On The Strand

strand

-verb  (without object)

1. to drive or leave aground or ashore

2. to be left in a difficult situation

-noun

3.  the land bordering the sea, a lake, or a river; shore; beach.

4.  the strands of a plot.

5.  a tress of hair

6.  a string of pearls, beads, etc.

-verb (with object)

7.  to form by twisting strands together.

8. to break one or more strands of 

This is the word of the day.  I'm reading a book called Literary London to prepare for my fabulous DIS class and trip of the same name.  Those who know me know already that I paged to the index immediately to look up every bit of Sherlock Holmes history to be found on the streets of London.

"The Strand" is a geographic location inside the city, but moreover it was the name of the literary magazine that published Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories in regular installments.

Anyway, this got me thinking about the word "strand" and how it is very possibly my favorite word in all of the English dictionary.  What other words can mean such a variety of (at first glance) completely unrelated things?  We could be talking about a beach, baseball, a shipwreck, a missed bus, a necklace, a magazine, a street.  I love this crazy language.

We could be talking about wandering foreign countries alone and four inches of chopped-off hair.  The way the strands sit unevenly around my ears now and how there is no place you can go where you won't be.  Stranded with oneself.

If this sounds morbid, I promise it's not.  The hardest thing I've learned is that going somewhere else isn't in and of itself the exciting thing.  It doesn't change you if you don't want to be changed and it doesn't put broken things back together.  Someone who's been everywhere isn't a better or happier person than someone who lives in the same zip code where they were born.

You can be dazed by the strangeness for a little while, but traveling and living far away from home doesn't get you any farther away from yourself.  That's okay.  It's just a rather grown-up realization.

Copenhagen is situated on an island, Zealand, surrounded by water on all sides.  On this strand I have stranded myself, cut the strands of my hair, and stranded the strands to form a strand of pearls.  Or, at the least, found a few glass beads.

Bastardizing the Bastardization

MEXICAN FOOD.  As an American, you grow up with it, you crave it, maybe it's even the sole benefactor of your B12 intake for the better part of two decades.

I was admittedly suspicious when my roommate first pointed out The Taco Shop, a "Mexican food" establishment a few blocks from out flat.  She was just so excited, and over the last two months, I've seen her get takeaway from there as a kind of special treat for herself.  You see, it's her favorite-- and she eats it with a knife and fork.  That was pretty much the first inkling I had that something was horribly, horribly wrong.  That and the fact a burrito costs about $10 more here than it does Stateside, classifying it as "exotic ethnic food" instead of... well, whatever Mexican takeout is to Americans.  Cheap late-night snack after an improv show?

My suspicion was justified.  If a Dane hasn't been to the United States (or, I suppose, to Mexico), you can bet your bottom dollar that they have no idea what Mexican food is supposed to taste like.

I had a Sunday night all planned out: the Copenhagen Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is going on, and I was gong to catch an Israeli movie at 9:30 and kill a few hours doing homework in a cafe.  Well, the movie was sold out by the time I walked in at 6:45, and every cafe within a ten-block radius is closed on Sunday nights.  The few bars that were open are not the kind of places you want to go alone, either.  

I consoled myself by deciding I'd get takeaway food for a late dinner-- for the first time since coming to Denmark (eight weeks ago today!).  I found myself outside of none other than The Taco Shop, and the IDEA of Mexican food was too hard to resist.  "It's probably not as bad as you assume," I said to myself, reminding her just how damn judgmental she can be, even in the absence of evidence.  Look, sometimes a girl's got cravings: I was utterly seduced by the promise of "smothered nachos, authentic California style."

My second clue that something was amiss was when, after ordering the "vegetar burrito," the cashier asked me if, for 14 extra kroner, I wanted it with cheese and chips.  What the heck else is in a vegetarian burrito if there isn't already cheese?  I splurged, still full of disappointment about the sold-out movie, and scurried home to discover what it is Denmark qualifies as Mexican food, California style.

You know, it really wasn't so bad.  It was actually almost good, just overpriced and slightly off.  The beans were kidney instead of black.  The cheese was mozzarella-y instead of cheddar-y.  And the burrito itself was simply a tortilla wrapped around beans and rice.  The sauce and cheese and lettuce and tomato were on the side.  And no sour cream.   It was actually a valiant attempt, and it satisfied.

It got me thinking about the way Mexican food in America is often not what Mexican people would recognize as their food (Chipotle comes to mind-- and I do occasionally love Chipotle).  I had a friend freshman year at Oberlin who insisted that tacos, burritos, and nachos of any caliber were "Tex-Mex," not authentic, and who am I to dispute that?  Just a fourth-generation American, about as Mexican as McDonald's.  All I can say is that Chicago, New York, and LA have spoiled me into believing in one delicious, greasy, imperfect incarnation of "Mexican food," and the permutation Denmark offers is reason #1 why I couldn't live here permanently.

Reading the Right Book at the Right Time

I've been reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter since May.  Yes, that's right.  I have been reading this book in starts and stops for almost five months.  It's been a savoring technique, I suppose.  I don't even remember what initially drove me to seek it out, but right after my twentieth birthday, I dragged a friend with me to Ravenswood Used Books, (my favorite of its kind in Chicago), to find it.  We did, with some help, and I've been slowly making my way through it ever since.  It's too perfect-- one of those situations where you've found the right book at the right time.

One of the reasons I wanted to read it initially was that Carson McCullers got it published when she was just 23 years old.  After turning twenty, I realized the clock was kind of ticking on the whole "young genius" potential.  If I write something great at 70, which is a perfectly admirable thing to do, I'll be proud, but it's not quite the same as McCullers' early masterpiece.

Because I bought it used, I have no qualms about dog-earing and scribbling in the margins, which has always been my favorite way to read a book.  Many bibliophile friends (some of whom read this blog and will probably run away screaming from this entry) consider it desecration, but I don't feel like I've really read or really own a book until I can see myself, quite literally, in its pages.  This beat-up, stained, and tattooed copy of Lonely Hunter is a time capsule now, and I'll hang on to it for a long time.  Of course I'll want to remember which parts felt resonant now.  That says a lot more about the experience of reading than keeping it pristine forever.

"She lay on her stomach on the cold floor and thought.  Later on-- when she was twenty-- she would be a great world-famous composer."

"It would be in New York City or else in a foreign country."

"...in a foreign house where in the winter it would snow.  Maybe in a little Switzerland town with the high glaciers and the mountains all around [...]  Or in the foreign country of Norway by the gray winter ocean."

These are quotes from the book about Mick Kelly, a fourteen-year-old girl around whom much of the book revolves.  She spends a lot of her life daydreaming and inadvertently being cruel, which may well be the way all 14-year-old girls pass the time.   Throughout the whole book, she dreams about being twenty as if it's the finish line or the pinnacle of everything that came before.  Which to her, of course, it is.

Here I am, twenty and in a foreign country by a gray winter ocean.  And I can't shake the feeling that this book is somehow mine.  Finishing it will be a bereavement.

I am only going to say this once, but if you'd prefer an actually factual account of what it is I do with my time, or some version of it, or at least a really similar outline...head over to my friend Alex's blog.  He's writing about what we ACTUALLY do here, and his entry "I Beat You Here, Obama!" is a much better story about the field study for our Copenhagen History class than I will ever write.

This is mostly because I consider (if you hadn't noticed) writing meanderingly about swans dying and the feeling of being an outsider better suited to my skill sets than documenting what happens on a daily basis.  Already, the almost six weeks of living here have become a generalized feeling, a sort of residual blur of Copenhagen and Denmark much more than a series of perfectly remembered events and outings.  The feeling changes many times a day, depending on how many times a Dane has bumped into me without saying "unskyld," how much coffee I've spilled on my shirt, and how many stairs I've fallen down, with my happiness usually proportional to the amount of time I've spent writing or reading in cafes about town.

Tonight, DIS "partially subsidized" (we'll see what exactly that means when I turn in my receipt tomorrow) a trip to the movies for my roommate and I.  We saw "Inglourious Basterds, which was an unusual experience on a few levels.  First of all, I had no idea what to expect, and had a surprisingly emotional reaction to the last half hour or so of the film.  Second of all, the scenes are performed in German, French, English, and occasionally Italian, and not always all at the same time.  Because this was a Danish theater, obviously, the subtitles were all in...Danish.  Meaning that I only understood, on my own, about a quarter of the dialogue.  

Fortunately, Mira was kind, and occasionally whispered translations to me-- she speaks all of the languages, and Swedish and Spanish besides.  I actually had a fun, if difficult, time trying to grasp at the situations where the spoken language was French or German.  I found myself reading the Danish subtitles pretty frequently, and to my surprise, I understood  a good 50% of the scenes through that-- and my rusty Spanish came in handy when I tried listening to the French.  I should mention that READING Dansk is a good dozen times easier than speaking it.  I understand a hefty amount of written Danish by now, but have yet to master the pronunciation, by Danish standards, of a single phrase.  I think Mira was a little taken aback-- and hopefully impressed-- with the amount I was able to glean for myself through the subtitles.  No offense to her native tongue, but Danish doesn't seem to be as nuanced or as direct as English, and that does make it easier to read.  I remember at one point, all Brad Pitt said onscreen was "No, you can't" or something, and the Danish translation was a good seven or eight words long to convey the same idea.

As for my thoughts on the movie, those are harder to articulate.  I've never seen something that so exuberantly revises history or so shamelessly eroticizes violence (except for other Tarantino films, naturally).  I was moved more than any other Tarantino film by the emotion of the idea, and I think a lot of the execution surpassed my own expectations.  The last third of the movie fell apart, in my opinion, but not to the detriment of the flabbergasting first two.  Overall, definitely worth seeing, and I don't think you can leave the theater without forming some strong opinion on it one way or the other.

P.S.  Since a few people reading want to hear my thoughts on the current/new season of "House," but even more people probably don't, I'll keep it short: still one of the best shows on television/not at all up to its own standard.  I more or less entirely agree with this short review by an enlightened TV critic.

Recommending and Otherwise

I am only going to say this once, but if you'd prefer an actually factual account of what it is I do with my time, or some version of it, or at least a really similar outline...head over to my friend Alex's blog.  He's writing about what we ACTUALLY do here, and his entry "I Beat You Here, Obama!" is a much better story about the field study for our Copenhagen History class than I will ever write.

This is mostly because I consider (if you hadn't noticed) writing meanderingly about swans dying and the feeling of being an outsider better suited to my skill sets than documenting what happens on a daily basis.  Already, the almost six weeks of living here have become a generalized feeling, a sort of residual blur of Copenhagen and Denmark much more than a series of perfectly remembered events and outings.  The feeling changes many times a day, depending on how many Danes have bumped into me without saying "unskyld," how much coffee I've spilled on my shirt, and how many stairs I've fallen down, with my happiness usually proportional to the amount of time I've spent writing or reading in cafes about town.

Tonight, DIS "partially subsidized" (we'll see what exactly that means when I turn in my receipt tomorrow) a trip to the movies for my roommate and I.  We saw "Inglourious Basterds, which was an unusual experience on a few levels.  First of all, I had no idea what to expect, and had a surprisingly emotional reaction to the last half hour or so of the film.  Second of all, the scenes are performed in German, French, English, and occasionally Italian, and not always all at the same time.  Because this was a Danish theater, obviously, the subtitles were all in...Danish.  Meaning that I only understood, on my own, about a quarter of the dialogue.  

Fortunately, Mira was kind, and occasionally whispered translations to me-- she speaks all of the languages, and Swedish and Spanish besides.  I actually had a fun, if difficult, time trying to grasp at the situations where the spoken language was French or German.  I found myself reading the Danish subtitles pretty frequently, and to my surprise, I understood  a good 50% of the scenes through that-- and my rusty Spanish came in handy when I tried listening to the French.  I should mention that READING Dansk is a good dozen times easier than speaking it.  I understand a hefty amount of written Danish by now, but have yet to master the pronunciation, by Danish standards, of a single phrase.  I think Mira was a little taken aback-- and hopefully impressed-- with the amount I was able to glean for myself through the subtitles.  No offense to her native tongue, but Danish doesn't seem to be as nuanced or as direct as English, and that does make it easier to read.  I remember at one point, all Brad Pitt said onscreen was "No, you can't" or something, and the Danish translation was a good seven or eight words long to convey the same idea.

As for my thoughts on the movie, those are harder to articulate.  I've never seen something that so exuberantly revises history or so shamelessly eroticizes violence (except for other Tarantino films, naturally).  I was moved more than any other Tarantino film by the emotion of the idea, and I think a lot of the execution surpassed my own expectations.  The last third of the movie fell apart, in my opinion, but not to the detriment of the flabbergasting first two.  Overall, definitely worth seeing, and I don't think you can leave the theater without forming some strong opinion on it one way or the other.

P.S.  Since a few people reading want to hear my thoughts on the current/new season of "House," but even more people probably don't, I'll keep it short: still one of the best shows on television/not at all up to its own standard.  I more or less entirely agree with this short review by an enlightened TV critic.

Feeding Oneself: Harder Than You Think

True confession: tonight was the first evening I made myself a real meal.  Granted, I boiled pasta last week and poured store-bought Italian sauce over it, cold, and over the weekend I attempted guacamole with limited Scandinavian vittles.  But tonight, I calculated how much I'd been spending on food, how many more lattes I could afford if I stopped, and did round two of food shopping.

Things turned out much better than expected.  Let it be said that I lived without a meal plan or my mother's awesome cooking for a few weeks back in January '09, but Ohio is cheap when it comes to take out, and I'm not sure I turned on the stove more than once.  (I seem to remember a lot of toast, from-powder scones, and rickets.)

Three ingredients never to underestimate: olive oil, garlic, and salt.  So that my pasta wasn't entirely devoid of nutrients (but hey, high on flavor!), I added some fresh yellow peppers to the garlic-and-oil saute.

It was SO good.  I made way too much, especially because I wasn't that hungry to begin with (had splurged on my first sandwich in Denmark earlier today, and had had two buttery, sugary baked goods on my walk to and from class), but maybe I can eat the rest later tonight or for lunch tomorrow.  SUCCESS.

I even took pictures.  The glass bottle in the back is Gronne Gaarden Granataeble juice, also known as Green Garden Pomegranate concentrate.  You add four parts water to one part juice, and it's epically delicious.  (So far, this is my favorite way to drink the tap water, which I find kind of gross.  It's full of "minerals."  So they say.)

Picspam!

Some sights on the walk between my apartment and school. These were mostly taken on the street Norrebrogade, and a little bit in the Orstedpaerken (park) that I occasionally cut through because it shortens the trip.

What Gets Lost In Translation

For starters, "please" and "excuse me."  The Danish don't have words for them.  I think it's pretty revealing, but Danes use a word, "undskyld," AFTER they've pushed or shoved you or what have you.  That's the norm.  I've been using unskyld a lot more than the average Dane, but I'm also a lot more clumsy than the average Dane.  I also have no idea if anyone's heard it yet, since I'm a bit freaked to use Danish so it comes out both soft and, quite probably, completely wrong.

It's pronounced something like "ooun-skuhld."  Yeah, try that one on for size.

I keep wanting to say "please" and "thank you," and that makes you stand out as a foreigner.  They do have a word for "thank you" -- tak.  The Danes sort of just toss it off, as a really short syllable, "tahk" or "tek."  My prolonged "ahh" sound is a dead giveaway, as is my tendency to try for "thank you very much," which most Danes wouldn't bother with.  I said "tusind tak" (thousand thanks) to a Danish barista today at a cafe near my flat and she looked at me suspiciously and said, "Already very clever."  This was likely an example of the local pastime, dry mocking.

Let's Talk Space

The Danish are renowned for their inventive architecture, modern aesthetic, and staggeringly imaginative integration of form and function.  It seems like their standards are at once centuries ahead of ours but also draw heavily-- at least here in Copenhagen-- on their medieval past.

I'm pretty exhausted (still jetlagged), but here are a few pictures of the neighborhood around my flat (Norrebro) for you to mull over if you're curious about this aspect of being American in Scandinavia.

The first grocery store trip. And the second.

My first night here, my roommate Mira made me a delicious dinner of salat (salad) and laks (salmon-- and since I'm Jewish, I've gotta mention the "lox" similarity).  But after a breakfastless morning and a meagre lunch of cookies on Day Two, I was ravenous.  I asked Mira where the nearest, cheapest food store was, and it's a place called Faksa a block north of our flat.

I thought I was passing.  I tried not to show my complete confusion as I entered the store and browsed familiar and not-so-familiar foods with labels like "leverpostej," "danskvand," and the most frightening-looking "agurk."  I didn't have time to wait for my first Danish class.  I was hungry, and I needed something resembling a meal.

I stumbled to the line with a basket full of muesli, sour peach yoghurt (I think), tomatoes ("tomater" is recognizable), grapes, avocados, brie (the same in all languages?), two baguettes, pasta, shredded mozzarella, and vegetarian tomato sauce.  It occurred to me that 1), my basket was fuller than all the Danes' around me, and 2), none of the food I bought, with the possible exception of muesli, was a local staple.  I had a little French cheese and some Italian supplies, and avocados are definitely not Nordic.  (In fact, my roommate seems to eat them hard and unripe, and maybe I should get used to them that way, as they don't seem to soften here like they do in the States.)

The guy at the cash register didn't look at me as he calculated the tab, and I'd watched the people ahead of me to gauge what to do.  I thought I was blending in.  "132 kroner," he told me in Danish.  I handed him 400.  The game was up.  The girls behind me looked confused and annoyed as the man handed me my 200 DK bill back and repeated himself.  He thrust the receipt into my hands as I finished bagging my own groceries (yes, you do that for yourself here), and I tried to run out, flushed with embarrassment.  But of course, I'd tried to stuff my American-sized grocery run into two thin, Danish plastic bags, and they tore almost immediately on the walk home.  Lesson heartily learned.

DIS doesn't exactly leave us high and dry.  Today and tomorrow, we get two sessions of "Survival Danish," the first of which was this morning.  We had the lesson on going food shopping, complete with field trip to a shop called Netto.  (Netto is a little more recognizably a food store than Faksa, it must be said.)  I know now that I don't want to buy liver pate or sparkling mineral water, but that terrifying "agurk" is really just a cucumber.  Albeit a more natural cucumber than my American palate is used to, given the apparent Danish distaste of all genetically-engineered food.  The fruits are smaller, the vegetables thinner, but everything, it turns out, tastes pretty much the same, or better.

Someone conveniently mentioned today that the European habit is to go food shopping once a day, instead of once or twice a week, and to just buy the food that you'll eat for the next one or two days.  This resolves a lot of my fear that Mira doesn't eat, given our spare kitchen, and explains the weird looks natives gave me on line yesterday as I tried to stuff a week's worth of groceries into a handheld basket.   But the payment mistake wasn't culture shock.  Even or especially in Denmark, my math skills are pretty questionable.