Culture sock

Horrible title, I know.

I was going to write this post on Saturday, but since everybody (two people, to be honest) wanted me to write it now, I thought I'd throw them a bone (in a nice way).

Our journey to Denmark didn't pan out as smoothly as one may have expected. The flight was not nearly as scary as I thought it would be. Instead of sitting next to the window, I sat near the window, just to be on the safe side. The take-off part was most enjoyable. Later they served cupcakes and drinks on the plane and by cupcakes, I mean everyone got just one damned (pardon my French) cupcake. Maybe they were trying to make us hungry so they could force us to pay exorbitant sums of money for airplane-food. I can at least comfort myself with the fact that it was a free cupcake and that it tasted good (but it was still far, far too small).
We got to the train station in one piece and there we waited for our train for at least 45 minutes. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that we had been standing on the wrong side of the tracks. But all is well that ends well and we got on the right train an hour later.

It took about three hours to get to Århus and we were all tired and hungry when we arrived. There we parted ways too meet our host families for the first time. With only four members, my new family isn't a very big one. But it's a very close family whose members appreciate intellectual values more than anything. They have been very generous and understanding towards me and for this I am grateful. We've been to a few places together, but not as many as the other exchange-students may have been. My greatest achievement, for the time being, is to have visited the city alone by bus two times. This my seem like a lame thing to say, but I like how the ticket composters in Denmark work. You put your ticket in and the composter chips away a little cube from the side of the ticket and prints a stamp on it as well. Fascinating. Well, maybe not that fascinating...
Another thing I noticed is that Danes are more likely to sit next to you than Estonians are. Back in good old Estland, whenever there was somebody sitting next to you and a better seat next to the window opened up, that person would swiftly hoist him- or herself up and make a run for the "new and improved" seat. I've done it myself, but maybe a little bit slower than some of the pensioners I've seen. I haven't seen any of that here in Denmark yet. But, of course, I've only used the bus 6 times. As of yet I do not know what to deduce from what I've experienced here in Denmark regarding buses and people. I better stop writing about buses, it's creeping me out.

Today was my first day at Risskov gymnasium. They put me in class 2x which focuses on Physics and Chemistry, as far as I can tell. The students were kind to me and I talked to a few of them quite freely. It's understandable that it may well prove to be impossible for me to make friends with the whole class, but I might at least get a few good friends by the end of my time here.
We had English and Physics today. The English lesson in Risskov gymnasium seemed actually quite harder compared to Mrs Eero's English lesson back in Estonia. (No offense Mrs Eero. Please don't decapitate me.) They checked some of the essays they had written and all of them seemed to have been written by specialists. As for Physics... Suffice it to say, that they are learning quantum physics at the moment. Quantum... Physics... I tremble at the mere mention of one of those words, but seeing them together... A living nightmare.
Absolutely everyone in the class uses a laptop. No writing whatsoever. With this in mind, I think I'm in quite a lot of trouble, because I have no damned laptop. Not all of us have the benefit of having parents with well-paying jobs. Fortunately my host family is willing to let me use one of their laptops. Unfortunately the laptop belongs to my temporary little brother, who needs it every Thursday. So tomorrow I'm going to play the role of Stone Age Man at school.

I'm not really in the mood for writing some more right now. My stomach has been growling relentlessly for the last 5 hours. I blame the cupcake they served us on the plane. Those vicious flight attendants must have laced it with cyanide or some other poison with a fancy-sounding name.




Üritan homme selle eesti keelde tõlkida. Sellel arvutil pole täpitähti ja seega võib teksti tõlkimine päris kaua aega võtta.