christmas in denmark...

so i dropped off sean at the airport on christmas eve morning... i got back to odense around 10:30... i had not slept since tuesday night except for 20 min on the train coming back alone... which for me is a record to not have at least a few hours under my belt... i had to finish packing for my trip and get to bjorg's family's house... i let myself take a 30 min nap just so i wouldn't fall over... i headed out to catch the 1pm train to her family's house on the main peninsula, jutland... and guess what... my train was late... ha story of my week... i waited out in the cold for another 25 min which made me miss my connection... i ended up in fredricicia because the conductor told me i might be able to catch my connection there but it was gone by the time i got there... i needed to go to vajle to catch my connection... i ended up waiting around for an hour because that particular regional train only runs every hour... so i was late getting to bjorg's... what did we ever do without cell phones? even here when i don't use it everyday i still am happy it saves me sometimes!

bjorg picked me up at the trainstation in hedensted... but her family lived in the next sister town... we arrived at her family's adorable danish house and dropped off my things before we went to church...

the service was in danish of course and i felt so terrible... i almost fell over during the service because i could not keep my eyes open... between the drone of danish words i didn't understand and finally not rushing around had caught up with me... i felt so bad... i started to waver and bjorg grabbed my arm... i barely kept myself away the rest of the service but somehow i did... i still feel bad... but next time i'll just try to sleep a bit more...

after church we went back for dinner... we had roast pork with this amazing crispy outside, potatoes (both boiled and then the danish specialty brown potatoes which are candied potatoes!), carrots, red (christmas) cabbage, fruit, and fantastic gravy... i can't remember the rest because there was just so much!

desert was the most fun however... we ate rice pudding with cherry sauce but the danish tradition says that you place an almond in the bottom of one of the cups of pudding and whomever gets the almond at the end gets a special gift! bjorg's mother got the almond it was pretty cool... i will be taking this tradition home with me! :)

another fun danish christmas tradition is holding hands and singing christmas carols while walking around the tree... i learned in culture class that there are a few variations... some families sing only one song and it gets faster and they run faster around the tree but bjorg's house was mellow and adorable!

following the tree singing everyone opened up gifts! it was so sweet of them... bjorg, her parents and her sister and brother in law got me small gifts so i could at least open something with them!

then we sat around and enjoyed each others company... i really crashed that night which was good since i had to get up and after breakfast have 20 hours of trains to get from there to budapest...

either way thank you bjorg and your family for taking me in as your own it was so very sweet of you!!! :)

** pictures: christmas tree... rice pudding... and grabbing the gifts from the hiding places since many danish homes get broken into during christmas just for the gifts!