Muserology Cafe

A Day at Flakkebjerg (February 2009)

by Michala K., age 16, Denmark

What's the first thing you see in the morning? Your mother telling you to get up now, or you'll be late for school? The first thing I used to see was my dog barking at my beeping alarm clock.

Not anymore.

I woke up this morning to the sun shining in through the windows and my alarm clock playing a tune from the radio. I sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by scarves for privacy, and as I pushed aside the scarves I saw the face of one of my roommates, Freja, smiling at me.

I live at Flakkebjerg Efterskole in Denmark. My parents and my little brother live in Copenhagen, an hour and a half away by train and bus. An efterskole, or "after-school," is a boarding school mostly made up of ninth and tenth graders. Unlike students at Hogwarts, though, we don't learn magic.

We live in buildings that look like old farmhouses, and probably did start out as farmhouses, but now have bedrooms and living rooms and classrooms. We are 140 students, which makes Flakkebjerg one of the largest efterskoler in the country. We have two dining rooms and a large kitchen. We also have a barn, a stable, thirteen horses, three rabbits, a fox out near the soccer field, a greenhouse, two cats, a gym with a rock-climbing wall, a skate park, our own bus stop, lice, and probably some mice too.

We are separated into eight families: Brejdablik, Vanaheim, Jotunheim, Noatun, Niflheim, Trudvang, Bilskirner, and Alfheim. All the names come from Nordic mythology. My family, Brejdablik, has a legacy of hating Vanaheim. The reason is that when people sneak out at night to visit each other, a lot of people go to Vanaheim because it's far away from where the teachers live. Brejdablik gets hardly any visitors, so we get jealous and pretend to hate Vanaheim. We really do love them, though.

After we groggily get up, my three roommates and I go to breakfast, a buffet of cereal, oatmeal, and freshly baked bread. We are allowed to sit wherever we want and make as much noise as we want. Breakfast is from 7:30 to 8:00 AM, and after that we have a half hour to take a bath, change our clothes, clean up our rooms, or finish up our homework.

After that, classes start. There are five lines, or courses, that we can take. They are Performing Arts, Visual Arts, Science Explorer (a physics and chemistry course), Science Adventure (a sports and biology course), and Global Explorer (a social studies and politics course with an emphasis on English). I am on Global Explorer, and it's a lot of fun. We also have the usual math, Danish, English, French or German, science, and PE classes.

We have a break at around 10 AM, and dinner is at noon. We have our main meal in the middle of the day, which the teachers say is healthiest. The food is very good, a mixture of new and traditional dishes. Meat is considered a side dish, so it's very vegetarian-friendly.

At 4 PM we are finished with class and go to do our chores. We are all assigned a small section of the school that needs to be cleaned every day. It's not very hard, and we play loud music to make the time go by. At 5 PM we eat supper, which usually consists of leftovers and a salad bar. In the evening, there are several activities that we can choose from, including horseback riding (I go out riding whenever I can), jewelry making, and sports. We don't have to do anything until 9:45 PM, when there is evening assembly, but there is evening tea and cake at 8:30 PM. We have to be in our family areas at 10 PM and in our rooms at 10:30 PM.

In reality, the routine that we live by goes unnoticed. The kids at Flakkebjerg come from all sorts of different backgrounds. Some kids pay to come here, while others, like me, get support from the government. Some kids were bored with their old schools and came to Flakkebjerg for a change of scenery; others came because they were unhappy at home. We are all very different, and it is by our differences that we bond in friendship. We are a mixed bunch of punks and preps, of nerds and jocks, all trying to stick out in a crowd and at the same time fit in with everyone else.

Efterskole life is never dull. Once, we returned from a field trip to find that Vanaheim had stolen Noatun's refrigerator. Another time, we Brejdafolk came back from evening assembly, ready for a good night's sleep, to find that somebody had stolen all our mattresses. We retaliated by stealing Niflheim's couch. On the other hand, life is not all mischief. You might go into a living room and see people writing letters by cutting words out of newspapers, or a small group sewing a dress out of plastic bags.

When you come into a room, people are always glad to see you and want you to join them. If someone is homesick or just having a bad day, he or she will always find a shoulder to cry on and a cup of hot chocolate waiting. Our efterskole is not divided into friends and enemies, but only friends and people we have not yet made friends with.