Wed. Aug 31, 2011

Three weeks down in MTCet already! Time is really moving. It's great to be here. I get a ton of questions about the language, so i'll break it down the best i can: its comin along nicely, but it's still! pretty tough. Imagine... speaking english but from the back of your throat. If that makes any sense? It sounds like a caveman language most of the time, very few consonants are prounounced with a "hard" pronunciation. For example: if a "d" is preceded by a vowel, it's usually pronounced as a soft "d", sounds more like an "L." Although, the first thing they told us when we got here is that Danish has zero pronunciation rules. none. zilch. nada. so... previously mentioned "rule" is really just a guideline, applicable about 50% of the time. It's annoying, but lots of fun. There's 144 different Danish dialects that are spoken across Danmark (according to our 2 rm teachers), so if you pronounce something the best you can, chances are somewhere in the country a native dane is pronouncing it the same way. But it sounds weird if you have a Kubenhavn accent for half a sentence and an Odense accent for the other half. So we're gonna be soundi! ng pretty funny. Haha and i'm learning to eat with my fork in my left hand and knife in my right at all times, again so we don't look like complete losers when we get there. The mtc is just full of random knowledge. There's alot to learn about the country and people. We have to take a citizenship test once we have been in the country for 6 months, and if we don't pass it could get dicey. So we're learning a little every day about their culture. For eksample, they don't use clothes dryers. Or garbage disposals. Or dishwashers. (Dad, I'm gonna come home only hand washing all my dishes i'm sure. You'll be proud) They are a very self-reliant people, so machines like that seem like a waste of energy when they can do it themselves. It seems like its going to be quite an adventure. We've also been told that we're not going to come home wearing any of the same suits. What we have now is "too americ! an" and we will want to fit in more. Not going to lie, I'm kind of excited. Can't wait until i get there... Seems like so far away at this point, but 7 more days and we're halfway through MTCet already! It's been tough this week, because the Dutch, Norsk, and Swedish elders on our floor left for the field on monday. We're all extremely jealous. They were our scandinavian buddies that we had come to know so well, and we could all understand each other in our respective languages. Now it's just us and the Dutchys that came in the same day as us. We're good friends with them. But our languages aren't related at all, so we can't speak parseltongue to each other any more. That's another thing, we joke alot about MTCet being like hogwarts, complete with prefects, headmasters, secret chambers, parseltongue... you name it, we got it. It's sad really, we're all desperate for some form of entertainment so that's what we resort to. Anywho. My email time is up, they don'! t give us enough. But i miss and love you all! Letters are the best, so if your ever bored shoot me a note.

Gud vær med dig,

Ældste Logan