Keeping the kids under control

It can be clearly seen that I am in charge, can it not?

Girl's Dorm at Vejlefjord

Unexpected Perks

The news of my engagement to Paul has gradually been making its rounds about the campus. Leroy however, our New Zealand SM, must've decided that the news was not getting spread quickly enough. He decided to make a special announcement at student assembly last night, and had me stand from my chair to receive the thudnerous applause and whoops of approval. Allegedly, I turned an impressive shade of beet red. But it turns out that the proclamation at assembly was only a preliminary introduction to a wild evening. I decided to forego Thursday night's usual volleyball practice and compose instead a Spanish version of my engagement announcement for my friends in Argentina. I had had a busy day, and was looking forward to some peace and tranquility in my own room. Imagine my annoyance when I was rudely interupted by boistrous banging on my door. With rumblings of distemperment I told the offenders to open and enter. A wave of excited faces rushed into my room, lifted me from my chair, yanked a pair of patches over my shocked eyes, and proceeded to haul me down the stairs and out the door into the rainy and windy black night! They encouraged my vocalized fears that I would be dumped in the fjord by spinning me around in various directions (until I was disoriented), and splashing my face with water. Tiring at last of this passtime, they dumped me on a couch in the girl's dorm livingroom and began covering me with a plentitude of little heart stickers. With a snatch of my hand I removed the patches from my eyes. There before me were the victorious faces of Krystle, Jenny, Maria, Rita, Krystle's friend Loraine who is visiting from Australia, and of course, the infamous dean Pia. Birgitte, the other dean on duty, joined us several minutes later. My awesome fellow SMs had prepared an entire engagement celebration! Loraine and Krystle had taken great pains to buy several cartons of fresh berries and make a whole stack of vegan pancakes for our enjoyment. It was of no matter that we ironically ate them with scoops of real danish ice cream. We chatted merrily, made toasts to Paul and myself with glasses of sparkling cider, and designed wedding dresses out of toilet paper (the model that Rita and I made looked like something from a Bible charade about Lazarus). They even gave me a couple of gifts: a big bar of dark chocolate and The Emperor's New Groove in danish. With so much sugar pumped into our systems, we had to do some tumbling gymnastics and Romanian dances before we could settle down and close the evening with the new cartoon I'd just received. Friends are so awesome. I never knew that a little announcement about being engaged would produce such a stunning response. Maybe I should get engaged more often...

Hiking photos

Jotunheimen National Park portrait

Triumphant self-satisfaction after completing a rigorous boulder scramble. It was entirely worth it in order to reach the foot of Bessegen's nearest glaciar.

Red Pudding with Organic Cream

11/10/06

Life is excellent. Do you ever have a period of several days when everything just seems to be going your way, and you have to stop and think in order to find something to complain about? Such is my lot at present. The Lord has blessed my life in so many ways recently, that I can't help but praise Him for being such a wonderful God. It is days like these that we need to store in our memory banks, so that when difficult times come, we can look back and remind ourselves that the Lord has proved faithful in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

Last week my Student Missionary duties included acting as a chaperone for the tenth grade class trip to Berlin. We bussed down from the school on Monday, stayed in a cheap hotel for a few nights, and returned early in the morning on Friday. The sight-seeing agenda was designed to please a crowd of hyperactive kids, so it didn't include as many museums as I would've liked to have visited. However, the teacher let myself and another SM (Student Missionary) have an afternoon free so that we could visit the acclaimed Pergamon Museum. This museum houses one of the world's most impresive collections of Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and Islamic artifacts. The school funded our entrance fee (halelujah!) and there were even audio headsets available in English to guide you through the displays. I wove my way in and out of the archeological treasures, soaking it all in. A blue-tiled entrance from the times of King Nebuchadnezzer. A freize of Greek sculpture from the city of Pergamon. Fragments of early Sanskrit writing. Woven rugs, Arabic calligraphy, bearded statues, and brass coins. Maria, my Slovakian accomplice, was not quite as jazzed about all the "old stuff" as I was. But she was a good sport and let me take my time.

And now, we are back in good old Danmark. It's nice to be surrounded by the soft, smeared tones of Danish once again, instead of the gutural, choppy noise of German. I've been doing my best to learn as much of the language as I can during my time here. We have Danish lessons twice a week provided for us by the school, although most of what we learn is from the kids prompting us with new phrases. Each night that I'm on duty, I sit out in the lobby with my various language books and have the kids help me with my pronunciation. They're always more than happy to oblige. Last night we worked on how to say "I'm wild about bananas," "These are my own knees," "I can't stand horror films," and "what do you think of badminton?" among other things. As usual, I found myself having to say: "roud groud med oukologisk floude" several times for their entertainment. This is not the correct Danish spelling, but it's the closest that I can come to it without having a special Danish keyboard. It's a kind of dessert that's very hard for foreigners to pronounce, and is the ultimate test for how well your Danish skills are progressing. The direct translation is "red pudding with organic cream."

I've been working many extra hours this week in order to have more free time at Christmas, when I'll be going home to my American loved ones. For now however, I'm perfectly ready for autumn break! I found a reasonable plane ticket between Billund and Oslo, so I'll be visiting Martina at her school in Norway for an entire ten days. It seems almost too good to be true. We've always been "best buds" and we've missed eachother a lot. But, even more exciting than seeing Martina, is the fact that Paul, my boyfriend, will be meeting us there! The Lord blessed him with the discovery of a reasonable flight to Oslo as well! We won't have lots of flexibility as far as traveling, since Martina still has classes in session, but she assures us that there's all sorts of gorgeous hiking to be done in the surrounding area. The three of us should have a good time exploring the nordic wilds.

Well, I ought to try and pack some things before "pligt" time rolls around: the hour of the day where we supervise the students' daily cleaning chores. Everyone's favorite part of the day, I assure you! :-)
God bless to one and all, Petra