At rejse er at leve;
   To travel is to live

My School is crazy and I love it

In the past week I’ve been adjusting to my new school and new life in Denmark. Even though my bike is a bit tall for me (we’re getting a new one soon) I’m actually not that bad at biking anymore! Sure, I may have caught a bug in my mouth and a poor unfortunate slug might now be two poor unfortunate slugs, but otherwise I’m doing great!

All of the tents in the back of the school

All of the tents in the back of the school

What I’m excited to tell you about is the celebration that we had last night. Our whole grade had a sleepover in tents outside our school…..yes, that’s right, my entire grade had a sleepover. How could I not love my school?

Anyways, as part of the celebration, every class had to dress up differently, and my class’s theme was Cavemen! Other classes dressed like Nuns, Hippies, Astronauts, Jesus’s followers, etc. The funny thing is that almost the whole grade dressed up to fully support their class, which I found really cool considering most people don’t wear costumes at my American school when we have dress-up days.

Now you may be wondering, “What did your costume consist of?” I couldn’t dress up too much considering I had a language camp at a different school in the morning, and apparently I must not have had enough room in my suitcase from America to bring anything caveman-like. So how did I solve this? A brown towel around my shirt, leaves in my hair, and lots of dirt on my face. Literally, my face was covered in dirt. Most people went all out, and we all were covered in dirt and leaves. Some people had leopard print, some had sheets draped around them, and others were wearing garbage bags. Combined with our dirty appearances, our costumes actually made us look quite homeless instead of like cavemen, but I think our class still gets a gold star for effort.

My friends and I dressed as cavemen

My friends and I dressed as cavemen (Yes, I failed)

The celebration started right after school was done, and we had group activities to do. For one of them, we had to link hands with a partner. These partners would form a line, the hands making a bridge, and someone would literally walk on the linked hands to get to the other side. (I apologize if this doesn’t make any sense, it’s hard to explain.) It was slightly painful to hold up the person with only your hands, but my class encouraged me to do the walking. This was worse, because I felt like I was crushing people’s hands, and I had to use their heads/necks/shoulders as railings to steady me. Actually, it was kind of fun, even though I felt like I was going to fall and or injure someone.

Next we had to put up our tent. It was big enough for all of us to sleep in, so needless to say, it was quite big. More like a party tent or something. Anyways, everyone had to decorate their tent in their theme, which meant animal skins, sticks, cave drawings, and a green tarp on the ceiling to make it look like a cave inhabited by cavemen.

Delicious chicken grilling

Delicious chicken grilling

After the tent was put up, we started grilling our meat! I proudly put my chicken wings on the grill (that’s a story for another time) and watched the chickens burn. It all looked delicious and I couldn’t help but think how cool it was that our class was having a grill-out and potluck. We feasted on our meal of chicken, potato salad(s), pasta salad(s), bread, and more. Clearly our class was lacking in the planning department because nobody brought cups, plates, forks, or spoons, but luckily some of my friends bought some last minute so we could actually eat.

My friend on exchange from Mexico, Luis, and my friend Kamilla introduced me to their friends and they were really awesome! (Shoutout to Maggie and Emma!) Even though I didn’t get the opportunity to talk to them much, they seem really awesome, and I hope I’m able to hang out with them in the future. I found it really interesting how they were saying that they thought Denmark was boring and they were wondering why I would pick it. I guess it’s all a matter of perception, because they wanted to go to America, and I’ve felt that my city is boring sometimes. I think it’s interesting that even across the world, we share the fact that we want to visit a place with a different lifestyle than the one we were born into.

Jesus, God, and followers do their performance

Jesus, God, and followers do their performance

The coolest part of the night was when we had our class performances. Each class gave a performance that had to do with our theme. The hippies did a hippie song, the Nuns did the song “Single Ladies,” etc. My group chanted a rhyme about our class to the song “I love Rock and Roll” and went all caveman at the end as we were in awe of Mathilde’s fire. Apparently our performance was pretty good, because when it was ranked by the other classes, we got the highest score! The top 3 had to do it a second time, and we got second place overall! We were beat by the Jesus followers, but their performance was fantastic and they totally deserved to win!

Once the performances were over and we were done taking caveman selfies, we headed down to our tents to mingle and get ready for bed. Kamilla, Sara and I spent like 30 minutes looking for Luis, but it turned out that he’d been sleeping the whole time. Sadly I had to go to bed after about 12 because I had language camp the next morning, and I had to wake up at 6:30 so I could get to the train station in time.

Overall, the school sleepover just reinforced how much I love my school, and it was a fantastic experience to get to know the people in my class better, such as Cecilie, who I hadn’t ever really talked to before then. Everyone in my class has been so friendly to me, and I’m so glad that I got to share this tradition with them. (I apologize for how cheesy that sounded, but what can I say? I’m from Wisconsin.)

Sidenote: I’ve been in Denmark for almost 2 weeks now, (whaaaat?!?) and I’m going to do a Question and Answer post next time when I come back from the Rotary Intro camp, so post any questions you have in the comments below or on facebook/email.

Oh, and a reminder that you can get notifications whenever I post a new entry by using the Email Updates thing on the sidebar!

Thanks for reading! And the Danish translation of that is asldkfajsldkfjalsdkfjalksdjfalksdgahwrejkbkjasdf

-Cameron

P.S. Still working on that whole Danish thing

Oh, and I just found out that my choir in Denmark might be traveling to Riga, the capital of Latvia, to sing. No big deal. Just Latvia.

5 Responses to My School is crazy and I love it

  • Cameron – SO happy you are liking your school and meeting lots of new people. This will be a wonderful experience for you and one that you will not ever forget. I still remember my 8 months in Paris like it was yesterday. See and do and eat and experience as much as you can while you are there. I’m enjoying reading your posts on your blog. Let me know how the music class goes, okay? Happy Trails! Ms. Crandall

  • Have you learned to like fish yet? How often is fish part of the meal? Where are all of the pictures you are taking? We’ve only seen a few and knowing you, I’m sure you’ve taken hundreds. Have you had to ride your bike to school in the rain? How bad was it? Is there anything you miss from home? For example, a type of food, something you would take for granted here but isn’t easy to come by there, something you should have packed but forgot or didn’t think you’d need, etc.

  • What similarity/difference has been the most surprising to you so far?
    Is there anything that has completely blown your expectations out of the water (good or bad)?

  • Wow! Sounds like you’re having a blast and i’m learning alot about denmark, totally thought it would be sticks and stones…i feel like I should ask a question and the Jesus follower’s thing got me thinking and wondering about the main religion. Is everyone there a diehard catholic or anything like that?
    Then seeing that pic, and thinking form past experience i bet danish girls are hot. >u> oh ho ho who’s the ladies’ man now?

  • Do you even understand a single word, of what we and the teachers are saying? 🙂

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globe senior pic squareMerhaba, I'm Cameron Neader.

I'm an 18 year old going on Rotary Youth Exchange to Turkey and I was an exchange student in Denmark in 2013-14.

Click here to read more.