The Swedish Chef

This past Thursday, Denmark celebrated yet another holiday in  the month of May.  (I think there are about seven.)  This one was Kristi Himmelfartsdag.  Known in other countries (more delicately) as Ascension Thursday, the Danish name means, roughly, Christ-goes-to-heaven-day.  Personally, I think this is much more useful than “Ascension,” as it provides much more information about the holiday, despite being yet another Danish term that proves mildly amusing to English speakers.  (A common one is the term “Slutspurt,” which occasionally appears in big block letters in store windows.  It roughly translates as “final sale.” More confusing is the occasional elevator light proclaiming “I Fart,” indicating the approach of the lift.  But I digress.)  The European Environment Agency also had Friday off, as a “bridge” day to a long weekend.  I have deemed this “It’s-a-long-way-up-day.”   

Alas, I spent Kristi Himmelfartsdag in Sweden, where it was called Kristi Himmelsfärdsdag. I took the train to Stockholm, and it was my first trip across the Øresund, over the 14-km bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden.  I took the six-hour train ride to Stockholm for the signing of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.  This was a big event complete with ministers from over 100 countries officially signing the treaty.  With the negotiating virtually over and the formal proceedings consisting of a country roll call and the same speeches 100 times in six different languages, the meeting was basically an excuse for a party.  And party we did – the official Swedish government dinner was quite an event, even by the standards of a series of treaty negotiations that had more than its share of over-the-top galas.  At the third negotiating session, the government of Switzerland (which hopes that the secretariat of the Stockholm convention will eventually be in Geneva) held a lavish reception, complete with more kinds of cheese than I thought existed.  They were outdone, however, by the city of Bonn, Germany, in the fourth negotiations, with a huge bash in the art museum, with plates of food, local dignitaries, and even waltzes.  (The city of Bonn has also put in a bid to host the secretariat.) Not to be topped, at the fifth negotiation, the government of South Africa hosted a multimedia extravaganza for delegates in Johannesberg, where delegates at a formal banquet dined on ostrich and were treated to a video presentation of South Africa, African dancing, and blues singing.  (Note to those who were present: I may or may not still have some interesting photos of senior U.S. government officials dancing at the event.  I am willing to negotiate. Call me.)  The Swedish dinner took place in the Vasa Museum, which is a museum dedicated to a 17^th century ship raised almost intact after having been preserved for over 300 years at the bottom of Stockholm harbor.  The story of how it got there is quite interesting.  It seems that the King (King Gustav II Adolf) wanted to build the biggest warship ever built, and ordered a 62 meter long monstrosity with two levels of cannons and elaborate decorations and detail at the top.  Unfortunately, all the firepower at the top of the ship was not balanced by sufficient ballast at the bottom.  On its maiden voyage in 1628, a small gust of wind blew the top-heavy ship over, and it sunk to the bottom of the harbor, where it stayed (preserved nearly perfectly) until the late1950s.  The delegates to the conference, dining on reindeer in the shadow of the massive hulk of the ship, seemed to view its history as a warning of the perils of following the direction of political leadership (who always want something bigger and better, like the king and his cannons) without paying attention to how it will be done.  The disaster, the museum guides pointed out, was viewed as an act of God, since it was impossible to blame the king.  Alas, the delegates replied, it was the engineer who lost his head!

During my trip to Stockholm, I also got a chance to practice my Swedish – a language that written, seems remarkably similar to Danish, but spoken, sounds like -- well, like the Swedish chef from the Muppets.  The two countries, despite similar language and culture, have a not-so-friendly rivalry that lasts, oh, since the dawn of recorded history.  I won’t recount it here, but it involves a lot of wars and beheadings and Christians and Frederiks versus Gustavs.  Today, there are fewer beheadings, but the rivalry remains.  At the Swedish government reception, the Swedish environment minister recounted an old joke about European integration, where the punch line involved the Dane and the Norwegian ganging up on the Swede and pushing him out of the plane.  (It wasn’t that funny.  I’ll spare you.)  On my tour of Stockholm City Hall, the guide was quick to point out a sculpture which depicted a figure representing Sweden as “good” and Denmark as “evil.”  On the Danish side, the city of Copenhagen is overrun on summer weekends with partying Swedes seeking to avoid their country’s high taxes and government restrictions on alcohol – and Danish schoolchildren all know the saying, “Keep Copenhagen Clean – take a Swede to the ferry.”  And it was a Swede who observed to me last week, “Danish isn’t a language, it’s a mating call” – noting that its sounds bear a remarkable resemblance to ostriches grunting.

The Naked Eye

Spring has finally arrived here in Copenhagen.  To the Danes, this seems to mean only one thing: time to sunbathe naked in the park.

It all began just about a month ago, on the first relatively warm and sunny weekend.  I say relatively warm, because only those who had just been through the Copenhagen winter would consider it remotely warm.  I decided to cycle up the coast north of Copenhagen, a trail that runs past spectacular scenery, harbors, and beaches.  I stopped for lunch at one of the beaches about an hour north of Copenhagen, and walked around looking for a place to eat my sandwich.  And there, on the beach in the midst of a few people out walking their dogs or cycling, was a group of naked women sunbathing.  Now, I completely understand that countries are culturally distinct, and that nudity on beaches is common here in Denmark where it might provoke arrest, say, at Revere Beach.  This is not my point.  My point is that, though it was the first “warm” day, it was still quite cold.  (To put it in perspective, I was wearing a wool sweater, fleece jacket, and gloves while I ate my sandwich, and I was still a bit chilly.)  There were even a few people swimming in the ocean that day.  I have thus come to the conclusion that Danes either possess no nerve endings, no judgment, or neither. 

A Dane told me a few weeks ago never to leave Copenhagen between May and September – because if summer comes, it tends to come in those months.  I think that summer came and went last week.  It began to get quite warm (at least, warm enough to go out without a coat during the day, and for over 90 percent of Danes to consider nudity).  This culminated last weekend, which was one of the many spring holidays here in Denmark, and the occasion of this year’s Eurovision song contest, held in Denmark’s main football stadium, about 100 meters from where I live.  Friday, May 11 was “Great Prayer Day,” which, as far as I can tell, was a random holiday invented after the country turned Protestant, in compensation for losing the Catholic holidays.  (The European Environment Agency also closed on Wednesday, May 9 for Schuman Day, after the man who invented the EU.)  For those of you who have not heard of the Eurovision Song Contest, it is an annual contest that started nearly 50 years ago celebrating cheesy pop music from every European country, from whence came ABBA and its ilk.  Every country submits a cheesy song (cheesiness seems to be a critical criterion in selection, judging from this year’s entrants), and then they have a big festival in the country that won last year, and select a new winner.    The procedure by which the winner is chosen rivals the EU’s qualified majority voting system in its complexity.  During the TV broadcast, all of the songs are performed.  Then, viewers get five minutes to dial a telephone number in their home country and vote for the group they think is the best – they cannot, however, vote for their own country.  The top vote-getter from each country gets twelve points, the second ten, the third eight, and on down to one.  Once all countries are counted, the winner is the country with the most points, and only the top fifteen can compete next year (the others must endure a one-year period of national embarrassment).  This year, in a close race, Estonia took the top prize, narrowly-edging out Denmark’s bid to recapture the title.  The excitement over the contest here in Copenhagen, which was virtually taken over by Eurovision-fever, even prompted the city to allow shops in the center to open on Sunday.  In my opinion, the best part of the whole thing was watching the English version of the event on the BBC, whose announcer spent the entire evening making fun of the situation. 

Alas, this weekend was freezing and windy.  Summer, it appears, is now over.  However, the days are getting longer and longer.  Tonight it didn’t get dark out until about 11 pm, and the sun rises somewhere around 4:30 am.  This can be a problem.  Though I can usually sleep through anything, especially in the mornings (jackhammers, tree-cutting machines, parties, etc.), something about the Scandinavian morning sun wakes me up at 5 am.  Because I am not a morning person, this is a problem – especially on the days when I have gone to sleep just after three.  After a few very tired days, I managed to solve this problem by putting my British Airways eyeshades to good use. 

 

My Danish is rapidly improving – I am now in “Level 3” Danish classes.  (Upon passing me in Level 2, my teacher said, “Well, it isn’t pretty, but it’s right.”  A ringing endorsement.)  We learn interesting phrases in Level 3 like “I usually eat three pieces of white bread with cheese and three pieces of white bread with marmalade in the morning.”  These, as you can tell, are quite useful.  I can now tell time in Danish, which is no small feat, considering that you must say, for example, “7:35” as “5 minutes over half eight.” I have learned enough Danish to watch a bit of Danish television, and I can now understand most of the words they say on the news (I cannot yet put them together into a coherent story, though).  I have become a big fan of the Danish equivalent of the game show “Greed” (here, it is “Gri$k”), which I can understand completely, not only because the questions are usually easy but also because they write out the questions on the screen. 

I attempted to apply my Danish skills a few weeks ago while ordering take-out food from The Taco Shop, a surprisingly good Mexican place with three branches in Copenhagen.  The Taco Shop, owned by an American, is one of the deceptively Anglophone places so common here.  While the menu titles are in English (e.g. Super Taco; Today’s Special); a closer look reveals that the description of the item reads “kylling eller oksekød, salat, tomat, løg....” I managed to place my order in Danish, and the woman behind the counter returned with a question, and I told her, in Danish, that I wanted my food to go.  To which she replied, in English, “No, um, what kind of salsa would you like with that?”