Hyggelig...

"Friendship is like peeing your pants, others can see it but only you can feel the warmth"

-Unknown

I have already established the fact that Danish is a strange language, I mean it doesn't even have a word for please.  One thing that Danish does have however that English does not is the concept of hyggelig.  Hyggelig cannot really be translated into English, we don't have a word for it.  The best way to describe it is like a warm and cozy atmosphere with friends, but that really doesn't  even quite capture what it is.   Truth be told I am not quite sure what hyggelig is, but I think we came pretty close with our latest Saturday dinner.  This week Krys and Seonaid decided we would have a campfire in the "viking ship"(I will explain that later), and we would cook bread over the fire.  I know it sounds weird and I definitely had my doubts about it, but in the end it was actually really good. 

Here is Krys, the only one who has ever done this.  So you took dough, wrapped it around a stick and then stuck it over the fire and tried to bake it without burning it.

 And there are no metal sticks here, no here you just pick sticks up off the ground and then use a knife to cut off the end, completely sanitary.

And here is the famed "viking ship", I put that in quotes because we actually have no idea what this is.  Seonaid found it when she was running one day and since then we have just called it the viking ship even though its just wooden sides in the shape of a ship in the middle of a field.

 So here is the bread cooking.   We actually ended up with most of my Danish class coming and it was really good to see everyone since it has been two weeks since the class ended.

Mitch tried to put cheese in his dough and then cook it.  As you can see most of us just got impatient and started eating the dough way before it was thoroughly cooked.

 And then we of course had marshmallows! or charmallows as the package called them.  I couldn't believe how many people had never cooked a marshmallow over the fire before!  When I cook my marshmallows I am part of the start it on fire, eat the outside then start it on fire again and repeat camp.  These marshmallows however didn't burn! They just sort of melted, but they were still delicious.

Now onto the boat and the sunset pictures.  Sorry it was just really pretty.

 When we arrived at the viking ship it was too windy to start a fire there so we actually had our fire in the middle of this stick circle thing, again not quite sure why it's there.

 This is Triin, looking defeated after I killed her off in a fierce game of mafia, which I won.  I just have really good powers of persuasion.

While we might not know the exact meaning of the word hyggelig, I think we came close last night.  We had a fire, friends, and marshmallows.  Does it get much cozier than that?

Random Danish Facts:

-Denmark is actually the oldest surviving country and there has never been a revolution.

- It rains almost every second day.  On average a year has 171 days with rain.

- The wealthiest people in Denmark pay 60% taxes and the average rate is 49%.