Just one more thing...

(Title to be read in the voice of Columbo)

Hi friends.

It's been a while.

More than a while.  It's been a year and two months.

I felt like there was one more issue that I needed to discuss.  An issue that affects more expats than we like to admit, because we all think we're going to be the ones to stay on the "right" side of statistics.

And that, dear readers, is the issue of divorce.

Living in a new country, in a place where the language is different and the rules for everything are different... Well, it will make a person question nearly everything.  Being newly married also does the same, but being newly married and in a new country is far more intense a crucible than some relationships can handle.  If you're not careful, or if both parties aren't completely honest beforehand about what they want (for themselves, for the other person, and for the relationship as a whole), the issues magnify quickly.

As difficult as it is, I think this can be a good thing.

As much as divorce can be truly awful, it's just as awful to stay in a relationship that should not continue.  I firmly believe that if a relationship is going to go wrong, it's best that it happen after only a couple of years, instead of waiting for all of the issues to slowly bubble to the surface.

So that both parties can move on to happier things.

I won't go into the process of how the whole thing works, as ours may have been unique, since I live in the US now.  Suffice it to say, it's a long, emotional process.

But I have been lucky.  When I moved back to the US, I decided to try living somewhere new, and it is a decision that I have not regretted for a second.  I've been happier here in Seattle than I can ever remember being, and I have found scores of amazing friends who have been incredibly supportive and just downright amazing.

Is it possible to feel blessed if you're not even remotely religious?  Maybe not, but I do feel grateful.

Divorce is hard.  Neither party usually comes out of it looking particularly good.  But it definitely forces you to take a hard look at yourself and the kind of person you want to be going forward, and the kinds of people you want to surround yourself with.  And as someone who has always been an advocate of self-honesty, I think that's a wonderful thing.

I say all of this mostly to give you hope.  Those of you who are struggling with a relationship that is struggling to handle the crucible.

My advice is this - Do what you can to make it work, but also recognize when you've done all you can.  And then find somewhere that makes you truly happy, and people who make you feel grateful to be alive every day, and hold onto those things.  Change is scary, but being stuck in a bad situation is even scarier.

I flew to Denmark one last time this past weekend, and my divorce became official yesterday.

And I'm okay.  I'm more than okay.

You will be also be okay.

And you will be a wiser, more confident person than you ever thought you could be.

And those are invaluable things.

Good luck to you, reader.  I hope you find the things that make you happiest and that you get to enjoy those things for the rest of your life.

To Endings and Beginnings

Every good adventure story has a beginning, a middle and an end.  It's only right that this adventure follow that same path.

In just under a week, my time in Denmark comes to a close.

I will be leaving the land of Scandinavians in skinny jeans on bicycles and landing in the land of Americans in skinny jeans on bicycles.  I'll be trading in the rainy, flat landscape of Denmark for the rainy, mountainous landscape of Seattle, Washington.

While I'll miss eating excessive amounts of cake, I'll make up for it by eating copious amounts of pie.

Whether or not I'll be able to use my newly acquired fluency in Danish remains to be seen, but it'll certainly be a cool trick to pull out at parties.

So, if you happen to have a glass of something nearby, let me give it an imaginary clink, and a heartfelt "skål."

To endings and beginnings.

Farvel, Danmark, og mange tak.  Jeg håber, vi ses igen snart.

Studieskolen - Studieprøven, Mundtlig Kommunikation

I'm taking a break from preparing for the looming final leg of the Studieprøve (which, for me, is tomorrow morning), as I realized that I haven't done a breakdown of this part of the exam.

So, it breaks down like this:

After we took the listening portion of the exam, we were handed a paper with a list of three umbrella topics, under each of which were a variety of possible directions to go in when talking about each topic.  This time around, the umbrella topics are "sport's role in society," "the welfare state," and "public health in Denmark."

Unlike for the PD3, where we only needed to prepare a 2-minute presentation on a topic, for this exam we are expected to prepare three presentations, one for each umbrella topic.  Each one needs to be 5 minutes long.

The day goes as follows:  First, we come in and give a 1-minute presentation about ourselves (who we are, why we're taking module 6 Danish, what we're doing with our lives, etc.).  We then choose, at random, one of 3 cards.  That card will correspond to one of the umbrella topics we have prepared, and it's that presentation that we give.  After that, we then take the remaining 20 minutes or so to have a discussion of the topic presented with the censor.

It's a lot more work that any of us expected.  Because not only are we preparing 3 topics to present, we're also expected to know enough about each topic to discuss it for another 20 minutes after the presentation.

So, the exam sure does go out with a bang.

Luckily for me, I leave on Friday for a much needed trip back to the US to visit my family and friends.  Even if I manage to forget every word of Danish that I've ever learned while I'm away, it's okay as long as I pass tomorrow, because I'll never have to take another Danish class EVER AGAIN.

How Rude...?

Before moving to Copenhagen, I read a lot of accounts from foreigners living here who complained that the Danes were rude.  I argue that "rudeness" is highly relative.  How rude the Danes seem depends a lot on how friendly your home town is.

My home town?  Not especially friendly.  Let me describe it a little bit...

I grew up in a suburb north of New York City.  It's close enough that folks who work in NYC can buy homes and commute to work.  It's got its pockets of less well-off areas, but overall the whole county has a good bit of money.  And one thing that I've learned from having lived in both poor and wealthy cities is that folks with lots of money don't always feel the need to be friendly.  Conversely, when I lived in Buffalo, NY, which is known for being almost as poor as Detroit, I found that almost everyone I met was open and friendly.

So now, let me compare waitstaff and retail workers in my hometown to the same here in Copenhagen.  Back home, most of them are teenagers and 20-somethings.  It's tough to make enough money making minimum wage or collecting tips to afford a place to live there, so a lot of them are still living with parents. Think back to yourself as an awkward teenager or disgruntled 20-something, and imagine trying to put a smile on your face and be friendly to a bunch of folks your parents' age who make more money than you.  So, you'd tend to get service that was lackluster, to say the least.  Here in Copenhagen, people live a fairly private life, even when in public.  Interacting with strangers on a daily basis doesn't come easily to a lot of Danes.  That being said, even the folks working in restaurants or in retail shops make a living wage here, so they tend to be less irritated about having to be at work.

Sure, the waiters don't work for tips here, which means they don't feel the need to put in the extra effort to be nice.  But what that also means is that when they are nice, it's much more genuine.  And let's be honest, the tip money doesn't help the kids back home working at the local diner to be especially friendly.

I can certainly see how coming from a town where everyone's fairly nice to everyone else can make the Danes seem cold to the point of rudeness, but I've found that folks here are usually as nice to us as we are to them.  They don't take terribly kindly to being talked down to, as they have a culture that says that everyone should be on the same level, but my experience has been that when I'm smiling and kind to waitstaff and shop workers, they're pretty much always as smiling and kind right back.

Studieskolen - Module 5.1, The Overachievers

Who goes to Summer classes at Studieskolen?

The overachievers, that's who.

At least, it seems that way.

While the class is supposedly supposed to have 11 people in it, it seems that there are actually only 5-7 students.  This is the smallest Danish class I've been in at Studieskolen, and it's nice to be able to have more individual attention.

Like I said, though, the other students in the class are all damn good at Danish.  One girl said on the first day that she only reads books in Danish, so her vocabulary is freakin' enormous.  One guy (the only guy in our class, other than the teacher) said that he learned Danish at age 16, though I'm still not quite sure why (he's Turkish, and Danish seems like a pretty obscure language to learn in high school). Still another girl has already done module 5.1 once before, so she's got all of the answers in her book already.  Not to mention, when I arrived in class this morning I saw her reading the dictionary!

So, I'm feeling a bit behind at the moment.

The good news is, the class is as relaxed as a Summer class should be.

The bad news is that it turns out that our class will be cut short by 2 weeks, as the teacher who was supposed to teach at the end is in the hospital (she's fine, but won't be able to teach, from what I understand).

So, more than ever, I'm glad that I decided in advance to repeat module 5.1 in the Fall, so that I'm sure not to miss anything important.

I'm still annoyed that my own memory for words sucks so much.  Anyone have any memory-improving tips?

A Mixed Bag Round-Up

I've been a bit distracted this month, so it's been a full 2 weeks since my last post.  But with April coming to a close, it seems like a good time for a quick round-up of recent events.

Let's go back to April 16th, which is the Danish queen's birthday.  It's traditional for her to step out onto the balcony at her palace here in Copenhagen on her birthday and wave at the gathered masses.  A girlfriend of mine who I met my first module of Danish classes wanted to go see, so she and I took my puppy, Wooster, and joined the celebration.  It was a perfect day for it:

That's the queen in the red jacket on the balcony.  Wooster was, as you might expect, quite impressed:

As far as Danish class goes, it's been a bit of a mixed bag.  One of the main issues this module is that the "textbook" that they're having us work from is what appears to be a not-yet-published version of a future textbook.  So we've been receiving each chapter as large stapled-together packets.  It's chock-full of errors and missing information and incorrect page numbers, making for a lot of confusion.  Not only that, but the DVD that they handed out to go along with the "textbook" was a burned DVD with a hand-written title, and which we were asked to download onto our computers and then return.  In addition, the track titles on said DVD don't match the names of the assignments in the book, so it's a bit of a guessing game to figure out which video to watch.

Our Monday/Wednesday teacher actually seems to have gotten his act together a bit.  Instead of just assigning a ton of homework and spending class time going over the answers to that homework, he's now having us work on more interesting, varied, helpful assignments during class.  He still hasn't prepared enough to actually know all of the correct answers, but at least he's moving in the right direction.

It seems, however, that we are going to have a mid-module teacher change.  The new course schedule came out this week, and it looks like our Monday/Wednesday guy is going to be replaced by a Monday/Wednesday/Friday guy (with Thursdays remaining with our other teacher) when we move to module 4.2.  We've been told that this new guy has been teaching Danish for a long time and is very good.

And finally, today is my birthday.

The big 3-2.

Happy birthday to me.

The Påskeferie Post

Prepare for a seriously broad generalization in 3...2...1...

The Danes are a bit funny about religion.

We're smack in the middle of "påskeferie," or Easter vacation, so I figured I'd take the time to discuss my impression of the Danish relationship with Christianity.

In the US, various forms of Christians make up the majority of the religions folk.  The same is true here in Denmark, where the state religion is Lutheran.  Nearly 80% of Danes count themselves among the Lutherans in the Church of Denmark.  The Danes themselves, however, are not especially religious.  Those that are will often state proudly how they go to church.  Once a year, for Christmas.

Now, I'm not a religious person.  Once a year is more than I normally go.  Then again, my own religions background is a bit of a hodgepodge including Catholicism, Judaism, Unitarianism, and a stint in high school when I decided I wanted to be a witch.

The Danes get funny about religion when it comes to their perceptions about how the rest of the Christian world handles their religious life.  A month or so ago, we were discussing the Danish tradition of "fastelavn," which is the Danish version of Mardi Gras or Carnivale.  Our teacher discussed how, "back in the olden day," fastelavn was the big party before a (gasp) 40-day period of occasional fasting!  But no one would do something as crazy as that these days, right?  Truly, she didn't seem to associate the holiday with anything that might be going on in other countries today and didn't seem at all aware of Lent.

As I said, I'm not a religious person.  And I have no issues with the level of religious life in Denmark.  I do, however, think that the Danes occasionally have a habit of assuming that the way things are done here are the norm.

As far as I can tell, though, as far as religion goes...

There is no "norm."

Being Wary of the Ides of March

I spent much of today wondering why I was so tense and tired.

I've had a quiet, relaxing weekend.  Spent lots of time with my wonderful husband and adorable dog.  Ate some lovely food.  Watched some television.  Saw a completely stress-free, brain-candy movie.

So, how come my shoulders are tied up in knots?

Oh, right... remember this post?  (Probably not.  I posted it a year and a half ago.)

This Friday, I'll make my way to Rigshospitalet (my local hospital here in Copenhagen) for what might be the first of several meetings regarding getting tested for the gene I discussed in the above post.  My concerns about having the gene were a big part of what discussed with the doctor a few weeks ago.  As with most things when it comes to the Danish healthcare system, you go to your primary care doctor for any and all questions, and then that doctor will either treat you himself or give you a referral.  In this case, the referral was sent to the hospital and they sent me a letter with my appointment date.

That date is March 15th.

Life, your sense of poetry is not amusing.

It means missing a Danish class, and I've had to miss a few this module.  In fact, I'll be away on the day that they've scheduled our module 3 exam, so I will have to schedule to take it on a different day.  Hopefully missing a few classes won't jeopardize my chances of passing.

But let's be honest... getting this genetic test done is more important than whether or not I have to re-take 6 weeks of Danish classes.

In the meantime, I'll just hang out with my husband and my puppy and try not to think too much about it.

Nemo vs. Copenhagen Snevejr

Snow has been the word of the week for most of the people in my life.  As winter storm "Nemo" buried most of the northeastern United States, we here in Copenhagen have been getting some fairly standard Danish snow.  I took this picture a couple of days ago from the dog park near St. Paul's Church in the city center:

I spent the majority of my life living in the northeastern U.S., where snowstorms that dropped a couple of feet of snow tend to happen at least once a year.  The picture above shows the results of a typical snowfall here in Copenhagen.

I'm gonna have to lean towards Copenhagen as the better option here.

I was at a 7-11 here a week or two ago (they're hilariously common), and the guy at the counter asked me what I preferred about Denmark as compared to the U.S.  He just refused to believe me when I told him that I preferred the weather here in Denmark.

Granted, that day happened to be chilly, rainy, and gray.  Even so, it doesn't get as cold here in the Winter, and it doesn't get as hot in the Summer.

And I'll take a bit of rain, or an inch or two of snow that will melt within a week, over this:

4 Tips to Learn Danish Quickly

Danish is an extremely difficult language to learn.  However, it turns out that there are a few factors that can greatly improve your chances of learning it before other people.  Today, I give you a few of those factors.

1.  Have a Danish boyfriend/girlfriend or spouse.  Your Danish teacher may very well assume that you have one, and therefore some of the homework that you are assigned will involve talking to said significant other.  For those who do not have a Danish significant other, see option number 2.

2.  Regularly go to a job where most of your colleagues are Danish and will happily be patient with you while you struggle to express yourself in Danish without switching to English, despite the fact that speaking English is far easier for both of you than speaking Danish together might be.

3.  Be a highly logical person who already has a fairly firm understanding of grammar rules.  Learning Danish will test the grammar skills of even the most literate of native English speakers.  If you don't already have a basic understanding of grammar, learning Danish will teach you more about the structure of the English language than you ever thought you needed to know.

And finally...

4.  Already speak either German, Dutch, Swedish, or Norwegian.  There are a few classmates of mine who, from early on in our Danish classes, were able to understand most of what the Danes said.  At first, I found this extraordinarily frustrating.  What was I doing wrong that I just didn't know what all of these words meant, even if I could understand what words were being said (which is a challenge unto itself, especially early on)?  Turns out, the only thing I was doing wrong was not knowing one of the aforementioned languages.  Enough of the words in those 4 languages (and possibly a few that I've forgotten) are similar enough to words in Danish that it's entirely possible to understand Danish very quickly.

Those who are lucky enough to fit into 2 or 3 of these factors will find themselves racing ahead of the others in their class.

As for me?  The only category that I even vaguely fit into is #3.  In most cases, I'm able to understand and remember the grammar rules easily enough.  Unfortunately, it's the words that I have a tough time remembering.

There's very little that one can do with even a perfect understanding of Danish grammar if they can't remember any of the words.

5 Things I Wish Were Easier to Find in Denmark

So many things that seem commonplace back home home in America seem weirdly and unnecessarily difficult to find here in Denmark.

I've already posted my rant about how difficult it is to get cold medicines that aren't someone's grandmother's home remedy packaged and sold at the local Matas.

But there's more.  Here are a few:

1.  Painkillers:  Sure, you can go to the local apotek and pick up some painkillers there, but they're much milder.  And as I mentioned in my last post, if you don't live near a 24-hour apotek and happen to have a horrible headache or backache or whatever, and it's past 6pm... you're kind of our of luck.  

2.  Office supplies:  I was looking for binders today so that I could organize my music for my a cappella rehearsals, so I hopped onto Google, expecting to find something like a Staples or an OfficeMax like I would find all over the place back home.  No luck.  So, I jumped into the Facebook group dedicated to Americans living in Denmark and asked them.  They suggested a few websites that sell office supplies online only, or suggested I go to a bookstore.  I ended up finding a few flimsy ones at a local Tiger (which is similar to a Dollar Store back home), but I don't think they'll last very long.

3.  All of your groceries in one store:  There are 4 grocery stores near me, all clustered in a two-block area.  Plus several convenience stores.  I find that I go into 3 of them on a regular basis, sometimes in the same shopping run.  There's really no reason why they shouldn't just all combine into one big store and have everything all in one place.  And that right there is me sounding like a spoiled American wishing everything was like Walmart... Oops.  I don't wish they were like Walmart at all, actually.  I wish they were like Wegman's.

4.  Real nachos:  I've mentioned this before, back in this post.  I've been to 3 restaurants in Copenhagen that have served Doritos with cheddar cheese and called them nachos.  This must be stopped.  It's so bad that I don't even want to try the nachos at other restaurants, for fear of losing it and chastising some poor waiter/waitress.  Seriously, though... This is what nachos are supposed to look like.  Work on it, Denmark.

I recognize that some of these things become a bigger issue than they would be otherwise because I don't have a car.  It would, for example, be no big deal to hop in a car and drive the few kilometers to the nearest 24-hour pharmacy, or to head out to Føtex (which is as close to a Walmart-like store that they have here), but a car is out of the picture.  The reason for that is my number 5 on the list:

5.  Reasonably-priced cars:  It's not the cars in Denmark that are expensive.  It's the registration fees.  A car can easily cost you twice the list price or more just because of the fees to put the car legally on the road here in Denmark.  I'm not saying I'm complaining, exactly.  To be honest, not having to buy gas or worry about driving a car in the snow, or if the car will break down... it's a huge relief.  And the public transportation system here is the cream of the crop.  But sometimes... it would just be nice to be able to hop into a car, hit a store a few miles away, and head back home.  All within a span of 10 minutes.

Studieskolen - Module 3.1, First Impression Fail

The good news is that I have two teachers for this module (a guy who is new to Studieskolen on Mondays and Wednesdays, and a woman on Thursdays and Fridays who has been teaching there for many years).

The bad news?

The new guy hasn't started out on good footing as far as first impressions go.

Now, keep in mind that the class schedule has been in writing and available to students since maybe November or December.  And I can only assume that this schedule was agreed upon by both the teachers and the administration...

So, there isn't really any reason why the teacher should have been unclear as to which days of the week he was teaching.  Apparently, he thought he was teaching on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so after we'd sat outside our locked classroom for 15 minutes, and someone finally went down to the office to find out what was up, the teacher rushed into school.  Entirely unprepared to teach.

And maybe it's because he was so unprepared, and was flustered about the confusion and showing up more than half an hour late... But he seemed to be extremely awkward.  He spent the entire class sitting at a table in front of the room, and seemed frustrated when students would ask him to go to the board to spell a word or phrase.

The biggest issue to start, though, is that his Danish is much less clear than our previous teacher.  Now, I think this will be a good thing in the long run.  It sounds like he speaks much more standard Copenhagen Danish, as opposed to the Danish of someone who's been teaching the language to foreigners for 20+ years.  It's harder to understand him, but it will be good to tune my ear to his pronunciation, so that I'll have an easier time understanding people out and about in the city.

So, here's hoping that he's more prepared and less nervous on Wednesday.

And here's hoping that our Thursday/Friday teacher can pick up the slack if he's not.

Studieskolen - Module 3.1, Irrational Incredulity

After a 3-week holiday break, I'm heading back to Danish class later this morning.

As I start module 3, I'll admit that I'm a little bit apprehensive.  For a few reasons:

First, this will be my first class with a different teacher.  The teacher that we had for modules 1 and 2 was really great, and I learned really easily through her teaching style.  I have this (mostly irrational) fear that I was only doing well in Danish before because her style of teaching worked for me.  There's no reason to worry about something like that, and in a few hours I'm sure I will decide that I was being silly.  But the worry is there nonetheless.

It should be noted that all of my apprehension is equally irrational, if not more so.  For example, I worry that I'm not as up-to-speed as I should be, despite easily passing the module 2 exam, and that makes no sense at all.  But we've all had that dream where we show up somewhere and are expected to know something, but don't.  So we're forced to fake it.  I have more experience having that stress dream than I do with being a Danish speaker, so some part of my brain expects that scenario.

See?  Irrational.

And then finally, there's this weird rewiring of my own concept of myself that needs to start happening.  Sure, I took Spanish in middle and high school, but I certainly didn't learn enough to consider myself bilingual.  Some insecure part of me thinks that there's a ceiling to the amount of any foreign language that I can learn and that I'm nearing that ceiling.  To expect myself to be fluent in any language other than English is simply not something I'd ever planned on, so I've never looked at myself as someone who would be able to do so.

Is it possibly to be irrationally incredulous?

Because I am.

Food, Glorious Food...Sometimes

In the spirit of helping you keep your New Years resolutions to lose weight or eat less, or just generally think about food less... Here's a post about food in Denmark.

It may or may not actually help at all.

Since my perspective is that of an American, I can really only compare Danish food to American.  So, don't be surprised if you don't agree with my opinions on some things.

If you've been reading for a while, or if you've managed to scroll all the way back to my first few months of posting, you might remember this post.  Since moving here, I've had plenty of smørrebrød, and I have to admit... I've come around to it.  Not the pickled herring.  I still hate the pickled herring.  But otherwise, I'm a fan.  It's filling, fairly healthy, not too expensive... As far as eating a lunch out in Copenhagen, it's definitely the way to go.

Before we moved here, my husband warned me that he had been pretty disappointed in the food options when he'd lived here before we met.  In America, we've got this culture of eating out a lot, no matter the budget, so you can pretty easily find something decent in whatever price range you want.  Denmark, however, is just starting to have more of a restaurant culture, perhaps thanks in part to Noma (a fancy pants restaurant here in Copenhagen) being called the best restaurant in the world for a few years running.

It's easy enough to get amazing food in Copenhagen if you're willing to spend a lot of money.  Finding a more reasonably priced meal, however (if you're not eating smørrebrød, of course), is tougher.  Possible, but tougher.  There's this idea in restaurants here that as long as you have the recipe, you can make anything amazingly.  It's why you find a lot of mediocre Italian food here.  They know the recipes, but not the long-taught cultural secrets that make food from other countries great.  And it's also why Denmark is so good at smørrebrød - they've been doing it for so long that the little details come as second nature.

One thing that they do love in middle-of-the-road Danish cafes and restaurants is BIG PORTIONS.  Huge.  And they love to pile a plate with a wide variety of different things.  Often, you'll get your plate of food and everything will be lovely, except they'll have added one strange ingredient that just doesn't make sense.

Here's example of the portion sizes:

This brunch plate is found at a local restaurant that claims to be an American style diner.  Having lived there until this past Summer, I can honestly say that I've never seen a plate like that in America.  I don't really know what half of that stuff is.  Not saying this is a bad thing, though.  This particular restaurant (Cafe Luna in Christianshavn) happens to have really good, reasonably priced meals.

One thing that is NOT okay, though, is this monstrosity, which ended up on my husbands plate at a cafe in central Copenhagen earlier this week:

You're looking at Doritos with melted cheddar cheese.  The menu calls them nachos.  This is NOT what nachos are.  This is something you make at home in a microwave when you're in college and it's 4am and there's nothing else in the house.  Not something you go to a restaurant to spend money on.  This particular treat, once it sat on the plate for a few minutes, was so congealed that it could be picked up in one solid mass.  Appetizing...

So, I guess the take-away from all of this is that the food scene in Copenhagen is pricey, but getting better.  But it's still hit-and-miss, so be prepared to either spend a ton of money or take your chances.

The New Years Look-Back of Awesome!

It's the end of the year, so it's time for the ONLY LOOK-BACK THINGY YOU'LL EVER NEED!

That's not true.  I just lied.

Let's be honest, no one actually needs New Years countdowns/looks-back of any kind.  But since we're here, and you've already read this far...

As far as years go, this one has been a doozy.  I have the pictures to prove it!

One year ago, I was working in Boston, living in Cambridge, and seriously stressing out while planning a wedding.  Shockingly, said wedding went off without a hitch.  It's true!  Photographic evidence, exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

We'd expected to move to Denmark in August, but found out just days after the wedding that we had to move at the end of June, just weeks after the wedding.  We did manage to fit in honeymoon in New Orleans, though.  Here's a lovely 'gator that we met there:

We arrived in Copenhagen on July 1st, and it was the perfect time of year.  It looked like this:

I've spent the majority of time since then learning Danish, but I've spent the last 2 months also looking after this little heathen:

Well, now you're up to date.  

As far as New Years in Denmark goes, it seems to start a few days in advance.  At least, it sounds that way based on the fireworks that we've heard for for the last few nights.  We have two options as far as plans go.  We may go to our local pub, or we may stay home and have a quiet night in.  The latter is the most likely, but... we're mysterious and won't decide until the very last moment.

Maybe we'll have an adventure!

But even if not, happy New Year to you from my husband and I!

A Very Expat Christmas

We didn't have a particularly Danish Christmas this year.

Instead of celebrating on the 24th, as they do here, we kept with American and English tradition and celebrated our low-key Christmas on the 25th.  My husband made an amazing duck for lunch, plus Christmas pudding with home-made custard, and for dinner I made some steak and potatoes.  I got my husband the Game of Thrones books box set, so we both spent much of the day reading.

It should be noted that I am still on book one, which we bought several months ago, while he is now more than 300 pages into book 2, having started reading it yesterday.

In other quasi-literary (well, not really) news, we spent the evening of the 23rd out to dinner and a movie with a classmate and her husband.  We went to go see The Hobbit (or "Hobbitten," as it's called here).

I've come to expect the Danish subtitles when going to an English language film here, but I tend to forget that any parts of the film in any other language (say... Elvish for example) would also only have Danish subtitles.  So, I found myself putting my Danish lessons to good use during this one, and surprised myself with hour much I was able to understand.  There were still plenty of words that I didn't understand, but I understood enough to figure out what was going on.

As far as the movie itself, my husband and I agreed: It was a fairly good movie that couldn't decide which audience to play to.  The book is basically a kids book, and the way the movie started, I thought perhaps the movie was going to play more towards a younger audience too.  But as it went on, it got darker and more graphic, and it seemed to fall into the same feel as the Lord of the Rings movies.  Despite that, though, we definitely enjoyed it.

Next, we'll start watching seasons 2 and 3 of The Killing (or "Forbrydelsen").

With English subtitles, of course.

Christmas in Denmark: First Impressions

Back home in America, the Christmas season starts earlier and earlier each year.  As early as September, stores are putting out Christmas decorations or stocking the shelves with holiday-related kitsch.

And every year, radio stations have an unofficial race to see who can switch to 24-hour Christmas music first.  Once they do, all of the other stations who'd planned to do so rush to change their format until after the New Year.

And don't get me started on the ridiculousness of Black Friday.

As I'm sure a lot of Americans will agree, the holidays can be an extremely stressful time.  Have to get the best gifts for the best price, have to find something unique, have to impress the family and the friends and bake (or buy, in my case) more cookies and pies than necessary.

Call me a Scrooge if you will, but it's been a while since I was actually a fan of Christmas.

In Denmark, though, it seems to me a much nicer thing.  A few tasteful decorations go up here and there in November, but most wait until December 1.  And the decorations that do go up are so much less garish.  It just strikes me as a much more subdued, tasteful thing, and less of a competition to see who has the most "cheer."

As far as Christmas traditions in Denmark, I don't really know much about them yet.  I can tell you that Danes generally do their celebrating on Christmas Eve, as opposed to Christmas Day.

And then there is the company Julefrokost.

I have yet to experience one myself, but these are Christmas parties hosted by companies all over Denmark.  Technically, "Julefrokost" means "Christmas lunch," but it's generally more of an afternoon-into-evening-into-early-morning kind of thing.

And they're notorious.

It's traditional for employees and their bosses to eat and drink more than is good for them, and to act out.  Rumors abound about how the divorce rate jumps up right after Christmas because of all of the Julefrokost indiscretions, and how bosses and employees are known to regularly hook up at these parties and then never speak of it again.

I'm sure that's the case at some of them.  In general, though, it sounds a bit like a "big fish" story to me. People love to appear to have a wilder life than they actually have.

This Danish Christmas season started with a little bit of snow here in Copenhagen, so I thought I'd share the latest picture of our puppy, Wooster.  Here he is, enjoying his first snow day:

Studieskolen - Module 1.1, Week 5 of 6

Less than a week to go until the end of module 1 in my Danish classes at Studieskolen.

Providing I pass the test, that is.

What I know of the test itself so far is very little.  It will be a spoken test consisting partially of re-telling a couple of stories from some texts we were given over the last two weeks, and possibly some talking about ourselves (where we're from, what we do, etc.).

In yesterday's class, we were told to turn to a page in our books that had a page of text and read through it looking for anything we didn't understand.  My first instinct when I opened to the page was to be overwhelmed and assume I wouldn't understand much.

I was actually completely floored by how much I did understand.  A few words and phrases stumped me, but not really enough that I didn't get the context of the story.  As disastrous as my previous attempts at learning Danish were, I really didn't expect to have much luck with this method either.

It feels pretty good to be wrong sometimes.

I certainly can't pick up a Danish newspaper and understand any of the stories yet, but the progress doesn't seem to be slowing at all.

In fact, providing I manage to pass the test on Wednesday, I move right onto module 2 the following Monday.

I'll spend the weekend cramming, and we'll see how it goes.

"9/10 of the Way to Fun"

There's a word in Denmark that we don't have in English, and it's so prevalent here that it's basically a preferred way of life.

The word in Danish is "hyggelig" (pronounced kind of like WHO-glee)

The word roughly translates to a sense of coziness.  Like getting together with friends, lighting some candles, having some drinks and conversation. Hyggelig.  When everything is just nice.

Or, as my husband likes to call it, "9/10 of the way to fun."

This concept of hyggelig is one of the things that makes Denmark a great place to settle down and have a family.  But it may also be why some people find Denmark to be a little bit dull.

On Friday night, we went to a "garden party" at the home of one of my husband's colleagues.  It was supposed to be exclusively a work party, but they made a very kind exception for me, as I actually haven't met many Danes since moving here.  Most of the people I know are expats.

There was a tent set up in the back, under which were two long tables to sit at, and a table loaded full of food provided by the office cafeteria (office cafeterias in Denmark often put up amazing food, and this was certainly the case on Friday night).

Lots of food, plenty of wine and beer, a sing-along of a Russian song along with a shared shot of some kind of pear schnapps, as well as really nice conversation with a bunch of Danes... it was an evening rife with hyggelig.  It wasn't a party where people were rocking out to loud music, or hooking up, or drinking so much that they got sick (at least not while we were there).  It was a party where everything was just... nice.

The older I get, the more this is all I really need from a social gathering.  I guess that makes moving to Denmark a pretty good idea.

It also didn't hurt that, on the few occasions that I spoke a few words in Danish to the Danes at the party, they seemed really impressed with my pronunciation.  Feels pretty good to hear after only a month of classes.

Now I just have to work on remembering all of the words.

Accentuate the Positive... and the Negative

There are up sides and down sides to living in any country.  Over the last few days, I've seen a few clear examples of Denmark's good and bad sides, so I thought I'd share.  

I'll start with the positive.  

The Danes are an extremely trusting people.  They trust their government, and they trust each other.  Over the weekend, my husband and I went to a second-hand shop and bought this little sideboard:

Since we don't have a car here, we made arrangements to have it delivered on Monday afternoon.  Well, actually, my husband made the arrangements.  In Danish.  I understood that the cabinet was 500 kroner, and the delivery cost was 200 kroner.  What I didn't catch was that the delivery cost was to be paid when it was delivered, not when the cabinet was purchased.  So, when the guy showed up at our place, and after we'd brought the thing into our "pub room," he surprised me by asking for the 200 kroner.  Which I didn't have on me, having assumed it was already paid.  Once I called my husband to verify that the delivery charge was to be paid upon delivery, I apologized profusely and ran around the block looking for an ATM.  Didn't find one.  Closest one was a good 10-minute walk away.  So the delivery guy not only drove me to an ATM, but he also navigated the one-way streets, going out of his way, to then drop me back off at home.

Now, you might be thinking, "Of course he did.  He wanted his money."  True enough, but we later discovered that one of the doors on the cabinet was locked, and we didn't have a key.  So, my husband called the second-hand shop to see if they had the key.  They said to stop by the store and they'd see what they had.  When I got to the store yesterday, the man at the counter handed me a bag of keys, supposedly keys to every piece of furniture in the store that needed a key, and told me I could take the bag home, find the key that works, and bring the bag back when I was done.  So, today, I'll head back and drop of the bag of keys, having found the working key and opened the cabinet door.

This is all totally mundane stuff, but it's stuff that just makes me feel really great about how kind and understanding and patient people can be.

But then, they go and screw it all up.  

A couple of days ago, the Copenhagen Post posted this article.  The article discusses a flyer that was posted by the management at a local movie theatre warning movie-goers that, since the Muslim holy month of Ramadan was coming to an end (a month in which Muslims are not supposed to do things like go to the movies), they could expect an influx of "annoying" Muslims at the large blockbuster movies, and that security guards would be on hand to deal with any "unacceptable behavior" by said Muslims.

It's just so wildly, blatantly racist that I don't really even need to say anything about it to make the point.  Other than... Hey Denmark... This shit is not okay.  Anyone who says it's okay is also a big, giant racist, and you shouldn't be listening to the advice of racists.

The people in Denmark have been extraordinarily kind to me, but I fully recognize that part of this is because I'm tall and blonde.  I look like one of them.  It breaks my heart that people who don't look Scandinavian often have an exponentially more negative experience.