As it now rapidly approaches 2 months since I left Australia, I have plenty of news for the last few weeks here.
Firstly, on January 30th I had my first visitor - my friend Julia who is currently on exchange for a year (July 2008 - July 2009) in Cambridge, England. She arrived on the Friday night and stayed until Sunday. It was great catching up with her as I hadn't seen her for over 7 months. On the Saturday we decided to head to Copenhagen for the day and see the sights. We arrived in Copenhagen at about 11.15am and headed straight to the Tourist Information Centre so that we could get a map and work out how we would spend our day. Despite it being a Saturday, many of the tourist attractions were open till 5pm so we didn't have to rush to try and see everything. After grabbing a map, we walked for about 20mins in search of a cafe so we could sit and have a coffee and work out what would be the best way to see everything. We decided to do the self-guided walking tour which included many of the popular tourist attractions in Copenhagen, which was supposed to take about 3 hours, and so set off. Despite the cool weather and cloudy day, it was quite nice walking around the small streets. We managed to see Copenhagen Cathedral, the old University, the Round Tower, Rosenborg Castle and the Crown Jewels, The King's Garden and the City Hall. Unfortunately, in the time we had before things closed and it got too dark to really see much, we'd only managed to make it round one quarter of the walking tour. So instead trying to finish it, we opted to abandon the walking tour and hit the shops, with the resolve to just come back again and finish it off when we had more daylight hours. Our destination, Støget is one extremely long shopping street - any girl's heaven and any man's nightmare! It was amazing how long the street was and the funniest thing was that after about 500m you passed the shops you'd already passed in the previous 500m. So why they need about 4 or 5 of each shop on this one street is still a mystery to me. Finally at about 5.30pm, when it was dark and cold, we decided to head back to Malmö, have something to eat, freshen up and then hit the town. We met up with a bunch of my friends from Sommarstaden and headed out to Kulturbolaget, one of the many nightclubs. It was a fun night out and we even had the luck of finding it snowing when we left. Sunday morning we woke up to find it was still snowing and rather cold outside. So instead of showing Julia around Malmö, we decided to stay inside where it was warm and watch a movie.
Since then I have spent many, many hours in my room (which is not as much fun as it sounds) just watching movies and TV shows on my computer, listening to music, reading my books for my course and just chilling out. Today, however, I went and visited the school where I will be doing my 3 weeks school placement, Bladins International School. I'm in with a year 6 class (which is the equivalent of our grade 5) who are about to do their last term before moving up to middle school. My teacher is really nice and is giving me lots of opportunities to teach the class which is nice. The students are also about to start their exhibitions which will take up all of the last term. Their exhibitions involve the students chosing a unit of inquiry, researching this and then putting together a presentation which they will present to their parents in April. So this will all be going on while I'm there and I'm really looking forward to having a look at how it's done as this is something that is being introduced to some schools currently in Australia as a new way for learning. So I think it will be a fun and amazing learning experience to spend 15 days there, which will be done as 2 days a week for about 7 weeks.
And finally, I have started to organise some travelling trips!!!! Firstly, I'm off to Helsinki (Finland) and St Petersburg and Moscow (Russia) over Easter with Julia on an arranged trip that is offered to exchange students. I arrive back from this trip on the 15th of April and then the next day I am off again but this time to spend 4 days in Amsterdam!! This should be really good and the one main attraction I want to go and see is the Anne Frank house and museum, seeing as we're studying it currently in our course here. I'm also in the process of organising a trip to Prague with Valerie, a trip to Berlin with Gerda (who lives in Berlin and so can offer me free accommodation and show me round), where I would like to do a day trip down to Krakow and Auschwitz, and finally a trip to Italy at the end of May, where I can go to Pisa, Milan, Venice and Rome. I'm also hoping to maybe do a weekend trip to Gotland, which is an island just off the coast of Sweden (it's still part of Sweden though) and I think Interact (the student international group who looks after the exchange students) is planning a trip to Oslo which would also be great. So stay tuned for details and photos from these trips. Hopefully I'm not making you too jealous back home.
Hope the weather isn't too hot for you all aback home and that you are all safe!
Until next time...
Puss och kram,
Alice
xo
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