City Hotel Odense

... speaking is something that many fear more than death itself. Up With People wants us to become strong, confident leaders and that includes speaking with conviction and pride. We had a prepare a 2-minutes speech: either instructional or message-based.

I taught my group how to make an origami ship :)

It was great to see the huge, obvious strides that those ...

... for Sweden already! Yikes! I feel like I just got here.

Oh wait. I did. Yesterday.

Just another day in the life of an Uppie :)

By the way, see you in 3 weeks! I can't wait! :)

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving with family and friends! Trust that, if you're reading this, you were on my mind today and that I was thinking of my wonderful and supportive family and friends! I miss you all :)

Be thankful :) I know I am!

... part of the best UWP Cast ever! They deserve the best treatment!

We had so much fun appreciating our guys and showering them with love :)

I'm now at my new host family's home with Aude, my roommate, from Quebec, Canada. Our host family is wonderful :) We have 2 host sisters too! They are 17 and 19.

Well, time to get ready for bed :) By the way, look at your calendar right now! 3 weeks from tomorrow ...

... with an extensive and beautiful 16th century altarpiece. Then I saw the place of H.C Andersons childhood. He was very poor and lived in a tiny house shared with five other families. The nice lady allowed me to go in for free because I had run out of Danish Krona. I am meeting Australians everywhere.

OK so there's only 8.3 Danish krone to the pound & and we had 3 kids so we always new Denmark was going to be punishingly expensive. However it was worth going, most museums have either cheap entry or low price for kids. Just returned from the Viking open air village in Ribe (Jutland) & the buried ship museum at Ladby in Funen (Fyn). Also the viking ship museum in Roskilde (Sealand).All places were very ...

... Some of us were more nervous then others to pick up the crabs but we all felt them! We also watched some seals and porpoises being trained and were able to learn more about them.

Aside from all our travels we also took some time off and had some quiet days at home. We spent some time playing with the neighbors horses, roasting marshmallows in the backyard, and one of the boys favorites was sleeping in the ...

...to Denmark.
The original plan was to drive all the way to Copenhagen and stay on a campsite there. But since it rained and rained and rained, we decided to stop earlier and have a good rest before heading to Copenhagen and meeting up with Laurents & Iris at the airport there. We were lucky and found a really nice campsite right at the beach with a view of the Storebaelt Bridge :-)

... however, their idea of integration is very different from any in the U.S.  It was more about the fact that they share similar space and have the opportunity to play with each other occasionally that makes it "integrated."  It was a very impressive school but left me with more questions about inclusion in the Danish school system.

We had lunch as a group at Franck A on one of the main walking streets and then walked to Odense Kulturhus.  This center is a community center for ...

... the city centre *nd you couldn't drive f*ster th*n 30 km/h there. Mrs.Nielsen *nd her husb*nd, just *s everyone else in the neighbourhood, lived in * two-storey priv*te house with its own b*cky*rd. They put me in * groundfloor room, showed me b*sic things like where the b*throom w*s, where the bre*kf*st would w*it for me in the morning, where to c*ll in c*se I needed something *nd *fter th*t I w*s re*dy for Odense. W*sting no time, I got out. It grew cloudy *g*in, but wh*t could one do there ...

... We had time to do a little walking around in downtown Helsinki. Judy had been tere today and remembered a church that was caved into a granite hillside and it was reputed to not only be beautiful, but to have wonderful acoustics, so we wandered about til we found it and again, it was amateur time and a video (actually an audio) was again attempted by yours truly.

We then boarded the ferry from Helsinki to Stockholnm and although we were on a huge Silja line ship ...