Danish Diaries #4

Days pass faster and faster… Where’s Making Time when you need it? I think I have passed the familiarity threshold; everything is making less of an impression on me now and I don’t feel like I’m in a foreign place anymore. I am quite at home at my dorm and taking the bus is starting to feel natural. I must say the speed in which I have adapted is scaring me a little. This comes with its own costs: I’m slightly less inclined to meet new people or ready to try out new things and more likely to get in a routine as I have for the past 10 days or so with my daily morning Danish classes, for which I yesterday signed up to continue into Autumn (paid from none other than the Danish government). It follows that there hasn’t been any groundbreaking stuff going on. I shall share with you some non-groundbreaking tidbits:

• Danish is a strange language. It’s not only the sound (it’s still almost impossible for me to understand anything if it’s not written in the semi-recognisable script Danes have for written word), I also find some words very funny. For example: øl means beer. Øl (pronounced like ö), if you say it this way in German, means oil. If you say it a lot of times, like (øløløløløløløl) it sounds like: A) a retarded version of lololololol and B) this.Danish also has a unique and specific way of denoting family relationships. In Danish you can’t just have grandmother or grandfather; you have to be very specific about whose mother or father it is. So you get things like mormor (mother’s mother), farfar (father’s father), any combination really. I was wondering how far it could get, like a series of zeros and ones. “My morfarmor is 104 years old” -“Oh, my farmorfarfar is still alive! They had him on a TV show the other day!”
  They also do it with uncles. You have to be specific about whose parent’s brother or sister it is, too. I guess it makes things easier but it’s also funny.
• I went to a sushi dinner party organised by the Japanese students in Skjoldhøjkollegiet. It was really fun, all kinds of different delicious food our hosts had spent days preparing. Everything was very delicious and there was a lot more people than I had imagined! But then came the alcohol: Danish beer, Japanese beer, several different kinds of wine, including cherry wine and fighter wine (a Spanish expression for cheap wine that fights with you the next day), liquorice, uh, liquor shots — mind you I hate liquorice, oh, one new thing to add to my list — and after the party we topped it off with 4 vodka shots at Camill’s place followed with more fighter wine and gin with fruit juice. Seriously, I should have been worse when I woke up this morning. The only thing I didn’t remember was how I had gone to bed and my hangover only lasted a few hours… f you don’t take into account that I slept in all morning and missed today’s Danish class.

Author: Cubilone

This is me. Or so I believe. View all posts by Cubilone