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.

Collecting People, Part 1

I have so much to write about, (and fiction has been calling to me in earnest and repeatedly since the trip), that I genuinely have no idea where to begin.  My first thought was to list some of the people I'd met, their relative craziness or sanity, or-- in some cases-- clear-eyed lunacy, their stories, where we'd met, what I'd said.  The truth is that I am always collecting people, but if I go too long without thinking of them or remembering what they said, they can get lost.  So I figure they're a good place to start in recalling the past couple of weeks.

Starting backwards: on the bus from Berlin ZOB (omnibus station) to Central in Copenhagen, I met a guy named John Nations.  Man is a professional street juggler.  No lie.  But actually, he's a perpetual traveler with what some would deem arrested development and others would call an enduring bohemian spirit.  I don't know where I fall on judgment, but at this point, it isn't really about criticizing my fellow backpackers so much as understanding them.

So I met this guy.  We rode a bus for 7 1/2 hours together up through northern Germany, crossed a corner of the Baltic Sea to Zealand (by ferry), and landed in Denmark, where I helped him catch his bus to a friend's in Amagerbro.  Quite a character, as you can tell by his videos.  On the ferry, he noticed some Danish 14-year-olds who had been at one of his street shows in Berlin, and made their night by doing an impromptu chair-balancing act in the middle of the boat's cafeteria.  It made them clap like kids, and their teachers, the ship's staff, and I were likewise delighted and revived with his self-confident whimsy.  Personally, I was just thrilled to find an American in the middle of Europe, after a good two days without familiar conversation.  Not that there weren't Americans crawling all over Paris, Florence, and Berlin, but cringing away from them in embarrassment isn't the same as finding a gypsy street juggler from South Carolina next to you on a Greyhound.

Still going in reverse chronological order, on Thursday night I stayed by myself at a strange little hostel (10 Euro!  Tell your friends!) called Lettem Sleep 7 in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin.  I had rented a bed in a 7-person co-ed room, but there were only four of us there that night.  There was Jaime from Gibralter, who had been an English major in Wales and who was more than willing to discuss the uselessness of the degree with me for hours while recommending Spanish poets.  

In the other bunk were Tina and Simone from Russia and Sicily, respectively.  And yes, I know that Sicily is a region/island and that Russia is a country, but I'm just telling you what I know.  I don't know what city Tina was from, and I don't know where exactly in the south of Italy Simone had lived before they had packed up for Berlin and rented beds in the hostel for months, looking for work and apartments.  These girls were fascinating.  

On this strange little half-continent, it's insanely difficult for an American to guesstimate the ages of her European contemporaries.  Tina and Simone looked my age, but Simone was a professional video editor with her own home back in Italy who had come to Berlin not speaking a word of German.  Tina was a new student at Frie Universitet in the city who had just passed her German proficiency exam.  Tina could have been 18 or she could have been 30, for all I know about the Russian education system.  Both of them were thinner and better dressed than most American teens I know, and to top it off, although they had colds (everyone was sick everywhere), fabulous hair and skin.  I don't know what it is about this area of the world, or what it is about ours that have made me passable for a 35-year-old since I was fifteen, but it's got to be something in the air.

Laundry!

Laundry here is, by the way, completely impossible.  It's like an obstacle course, full of physical challenges I'm not good at and with the power to break even the strongest will.  For one thing, we have to hook the machine up to the only kitchen outlet and to the only sink in the flat for the entire two hour ordeal.  And when I say "hook the machine up to the only sink," it is as inconvenient and as industrious as it sounds.

There's a part that detaches from the regular tap, and another part that you attach to the faucet so that the doohickies on the washing machine connect properly.  These are far too complicated for me to ever do quite right and well beyond my ability to describe, but the main bit involves a spring, latch, and ball screw.  You then turn on the faucet and, if all goes well, the pressure DOESN'T fling the pipes off and spray you and the kitchen with water.  But of course, it's a learning process, and that must happen several (dozen) times for you to learn your lesson.

There's also the matter of dragging the machine out from under the minifridge in the first place.  It looked easy when Mira did it on my first or second evening here as a demonstration, but like all Danes, Mira is several times more fit than me, and the process of unlocking the wheels at the bottom of the machine and dragging it the three feet to the sink was an arduous fifteen minute task itself.

But even if you manage to move the machine, hook it up to the outlet, and attach it semi-correctly to the faucet, there's still the fact that its powder detergent, liquid additive (still don't know how to translate the bottle-- maybe fabric softener?), and every itty bitty button are in Danish.  And don't be fooled by the numbered dial, because that's not minutes.  The Danish measure laundry time in SPINS.  Cycle spins.  Of your clothes.  Consequently, the numbers on that dial stand for degrees.  Celcius.  The temperature that the machine will turn your tap water in order to properly wash your clothes.

I just did my first load of whites, and so far so good.  I'm more apprehensive about the darks.  We shall see.  

DIS gives us Wednesdays free, which are usually to be taken up with field studies, but which for me today is entirely devoid of activities.  I've contented myself with wrestling the washing machine for three hours and singing "I Have Confidence" from "The Sound of Music" loudly to myself when cheerleading is needed.

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.)

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.