Meeting my visiting family

After Danish class, I went over to the Danshøj metro stop to meet Lise and her daughter, Marie, who make up half of my visiting family. Peter was off traveling and Lise, the other daughter, was with her boyfriend, which of course I understood.

I've been trying to meet them since I got her but our schedules just haven't worked out. So yesterday was nice. I went over there and had a really nice home-cooked meal with them. They didn't care that I'm a vegetarian and made this really good eggplant and tomato meal with couscous and dried apricots. It was great to have a change from the højskole. I love the food there, but sometimes it gets repetitive.

They asked me all about how I was reacting to Denmark and what kind of culture shock I had experienced so far. Honestly, there hasn't been a lot that I've found totally shocking. I think it's because I listened when people gave me advice so when I saw certain things, I wasn't completely taken by surprise.

One thing, however, did surprise me. I was on the train yesterday and we stopped between stations. I asked someone what the announcer said and apparently, there had been a suicide in front of the train, which happens sometimes. But in the US, people would've reacted to it and gotten nervous. But here, no one really reacted. Maybe I shouldn't have expected anyone to, but it just seemed odd that they seemed to be more concerned with being late for work or school.

This morning, the train was really backed up. I don't know if there was another suicide, I don't think so because everyone I heard today was complaining about train trouble. It normally takes me about 50 minutes from when I get on the bus in Hillerød to when I get off of the train at Nørreport. Today, I caught a 6:52 bus and arrived at 8:26. A lot of people in my 8:30 class were late today.

Tonight I have my orientation meeting for the third week of travel break when I'm going to Russia. I'm so excited. As it gets closer and I start getting the itineraries in my hands and meeting the DIS staff on our troops, I can't even think about anything else. Too bad I have midterms this week!

As soon as it hits 9:50 on Friday and I'm done with my last pre-break midterm, I can breathe and get ready for what I'm pretty sure will be more or less the best three weeks of my life.