School Events

MOVIE NIGHT

Movie night during orientation week, where we ended up watching a romantic comedy...of a different kind as originally planned, due to some technical hiccups. [Shake It All About starring Mads Mikkelsen] But they really went all out to decorate the place! (so that's where our money for the program went...:P)

"Local dinner with your buddy" Night

This was really special, where I really felt true Danish hospitality (although some would argue the general lack of it). My exchange buddy (this program where a local student from CBS is assigned to an exchange student to help him/her settle down) and her friends invited me and their buddies over for a good home-cooked Danish meal. We helped cook, so I'm gonna try it out for myself one of these days!

The preparation

Danish Frikadeller!

Starters

Tom [HK] & Thea [Denmark]

L2R: Benedikte [Danish, and owner of the beautiful apartment],
Camilla [my incredibly helpful Danish buddy] and Tom [again]

Tom was clowning around being funny while there was mayhem in the kitchen haha. He's quite amusing...when I was talking to Carol (in our usual Singaporean fast-paced conversation speed) while he was washing the dishes, he suddenly turned around, gave us a completely bewildered look and said, "Were you speaking English?? I did NOT understand that at all." I don't know why but his reaction was hilarious. But well...whenever Singaporeans lapse into our monotonous Singlish, no Asian can understand us :p Anyway, Benedikte and Camilla were trying the "Brun sauce" to make it "brun sauce og kartofler", an extremely authentic Danish dish. It overheated, but it tasted really good :)

The wonderfully-laid out table that already greeted us when we stepped into the apartment :):):) The Danish girls were such great host.

The yummy product - tadah!

And the happy receivers of the product :D

On top of my own local buddy dinner, I crashed Jiamin's one as well hehe :P I know I know, greedy me.

Starters

(chips as always...which I really treasure here, because although it's junk food, it's 'luxury' junk food...things that I won't eat at home but want some here just because I can't afford to add it to my grocery shopping list :|)

Jiamin's buddy, Johannes on the left.

Preparing a 'typical Danish cake'...which was basically piling on lots of cream, chocolate, jam and...whatever you can find in the refrigerator @_@

Special salad prepared by Henry
(he's half-Danish half-Brit...I love his British accent! JJ & Juline - come back with one haha :p)

Mikkel & Michael

The extremely sweet dessert @_@

It's quite embarrassing how our counterparts here in Europe find out that some of us don't really have that much cooking experience...but it's mainly due to the fact that a lot of them live on their own by the time they are 17-19 yrs old. That's unheard of in Singapore, not necessarily because we're a tighter family unit, but we just can't afford to live on our own! @_@ But was just reminded how fortunate I am to have my mum take care of my meals for me (with great food all the time :p)...how I appreciate that much more now that I have to cook on my own! :p But students here are extremely independent, and have it really good! (well, that's just my opinion) Education is COMPLETELY FREE (yes, that means parents don't have to worry about their cpf funds going into their children's education, and yes, even at university level) and the Danish government actually gives the students monthly allowance of 4000dkk a month to study! (That's about S$1,000+) BUT, they take care of their own expenses entirely. They have to pay for rent (which is usually really expensive), food, textbooks, transport etc etc. That's why most of the Danish students here (if not all of them) work, depending on their expenditure. My buddy has 3 jobs @_@ She's a dance instructor, ski instructor and a sales girl. The international office director warned us that Danish students are extremely busy...now I can see why. And in most cases (explained by the director), too busy to have a religion as well.

FORMAL WELCOME DINNER

Formal Welcome Dinner (our last social program for orientation), where again they magically transformed the school area into a gorgeous fancy place. The student crew who put this together impressed me incredibly with their effort. I find it quite similar to SMU, in the sense most of the things here are student-initiative & student-run.

Some of Jiamin's Danish local friends from his local buddy dinner together with Liu Jia (also an exchange student) from China.

Fastelavn Celebration

It was a costume party, where I went to see them crack open the barrel of sweets. According old folklore, in the olden days, they used to put a real cat in the barrel @_@ aiyee.
(I honestly think that in modern context, it's another excuse for the Danes to go out and party :|)

The barrel in the background...no live cat.

Cracking the barrel

(the sweets here are disgusting here by the way. They Danes absolutely love liquorice!! I have no idea why...they even have liquorice mentos!!

Top 2 winners for best-dressed (in my book anyway) are...

*drumroll*

NETTO-MAN!

Considering how almost all of us students are on a really tight budget and cannot afford to actually BUY a costume, or eat out for that matter, this creative fella took Netto bags (Netto is like our NTUC, where we visit almost daily in order to cook our meals) and made it into a suit. A+ for creativity :)

PASTA-MAN!

From afar, I thought he had just put a pot on his head for fun (it was a scream), but I realised he had a whole pasta-theme to it. He strung pasta tubes and hung over his red shirt...geddit-tomato sauce! :p I was extremely tickled. It's a pity he's not from Italy (he's actually from Spain)...would've have been so original :)