Abroad in Denmark: Ny venner og hjemve (New Friends and Homesickness)

It's been getting progressively easier to be in this beautiful country, in terms of language learning, getting around, and for the most part (in my opinion, though I could be completely wrong), acting as the Danes do. Or if anything, not acting like such an (US) American.

I'm slowly understanding more Danish that I hear spoken to or around me, and I'm able to speak it significantly better (but not by a whole lot) than my first impressions post where I could only order ice cream. And weirdly enough, my brain has started to replace small English words with the Danish equivalent. Like, I'll think of the word "og" before "and", or instead of saying "what?" when I'm caught off guard or don't understand something, I say "hvad?" or "hva?". Those are just examples of words, but it happens more and more the longer I'm here, which gives me hope for learning this crazy language.

Something that is an issue though, with all the Danish going on around me, is that I am beginning to lose my English. I don't know if it's common among exchange students to begin to slowly forget their native language on exchange, but many of the other native English speaking exchange students I know in Denmark have experienced the same thing. Maybe we're just surrounded by Danish so much, and when we do speak English with Danes, it's slightly broken. Don't get me wrong though, just about every Dane I know speaks really great English, but it's still a bit off, so I'm probably just not exercising it well enough. I don't mind it too much, since I'm really trying to focus on learning my host language.

I'm finally getting closer to my classmates, though I think the novelty of me being foreign has worn off. I'm also getting closer to the other exchange students I've met at sprog skole (Danish school/class). Many of them aren't from Rotary, so it's been nice to meet them in another way. We meet up outside of class from time to time, and spend time together. I really enjoy the connections I'm building here, but I'm starting to miss people at home. I'll be thinking of messaging someone to ask them to hang out, but then I realize, "Um, hey, they're over 5,000 miles away, can't do that.".

My homesickness has extended past food, and to the people and feelings of my life in Texas. I think it's partially due to theatre. I was supposed to be inducted as a thespian this year, but instead I'm here on exchange. Now of course what I'm doing now is completely worth it, but I miss acting so much. Our department had induction the other day, and when I heard about it, I just cried; that of course leads into me being homesick. I was sitting in my room yesterday and thinking about things I used to do, and kind of missing it. It isn't a heavy feeling, it's actually really faint, but it's still a new feeling that I've noticed and guess I should record.

This was a very short post, which I'm sorry for, but I figured it'd be nice to give a little update about how I'm doing. Now for the worrywarts back home, don't worry, I'm completely okay (regarding the homesickness). I'm still loving every moment of this new life I'm building, and I hope it doesn't fly by too fast ;).

Also, this is a cute little thing I learned in Drama yesterday, instead of saying stage left and stage right, they say kongens side and dame side, which means the kings side and the ladies side. Not too interesting, but I thought it was a super cute thing to share.