Tuesday:
Today have been a long and tiring day.
We started early with a little trip to Dream Bank, which is a place where you can take different courses or get help to fulfill your dreams. It is free of charge and the place is there to inspire us to pursue our dreams. It is owned by the American insurance company, who sees themselves as dream protectors. It is used around by 6000 locals the month.
We got the opportunities to make a dreamboard, which we took with us home. It was surprisingly fun to make the dreams boards.
We eat lunch at the madison college, where we got five different pastas.
Later on that day we went to a team building and rope course exercise. The first three hours, we were together with some american students from the colleges, together we went through different team building exercises. It was really fun and one of the teams brooke the campus record by 4 seconds (the old records was 30 sec.) the point of the game was to touch all the numbers in a circle but only one person could be in it.
Later on we all (or most of us) went rope climbing.
In the afternoon we had mentor night and that is why we weren’t together.
Maja’s mentor experience:
Our mentor Diane picked us up at Madison College at 4.30 pm. Or that was at least what we had planned. As I told you, she is a busy woman so she showed up at 5.15 pm.
The plan was to go to her place, meet her dogs, get some food and just relax and have a nice conversation. On the way to her house, she drove quite a lot different ways to show us some of Madison. We saw the West side of Madison and the UW Arboretum.
When we came to her house, we were greeted by her three dogs. Afterwards we got a housetour. She made tea for us, which was delicious.
Dinner was homemade Chicken Stew with crackers and bread. It was so delicious and we were all happy to get some homemade food. We ate together with her and Declan who is a friend of Diane’s daughter. We had a really good time and had a lot of fun talking about different stuff.
The clock went 19.45 pm and we were ready to go home. She drove us back but when we hit the highway, something terrible happened. In the middle of nowhere one of the tires punctured. We had to drive to the nearest gas station so that we could get the tire changed. Unfortunately, we did not have the jack so we were helpless. Diane had to call one of her friends who came to pick us up and drove us back to the hotel. Diane herself stayed at the gas station and waited for a tire truck to come and help her. However, christina tried to help fixing the car and for that reason Diane promised to name her first grandchild after her.
I do not have pictures from the night except from the one’s of the dogs.
PS. the dogs were lovely.
Emilie’s mentor experience:
Sarah picked us up at the hotel 5.45 pm.
Unfortunately her brother and her sister in law were not home, so we could not visit a “real American house”, instead we went to a real American diner. It was a local diner in a city nearby, Sarah thought it was a small city, but we found out the city had a population of 30.000 people, which we think are not a small city in Denmark.
It was great a great night, we laugh and talked the entire time we were together.
Unfortunately the waiter messed up in our order, so luckily for us, we got free dessert because of the inconvenience. We had to try the apple pie, which was very delicious.
On our way home from the diner we saw a Harley Davidson motorcycle, which we had to take pictures with. The driver showed us the speakers in the vehicle, it sounded like being in a diskotek outside, it was so crazy!
Signe, Cecilie and Tanyas mentor experience:
Tuesday evening we got picked up by our mentor at 6 pm. This was the first time we going to meet her and her husband. Before meeting them we had emailed a little back and forth with her. She wanted us to go see where she lived because she lived in a rebuilt barn, which was pretty cool and cosy.
We drove from our hotel to see her house and got a little chit-chat. We picked up her husband up and drove to a mexican local restaurant, which was a cool experience, Our mentor had not planned anything besides the restaurant, so she was asking us what we wanted to do. At that time it was pretty late so we decided to drive around a little and experience the capitol, University of Wisconsin and Madison downtown in the evening. It was so pretty. We were really surprised to see how pretty and modern the houses the students lived in was, compared to Denmark. We were also surprised to see how many people who are using the university in the evening as a place to do all homework and assignments.
We drove from our hotel to see her house and got a little chit-chat. We picked up her husband up and drove to a mexican local restaurant, which was a cool experience, Our mentor had not planned anything besides the restaurant, so she was asking us what we wanted to do. At that time it was pretty late so we decided to drive around a little and experience the capitol, University of Wisconsin and Madison downtown in the evening. It was so pretty. We were really surprised to see how pretty and modern the houses the students lived in was, compared to Denmark. We were also surprised to see how many people who are using the university in the evening as a place to do all homework and assignments.
