We walked around the city and I was once again amazed with how different the concept of a "city" here is than it is at home. To me, the city is Philadelphia with huge skyscrapers, busy roads, obnoxious taxi drivers and hundreds of people everywhere (although there are obviously so many things about Philadelphia that I love). Here, on the other hand, the cities are so old and have so much history it is amazing. Right in the middle of the city is a beautiful old monastery from 1400 that was constructed to care for orphans, and in the middle of one of the roads, there was construction for a place where they had originally planned to do roadwork and they actually found human skeletons which was definitely different. No matter where you look, you see bikers in Denmark in all forms of attire, and in the city they are there in the hundreds. Also, in the middle of the city there are many streets just for pedestrians with shops and restaurants on either side. I love the cities here in Denmark!
We left the city and headed to Henrietta and Tomas' house and on the way stopped to feed Henrietta's horse, Lukas. We continued on to their house and had some coffee and tea, something that seems to happen often here in Denmark, and then Tomas came home from work. We spent a lot of time just hanging out and remembering the fun times we had when Tomas has visited us in the United States. We then traveled north to Blokhus, a cute little town on the west coast. We were supposed to go to Skagen, but it started raining and would be too hard to walk out on the beach to see where the North and Baltic Seas meet. In the town of Blokhus there is an area where you can drive on the beach with your car and park, and many people come from all over Europe, mostly Sweden, Germany, and Norway and bring campers for the day.
You cannot sleep with the camper on the beach, but there are also these little houses that you can rent without water or electricity, but the visitors use them to get out of the sun (or more often rain since it is Denmark)! No one is allowed to sleep on the beach in Denmark, though.
When living in Denmark, things are a little more expensive than what it seems in the United States. This is because they have something called the VAT or value added tax, which is a tax already calculated in to the price of certain goods. The Danish kroner conversion is 6 Dkk for every US dollar approximately, so I've really been doing a lot of math lately to make sure I'm not spending too much money! The craziest thing I think, is the cost to buy cars here. They VAT on a car end up being almost 200% of the car's actual value when all is said and done, so if you were to buy a car for $15,000 in the US, you would actually pay $50,000, and the VAT is more for bigger cars. For that reason alone, the majority of cars in Denmark are very small. Also, the gasoline prices are about double here than they are in the US, so the smaller cars get better mpg than the larger cars.
And finally, for the Danish lesson, which is more about pronunciation than the words themselves. The letters "g" and "h" are not pronounced in the language and an -er ending on a word sounds like "uh." A "d" in words sounds almost like the "th" sound. The æ vowel sounds like the "e" in met, and å sounds like the all. These pronunciations are all very important when Henrietta was helping me pronounce the name of the town where I'll be living with my host mom, Hvidovre. Try saying it yourself - it's not what you think, even with the explanation! (something like Veeth-ore-uh). Also, when you say bye, you also say what sounds like "hi hi" but it is actually spelled "hej hej," so "j" sounds like "y." You can also say farvel (with a silent f) to say goodbye. Finally, to be polite, you should know the words "undskyld" (un-skewlth-sorry) for when you run in to people on the train and in the city!
Til imorgen!
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