting since arriving in Denmark on Monday night. It was a meeting with the actual Scout section (those aged between 10 and around 16 in Denmark), where Jakob is a leader. At the meeting, I gave my presentation about Australia which went for an hour because Jakob had to translate everything I said into Danish so that the Scouts could understand. According to Jakob, the Scouts were quite interested, but I still think that some of them were about to fall asleep in my opinion. After the presentation, I showed them the best game that I have learned from Scouting - the chocolate game! Early on Monday before Scouts, Jakob and I popped into a supermarket on the way home from his roughly weekly job as a school cleaner to pick up a couple of blocks of chocolate for the game, and they certainly weren't wasted. For those unaware, the game involves sitting in a circle around a plate of chocolate and requires you to roll a pair of dice as they make their way around the circle. If you roll a double (numbers that are rolled are the same), then you go into the middle of the circle, put on a funny piece of clothing (in our case a funny hat) and then using a knife and fork, try and eat as many pieces of chocolate before someone else rolls a double. As you can imagine, the game can sometimes get out of hand, but thankfully it worked really well with the Scouts on Monday night. In the end, the Scout meeting went quite well and was a great oppourtunity to get to know some of Jakob's Scouting friends.
This sets up a nice lead in for me into talking about school and Jakob's friends there. School has been better than I thought it would be though I am yet to do anything much that could be considered as productive. Nevertheless, I gave my presentation to Jakob's English class on Wednesday, giving them Anzac biscuits that I had made the night before. Despite the lack of cup measurements in the house and using dark syrup instead of golden syrup which is not available at the local supermarket (I think the two are roughly the same anyway), the biscuits came out incredibly nicely with many people praising their taste. Inger has already asked me to make them again before Christmas! Along with the presentation, I showed the class a couple of examples of Australian humour through YouTube, with the two clips I used coming from the TV shows Fast Forward and Russell Coight's All Aussie Adventures. While the class found certain parts of the clips funny, I don't think they understood some of the background behind the comedy meaning that they weren't able to truly understand Australian humour. Still, I found them funny so I was able to have a good laugh. Also, Jakob's friends at school have been exceptionally nice and really good company as well. In the two big breaks in the day, I have always had a laugh with Jakob and his friends in the school's refectory, finding out little thing about Denmark here and there. In the last couple of days as well, I have had the chance to spend time with Jakob's friends outside of school. One of Jakob's friends from both school and Scouts, Stig, hung around with us on Wednesday night when Jakob was shopping for Christmas presents in Middelfart. A group of us including Jakob, Stig and his sister, another friend of Jakob's called Louise along with her friend, all went to the cinema on Thursday night to see New Moon. The main reason for going for me was for the social occasion rather than the movie (though I must say I found it more enjoyable than I thought I would). After the movie, we walked across to an outdoor ice rink set up in Middelfart, though without skates we simply tried to glide along the rough ice with our shoes. The funniest thing about this though was when a giant crack appeared in the ice, which you could easily hear. This amused me quite a bit. Overall, school has been great.
I might just briefly mention TV in Denmark as it has been rather enjoyable for me. Often because Jakob is bust doing things like homework after school, the TV has been a good source of entertainment. Luckily for me, most of the shows have been in English with Danish subtitles, so not only have I been able to understand the shows I have also been able to learn some Danish. The best part about TV in Denmark is that there is a lot of shows on that I love like Friends, Scrubs and Seinfeld in the afternoon when I have been watching TV the most. They also have shows on from a while ago that I was too young to get into, and so I have now been getting into them. The main example of this is Dawson's Creek, which has been rather good to watch as I have not seen much of it. However, I haven't been watching a lot of TV overall which is a good thing.
As it is now December here in Denmark (as it is everywhere else), the Christmas season has truly begun. I will leave talking about the Christmas season to a blog entry next week as it deserves its own entry; it is such a big thing in Denmark that you simply can't describe it properly in a paragraph. Tomorrow, I am going canoeing with Jakob's Scout group, so of course I will fill you in on what went down in my next entry (hopefully with no stories about me capsizing). Until then, stay safe. I will leave you with a couple of pictures of the frost that has been present here on a couple of days this week *for the whole day*, even on some of the roads.
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