Danish-taiwanese-week

Sorry for the gap in my updates, but I have been really busy recently (in a positive way). Especially, the past week has been packed with experiences, that I normally experience in Danish surroundings… but not this time!

First of all I went to see the new Harry Potter movie (!!!) together with a Taiwanese classmate. She had been so kind to book tickets to a version where the actors spoke English and not Chinese (Try to imagine professor McGonagall speaking Chinese!), but the subtitles where though still in Chinese, and the audience acted in a very Asian way ass well. I guess humour is different all over the world!

Saturday my family took me to a city named Keelung about 1 and a half hours drive from Taipei. The city has a very big harbour (and I’m pretty sure my father has been there), but we didn’t spend time at the sea. Instead we went to an old Japanese-style mine town that now was one big tourist attraction. My oldest sister and I got to go into the actual former used mine, which was interesting but a bit claustrophobic!

    When we returned home in the evening I had to cook some Danish food for an event I was going to on Sunday. My choice had fallen on frikadeller as my family does not have an oven (almost no one in Taiwan has). It had taken some effort to find all the ingredients, but I turned out that the ingredients weren’t the only problem I would get. Cause I asked my family where to find something to whip the forcemeat with, they told me, that they always used chopsticks! So now I can earnestly tell that I’ve been cooking frikadeller with help from chopsticks!

Me and my oldest host sister in the mine!

As I’ve told, the Danish food was cooked because of an event on last Sunday. It was a Culture Fair set up by Rotary to give the upcoming Taiwanese exchange students an impression of the different countries. Each country (represented by inbound exchange students) got one table where they had to “exhibit” their country, and then the Taiwanese students and their parents walked around listening, looking, tasting and asking questions.

    To represent Denmark I had made two posters: one with a map of Denmark and some facts about size, inhabitants, weather and welfare- and school system, and another poster with explanations and examples of the Danish language. Further more I had brought some LEGO for the visitors to play with (who could finish their figure in the shortest time), and on my computer I showed some promotion videos about Denmark. But the favourite attraction among my guests was definitely frikadellerne!

In addition to the many events then I’ve been busy dancing as we are training hardcore for our performance in December. And just to put even more dance into my life, one of my classmates took me to se the famous Taiwanese Cloud Gate Dance group (a modern ballet group) performing “Water Stains on the Wall”. They were indescribably skilful as they were dancing on a tilted stage! And still all the difficult steps looked so easy when they did them! And what made it even more beautiful was the use of modern classic music and constantly changing black shadows on the white stage. It made me think of a Chinese painting.

So this week has been pretty busy, and very special as it has contained some very familiar things but in new surroundings. Also we will enter December in a few days, but as they do not celebrate Christmas here it is not going to be anything special. A journalist from Horsens Folkeblad contacted me for an interview about, how my Christmas is going to be here, and I promise to post the article, when it is brought!

Julia :)