So this week was fairly busy, I had a big paper due and travel stuff to work out on top of all the other work given to me by DIS. My paper was an observation paper for my practicum site and I observed whether there was any prejudice shown by the kids when they chose their friends. I actually found that though Denmark may be seen as a homogenous society, there was no segregation or favoring of the majority ethnic Danish children when choosing playmates. This is probably due to the fact that I was observing at a highly diverse and inclusive preschool, and the preschool environment is even more of a socialization tool here than it is in the US.
Yeah, exciting stuff. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but my favorite class is Danish. Our class, the special Child Diversity and Development class has the most incredible teacher! She always brings us treats, and this time on Fri. she brought my favorite thing, flodeboller, because FCK the football (soccer) team lost to Barcelona, "but they played so well!" I love her. I have an oral midterm on Friday in that class and I'm actually not too worried about it, I think me and my friend Amanda will be fine, since we're so good at Danish, haha. We have started to type to one another in Danish sometimes for practice, and I'm so surprised at how much we have learned over such a short amount of time.
My least favorite class stars a professor that just doesn't care. He has left our class 4 times, once during a guest lecture, and Friday because we were going to watch Girl Interrupted. Now, it's a good movie, so we all stayed to watch it, but he left, and the movie was so quiet we had to call IT to help us fix it. Also, he gives us these hard tests, which I study for, and I get them back with only 61.5 points out of 100 and no feedback to help me for next time. It makes no sense.
Thursday I went to practicum and had a great time! This week was the mandatory school closure week, and most Danes take their kids and go on vacation somewhere warm, because it is starting to get dark and cold. I think there were like 20 kids out of 50. So the bigger kids went out to a playground and the younger kids stayed and the middle age group went for a walk in the forest/meadows around the center. It hailed on the walk, but it was more like a mix between snow and hail which was odd. I found out that the word for "Moo" is the same because we ran into a field of cows on our way. Also, a little girl touched the electric fence, poor thing, but she was okay after a few minutes.
We went back for lunch and afterwards, my fellow DIS student and I go for a break. During the break it started to pour rain and we were like, "Oh great, we have to go outside now." But because there were so few children we just sat with them while they watched a movie. This was the best part for me because I got to hold an 18 month old boy when he woke up from his nap and he was so cute and rested on my shoulder and wouldn't let me put him down, until the pedagogue got done carving the jack o' lantern of course, then that captured all his attention.
Friday night my host mom and I went out for pizza at this adorable and hyggeligt restaurant in Helsingor. It was so delicious. Afterwards we walked over to Blockbuster and rented Amelie, which to my sort of dismay only had Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish subtitles, none of which are do-able for me. But since I've seen the movie so many times and can speak French to some degree, I could understand it fine and it was a nice evening.
Saturday and Sunday were lazy. I worked on homework and skyped my parents and boyfriend, and the only time I left the house was to go into Copenhagen for an hour to work on a group project.
This week is busy: a Danish midterm and Psychology presentation due on Friday. But then, Friday night, Amanda, Shelby, and I are staying at Sarah and Amy's place in town so we don't have to pay for as many zones to get to the airport on Saturday afternoon when we leave for GREECE!! We will be going to Athens and taking a ferry to Santorini. It will be between 70-80 degrees and there are multitudes of olives and baklava! I never really thought I would go to Greece, but here we are. It will be so exciting!
And, I will blog about that when I get back on Saturday, but then Monday, Amanda and I leave on our Austrian/German extravaganza. We will be going from CPH to Vienna, then to Salzburg (Sound of Music tour!), then to Innsbruck, then onto Munich (Neuschwanstein Castle!) and finally to Berlin, arriving back in Copenhagen at 3:00pm on Sunday.
So lots of adventures ahead, stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment