Nytår New Years

Now it is 2017! Welcome to the new year!

I spent the new year with my third host family. My family helped me get ready and Signe did my makeup for me: it looked stunning and I felt so beautiful. Mathilde and I made chocolate mousse for dessert and then retired to change. My host aunt and uncle came with my host cousins, and my third host family’s friends’ family came. It was a blast! We ate a ton of food, played silly games like “hum the song and your team has to guess it” and “emoji movie titles.” We danced and talked and ate more. We blew horns, pulled crackers, and set off confetti cannons. Every hour we popped a balloon counting down to midnight. We listened to the Queen’s speech. Finally we stood up on the couches in the last moments of 2016 and jumped into 2017. We toasted each other, hugged each other, and wished each other a Happy New Year!

Now, in Denmark, I had been warned of the fireworks.

In a country where there is remarkably low theft and incredible safety, some of the stories shocked me. In a place where loosing your wallet and phone regularly means it will get returned to you unharmed, people were like “just get ready for the New Years fireworks!” As an American, having attended a whole lot of rather wild 4th of Julys, I thought I was ready; I thought I had seen it all. Boy was I wrong. At least a week before Christmas, people began setting off fireworks in the streets after dark (which is like 4pm). But in the days before New Years, this increased gradually into something that resembled the booms of a near-by-all-night-long thunderstorm. But on New Years Eve? Fireworks could be seen from the second it got dark until the second it became light! And for an hour or so around midnight there were so many everywhere that I swore everyone in the whole country was setting them off all at once. I saw some of the videos of the streets in downtown Copenhagen, and it looked like a joyful war zone. Everyone wore safety glasses, and there are impressively few injuries from all this, so cheers!

It was really a night to remember!

For anyone wondering, I started off my new year’s diet correctly with dessert for breakfast (bread with butter and brown sugar on top), extra chocolate mousse for lunch, and crepes (filled with ice cream and jam) for dinner! Then I ate lots of cup noodles (a local delicacy that is actually curry flavoured ramen). It has been great so far! Here is to a safe and joyful year to all!