Denmark is Awesome!

Week one Denmark - slideshow dvd

Dear Family,
Well it's been about two weeks since I've been able to email you guys, but we finally made it here. The jet-lag was pretty bad, we basically lost a night of sleep on the way over. We left SLC at 8:30 AM and flew over the atlantic during the night, and I ended up getting maybe an hour of sleep on the way. We got to Copenhagen about 9:30 AM and we were all dead tired. We met the President and his wife with the AP's, then took a car-tour of Copenhagen where we stopped at a chapel with the original Kristus sculpture like the one in the visitor's center in SLC. After that we contacted for an hour in one of the outdoor mall things in Copenhagen, I forgot what they call them here already. That was actually really fun even though I couldn't understand much of what anyone said back to us. Later we went to Frederiksborg Castle just north of the city and the President took us on a tour through the inside. There's a pretty famous chapel in there, and a room call the "prayer" room where the king would say his prayers. The walls were covered in Carl Bloch's paintings, probably 20 or so.

It was pretty well freezing that day, the airport said -3 or something, but it was windy and snowy which made it even colder. It's definitely colder here than in Utah so far, the humidity makes your entire face freeze which is very pleasant, or dejlig as we say here (delightful). My trainer is Elder Stoffey, who I met the second day after we had dinner and breakfast at the mission home. He's a cool guy, from Colorado Springs and has only been here for 8 months which is pretty new for a trainer. We got on the train to Ballerup after our training, which is my first area. It's a little suburb area northwest or Copenhagen. It's been fun so far, we started with 8 investigators and actually picked up a new one my second day here. We were knocking doors in apartments and he was interested and let us in for about 20 minutes. He has lived here his whole life. We pretty well taught him the first lesson and left a Book of Mormon for him to read for next time, hopefully we'll meet with him again this week. It's about what I expected overall, there's tons of things that are new to me here, but really it doesn't feel too much different from home. The members here are awesome, we have had dinner appointments with them every night so far and they all cook amazing stuff. I'll send you a picture of my first wienerbrød, the thing was the size of about 4 plates and covered in chocolate. It was tasty, and I pretty well ate the entire thing right there.

Our apartment is pretty nice, there's actually 4 of us in it, it's me and Elder Stoffey with the Zone leaders for the area, Elders Veach and Bailey. They're pretty cool guys, and there hasn't been a dull moment so far, pretty entertaining. Yesterday, my wonderful companion offered to have me speak in sacrament meeting. I figured I would go ahead and do it, and to just make sure I mentioned that I'm a noob here in Denmark up front. It actually went very well, I just talked on Missionary work for about 5 minutes and a few people told me after that it was easy to understand which was a good sign. Our meeting house (menighed) is in Søborg, which is about a 15 minute drive from the apartment, so it's an adjustment to having a stake center in our back yard at home. Today we played basketball in the Stake Center in Søborg, I pretty well destroyed them and dunked it a few times. Hopefully one of the Elders on Sjælland is good and will come humble me a little. We're going to check out Nyhavn in a few minutes, which is going to be awesome. It's that picture on the front of that Danish book I got from the library a while ago with the red and yellow buildings over the canal. With our train passes, we can pretty well go anywhere in Sjæalland on P-days which is going to be awesome. My companion is awesome and actually wants to do cool things so we'll probably go to some castles and check out the viking ship musuem in Roskilde if we make it there. Well, it's been awesome so far, the work is going good. Let me know if you want to know anymore about whatever here. That's about all I can think of to write about right now, but there's probably a ton I missed. Well, Elder Bailey just told me he's going to send you an email, so hopefully it's good what he says. He's an interesting guy, as is my companion and Elder Veach. Like I said, I haven't been bored yet. You'll probably figure out why when you read his email to you. Well, let me know how you're all doing, I'll send you all some billeder from my first week.
-Ældste Swenson