Frederiksborg Castle

The monarchy started living in the castle in the mid 1500's, mostly as a hunting lodge, but it was built before that. King Christian IV rebuilt it in its present grandeur in the early 17th century. After a fire destroyed the castle in 1859, the monarchy never lived in the castle again. They were able to save the paintings and other artifacts. The chapel was not destroyed. The benefactor (beer businessman) suggested that the castle be restored as a national museum. Today it is owned by the state. It took about 20 years to restore the castle. They restored it from pictures that had been painted of the castle.

Baroque-style gardens from the Frederiksborg Castle window.

Chapel. The room right behind the chapel is a private worship room for the king and contains pictures from the life of Christ, all painted by Carl Bloch.  It is always surprising to me how small the originals are, because we always see them in much larger replicas. 

Frederiksborg fountain

The castle is completely surrounded by water

The organ

Organ pipes opposite the organ

Dad between Athena and Hercules

Here is a picture of a tree in the park by our house.  It is the pacifier tree. When a child is ready to give up the binky (and they are old enough to know about this tradition), they bring it to this tree and say good-bye. Some even write messages and place it in a bag.

We mostly walk to grocery stores, so we can only buy what we can carry.  Most things come in small packages,  Also pantry and refrigerator space is limited.  Here are some pictures of some of the things we buy.  Powdered sugar comes in a small box.  That is the largest size for flour and sugar is even smaller.  The milk comes in a liter, and that is also a liter of yogurt, although you can get individual cartons.  Thank goodness we can get mayonnaise and miracle whip.  

Dear Family,                                                                                                                   July 10, 2016,   Sunday night

Our 4th Sunday in Denmark.  Life is settling into a bit more of a routine, that is marked by summer vacations (meaning dinners before Institute are not happening until late August, attendance at FHE and Institute are down and sporadic, etc.)  Also, right now with the BYU summer abroad students here, we are taking advantage of language lessons Mon - Wed for 2 hours every morning.  This will be the 2nd week.  They are fun so when those are over, there will be an empty spot in our schedule to fill up those mornings. 

We attended the same wards this week as last week to attain a little consistency and let the kids know we are around.  We went to Sacrament meeting and Sunday school in the Frederiksberg Ward (they did not have enough headsets to go around so we did not have translation) and then our block in the Gradsaxe 2nd Ward.  Both SS were in English again because of the BYU students attending plus other visitors who spoke English.  We also went to the Fred Ward because one of the BYU students brought her violin and volunteered to play a solo in church.  We wanted to support her (she invited us) even though they could probably care less if we are there.  She did an excellent job and added a nice spirit to the meeting.  The theme of sacrament meeting was senior missionaries.  A local sister just returned home from a genealogy mission in SLC and then the Temple President spoke as well as one of the male temple missionaries.  I found I could understand a small bit of the American speakers as their Danish was a little slower and perhaps their accents were more like I would sound.  I was still piecing a few fragments together but it did give me hope that perhaps I could give a Sacrament meeting talk in a couple of years or begin to understand some of the Danish.  There may be an advantage to listening without translation as it is a good opportunity to listen to diction and to try to pick up some phrases.  It also helps that they are speaking church language and some of that carries over.  I am also surprised that the Danes will often throw in a word or two of English in the middle of a sentence.  I think it may be because there is not a good Danish translation for some words so they just use the English word and everyone seems happy with that. The bishop translates for me in Priesthood meeting, which is really nice of him.  He is the best translator we have heard so far.  In sacrament meeting translation, there are sometimes long pauses of silence or a quick summary of something much longer, so we know we are only getting pieces of it.  One week, we could actually watch the translator nod off a couple of times.  It makes it a little tough to fully understand the speakers. 

We have our 2nd interview with the mission president this Tuesday.  I am not sure what we have to report, other than we feel we are off to a good start in making introductions and getting to know the active YSA's. We do have hours each day to fill up with some worthwhile activities but we are likely meeting or exceeding the expected 35 hours a week since we have many late night commitments, and if we count some language study as part of our work.  A summary that I might put on our first 4 weeks of being here (first impressions) is that the stake and ward leaders are looking for someone to keep the CUV open and be there when the youth want to gather.  Someone to help them with refreshments and food and support them in their activities (Chaperones or Church Leaders or adult supervision.)  They seem less anxious to have us meet in ward YSA committee meetings or be involved in visiting or rescuing the less actives.  That is not really surprising as I think we need to earn their trust first and being Americans with no language skills has to be a limiting factor.  On our part, we would like our mission to be something more than that so we are still searching for the formula of finding a "comfort zone" the whole time we are way outside of our normal comfort zone.

We had a fun P-day yesterday, just mom and I for a castle visit.  We decided we wanted to see the Frederiksborg Slot (Danish for castle), which has been turned into a National Museum of History.  It is located in Hillerød, about a 40-minute drive.  It was kind of nice just getting away the two of us without having to pace ourselves with anyone else.  We walked just about the entire gardens, which are extensive, so we got a lot of exercise.  They are very beautiful and have several statues in them as well.  Not as many flowers as I expected but the ones they had in one section were nicely done.  The church connected to the castle is comparable to any that we have seen.  It was beautiful with many large paintings and sculptured ceilings and ornate gold and silver trim. The altars and the organ were also very elaborate.  The pipe organ was playing the whole time we were in the chapel so it was a nice peaceful feeling. The rest of the museum, 4 floors, was mostly filled with paintings dating back to the 1600's.  We enjoyed the museum but I had visions and memories of Jared’s kids on some similar sight-seeing expeditions around the cities of Europe that we visited together.  I missed not carrying a child on my shoulders but knew that they would have been bored with the many rooms long before we were. We spent 4 hours touring the castle and grounds and then ate a small picnic lunch in the car before heading home at 3:00 pm.  The weather was perfect for such an outing.  We had to wear sweatshirts for the outside walking because the wind was a little cool.  Skies were overcast but it never rained on us until we were back in the apartment. 

At home, I trimmed the bushes around the patio and cleaned out weeds growing between the bricks.  It was nice to get a little “garden” time as it always centers my brain and I love the feeling of making things look nicer.  Jean ran to the store by herself. The rest of the day was spent on language and watching the rest of the CES broadcast from June, Elder Clark's message on the future of education in the church and the present state of revelation on that topic.  He makes it sound like more changes are coming and the Lord is accelerating the pace of more and better teaching in the church.  

Friday was our 2nd temple day.  Jean and I led the 10:00 session again which they did in English.  There were only 3 men and 10 sisters.  Everyone spoke Danish so I think they did the session in English mostly for us.  Only the oldest film is translated into Danish however, so it is also a way for the members to see the other films if they can understand the English.  I took all 3 men through the veil; 2 in Danish and 1 in English.  Both of the Danish were ordinance workers so I just had to trust that they said it right.  I think there were cards available but I did not use them.  I will have to check them out.  Based on the experience I had last week in the initiatory, the card would not have helped me a lot knowing if they said the ordinance correctly. 

The latter part of the session, I spent in Sealings as a patron and witness.  It was all in Danish and a few in Swedish so I got a bit less out of it.  I thought I knew most of the sealing ordinances in English but they turned out to be pretty rusty when I tried to relate what I was hearing to what I could remember in English.   It was nice to be able to look forward to the temple all week and have a commitment in the morning hours, when we are struggling to feel productive outside of our language study.  

So life goes on in missionary work. I hope you have a glimpse into our work.  It is a wonderful experience.  We miss you all and are happy when we can see your faces on Face Time.  Have a great week of summer vacation! 

Love, Dad. 

Min Kære Familie,                                                                                                                                                                          July 10, 2016

We spent three mornings this week learning Danish along with the BYU ‘study abroad’ students.  One of the host mothers is a 70+ year-old grandma (who could probably run circles around me).  Because she is a pensioner, she was asked to teach the BYU students Danish for two hours each Monday-Wednesday.  It is held at the Institute Center, so we asked if we could come along.  It is a lot more fun to do Danish with a native speaker than working with a computer.  We really like this woman, Marion Anderson.  She began by asking everyone their name—we had to respond in Danish.  Then she handed out 5-6 sentence conversations that we practiced with a partner.  It reminded me of how I studied French in junior high.  But it was very effective and she could help us with pronunciation.  We also read from a children’s book.  That is what we need to practice reading—simple stories from The Friend or children’s books.  The next day we did numbers and Sister Anderson asked us questions about our family—how many siblings we have; how many boys and how many girls.  We had to answer back in complete sentences.  She had also given the class an assignment to write 3 Danish sentences about a castle the group visited on Monday afternoon.  We hadn’t visited the same castle, but we wrote about the Roskilde Cathedral.  Everyone wrote their sentences on the white board, read them and the class tried to make sense of them.  Sister Anderson corrected our grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.  It was a good stretch for us. 

On Tuesday, we somehow got started talking about the world soccer games.  Everyone here was very excited when Iceland beat England.  It was a Cinderella story.  When the team returned back to Iceland after losing their next match, they were welcomed as heroes. Probably the whole of Iceland came out to greet them, ha, ha.  Sister Anderson said that Iceland’s win was like the one and only time Denmark won the European Football Championship.  She said that there was a movie about it—sounded like one of our underdog sports movies like Miracle or Hoosier or McFarland USA.  Anyway, the students asked if we could watch that movie.  So on Wednesday, the lesson was watching Sommeren 92.  The movie was in Danish, so that is how we practiced our Danish, lol.  There were English subtitles, but they didn’t match up with the action very well (and who wants to read a movie anyway).  Sister Anderson would translate a little and every once in a while she would stop the movie so she could explain.  Fun movie. 

We finally got internet on Monday night.  We worked on the apartment a lot this week—cleaning hard water deposits, pipes in the sink, dryer vents, etc. A first look at the apartment didn’t show any of these things, but we live here so we want everything clean.

We walk a lot—to and from the Institute Center and we walked to the mall to get Dad some shoes.  But we don’t walk from our present apartment.  It would add an additional mile or more.  Instead, we drive to our old apartment, park in the apartment lot, and then walk.  It is probably a mile each way from there.  We walk—rain or shine.  Parking is expensive and difficult to find. We also walk in the mornings for exercise.  We have a beautiful park right by our apartment.  There are several ponds with ducks and paths that meander through the greenery.  You could almost get lost with all the different paths.  One of the paths takes you to the edge of the city zoo.  We have a nice view of the elephant habitat.  I haven’t seen any elephants, but Dad did. 

I love our institute class.  There were only seven students there, but we had a great lesson and discussion—Elder Christofferson’s talk on Fathers.  We began by watching this video on fathers.  The teacher asked what made Bill a great father.  He then asked us to think about our own fathers and share a memory, a lesson learned, and an attribute.  It was fun to think about my own Dad and identify these things.  Finally, we discussed why Elder Christofferson’s message is so timely for us now.  Great message for all dads. 

We are loving our time here and are learning new things all the time.  We enjoy meeting new people and love them all.  We hope everyone has a great week.

Med kærlighed,

Mom