Happy Friday :) No class till 11:40 + weird desire to do something productive (aside from homework, of course) = BLOG updatin' time!
This week marks the end of our first official month in Copenhagen. It's very surreal; I'm in something of a routine, and am transitioning out of the tourist stage (I've finally realized that I don't necessarily need to bring my camera with me to class every day!). I'm a super competent grocery shopper, ALMOST a true Copenhagen cyclist (especially now that I've finally put a light on my bike and have stopped biking in the dark illegally!), and I have my established list of favorites (coffee shops, parks, etc.). In a lot of ways I still feel like I'm in the "testing the waters" stage, though; I'm really pathetic at using Danish in day to day life and I am CERTAINLY not beyond getting lost on the way back from somewhere I've been a billion times. These are things I don't really expect to change by the end of the semester :)
There are a few reasons I'm self-conscious about my Danish: 1) It's SO damn hard! I love Danish class, but we only meet twice a week (Mondays and Thursdays) so by the time the next class comes around, I feel like I've forgotten everything I've learned from the last class already. 2) A number of our professors have mentioned that the Danes aren't exceptionally tolerant of other accents. The few times I've attempted to use Danish in a restaurant or at the store, whoever it is I'm speaking to can immediately tell I'm an English-speaker and switches to English. There are so many different but VERY similar-sounding vowel noises in the Danish language, and pretty much every word is pronounced WAY differently than the way it LOOKS like it should be pronounced. I also feel like they enjoy mushing all their words together to make life difficult for those attempting to learn, and I think they just add whatever letters they feel like that day onto the end of a word to make it plural or change the tense. Take the word "banana". "Banan" is just "banana" (easy enough), but "the banana" is "bananen" and "the bananas" is "bananener". Seems simple enough when written out, I guess, but it gets tough trying to remember which letters to tack on when asking for bananas at the grocery store!
All difficulties aside, though, I love learning Danish. Learning it is a very different process that was learning Spanish (my history with Spanish is causing me to roll my r's and leave the h's silent, neither of which you're supposed to do in Danish!) and it's really neat to be learning what is such a little-known language back in the States. I'm a little excited to show off when I get home :)
In other news, Wednesday night I had my first first field study with my European Film class. We met at this VERY cute little movie theater to watch and discuss the film "Mammoth." It dealt with some pretty heavy stuff, but was, I thought, very interesting and well-produced. It follows the lives of an American couple and their young daughter, and depicts the difficulties they have in remaining close as a family. Because Lukas Moodysson (the director) is Swedish, I wondered if he was commenting on the American family's difficulties specifically, or if he chose the American setting for other reasons. It was a wonderful evening; the theater had a lovely cafe in which we sat, drank wine, and chatted with the film professors after finishing the movie (side note: I think at least half of our field studies at this point have included drinks on DIS - I picked the RIGHT program!).
Now, it's Friday! Again! I'm still a bit thrown off by the classless Wednesdays; they're starting to feel like Sundays, which makes Thursdays feel like Mondays, and then when Friday comes along it's like, where in the world did the week go?? We have tentative plans to venture into SWEDEN this Saturday. It's so funny that traveling to a different country for the day is feasible here - Sweden is just a 40 minute or so train ride out of Copenhagen!
Anyway - time to prep for the day. Vi ses! :)
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| Mmm - fishy fishy! |
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