Gyldne godhed

Golden goodness.

Wheat fields are so damn magical.

You aren’t allowed to run through them because they belong to individual farmers and need to be harvested... Deniz and I couldn’t help ourselves.

Just before she left back to Turkey, Deniz painted me the picture of us below with some pretty danish oil paints we found. It sits on the wall in my sweet little danish room. I already miss her so much. But I'm glad she's happy back at home, about to start at the best art school in all of Turkey.

Sometimes life is like a golden wheat field. People can run right into the middle of it - and run out again just as quick.

Gamle Mand

Old man Ejna.

I wonder what I’ll be like if I get to 97?

Ejna is my host family’s gardener. He has a nice old room in our house and loves sucking on caramel. Due to his delicate frame he can’t actually garden much, but with part of his Danish pension he helps buy the bananas and newspaper once a week.

Most mornings I sit with Ejna at breakfast. With a great toothless effort, I watch fondly as he sucks and swallows a buttered bread roll that has been nicely warmed and cut in half. He slurps his instant coffee and gives me a friendly reassuring nod. Often I reach my hand across to his and ask him if his bread tastes good. He always holds my hand tight and with brightened eyes he laughs and tells me that it does.

My host father’s grandfather first employed Ejna in 1922 at the tender age of 14. This means, if one of my host siblings has a child, our wonderful old gardener will have seen 5 generations (and 4 lots of babies) of the same family. He doesn’t have one of his own - but if that’s not love and relation I don’t know what is.

On his birthday I decided to make him some easy to eat Russian Fudge. I thought this would be perfect considering the Danes don’t have anything quite like it, and he loves the taste of caramel. It was rather difficult to find all the ingredients and I had to use some ominous substitutes. These included a strange syrup that wasn’t golden and an odd smelling powered vanilla essence. It turned out okay, Ejna sucked happily.

Friends and neighbours came around all throughout the day. They all brought baskets of chocolate and bread and alcohol (which they mostly drank themselves at the event). At the end of it all when they finally all left, Ejna was mumbling in an irritated tone and a slight frown swept across his forehead. He told farmor it was all a bit of shit as from his spot at the end of the table he didn’t hear one word the whole bloody time.

Det er hyggeligt

It is cosy. The sky is grey because great thick clouds consume it.. Talls trees are blowin' in the wind. My lovely family and I are warm inside having just eaten some deliciously fresh kanelsnegle (cinnamon danish pastries) cooked by my host brother Christian. Very clever!

Yum yum. Anyway, if you have read my last blog post and are particularly observant, you may have noticed the brother I had previously mentioned did not go by the name Christian. This would be because after first two weeks of moving into the little town of Fuglebjerg (ominously translating to 'birdmountain') I moved right back out. There wasn't that much detail to it.

Okay that's I lie, there was a lot of detail to it. It was a rather odd two weeks. Buuut in short we didn't fit together and thought it seemed silly to waste any time. When you have only 11 months, time becomes a very precious thing.

So nearly two months gone and I am sitting here starting to feel a comforting sense of normality creep in. Until now, each day has seemed like a colourful exciting explosion.. this weekend was the first I have sat and allowed myself to sit and contemplate life. Think about what i've learnt and how I might have changed so far. Simply have a good ponder. I missed that.