Famous

Today I was interviewed by Politiken (the more left-wing of the two big Danish papers) AND by Danish Radio about being an American abroad during the primaries. Here is the Politiken article, although it's in Danish -- maybe you can run it through babelfish or something :) You know you've finally made it big when you have interviews with two big national media companies in one day! Actually, they just came to my work because they know there are a lot of Americans there, I think -- but perhaps they looked me up especially.

I can't find a link to the radio interview so far, but if I do I'll put it up here too -- I'm not sure if it will be in English or Danish though. I imagine I'll probably have a Danish voice-over, but maybe not. The DR girl said they'd make a short version for the channel targeted to young listeners, and a longer version for the grown-ups' channel. This means either that young people have no attention span, or that old people have nothing to do -- or maybe both.

I Voted

Today I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could vote after all in the primary -- I had been under the impression that, since Minnesota has a caucus instead of a primary, I wouldn't be able to vote absentee. However, just this morning I found out that Americans living abroad can vote in person in various world cities at Democrats Abroad, which has its own delegates -- 11 of them. So Americans everywhere abroad count as a kind of 51st state, apparently. I don't know why I've never been aware of this before, but I suppose in most cases it doesn't end up being a deciding factor so it doesn't get much coverage, and I think it's pretty new. In any case, it was exciting to find out that I could vote after all! Polling in Denmark has already closed, with Obama coming out on top, 98-37. Maybe those 135 Danish votes will end up being the deciding factor in the closest race in history...

I really, really, really want...

Monopoly Her og Nu: Copenhagen version Monopoly, in which "the rent is adjusted to the sky-high prices in today's Copenhagen". Park Place and Boardwalk are replaced by Nyhavn and Strøget, you pay for everything on your Dankort, and I think it's the cutest thing ever. I saw it yesterday at Toys R Us (while trying to kill time on the Ikea trip), and would have bought it if it weren't for the 379 kr. price tag... not that that's apparently unreasonable, as Trivial Pursuit and Cranium were both 499! I can't imagine ever spending $100 on a board game! BUT, I found a place selling Monopoly Her og Nu online for 300 kr, so we'll see... maybe if I'm feeling generous I'll buy myself one as a going away present before I leave.

Fastelavn, Ikea style

Yesterday was Fastelavn (a Danish holiday in which children dress up in costumes and hit a candy-filled barrel with sticks until it breaks. Below is an old blog post I wrote on the subject when I was here two years ago:

Today is Fastelavn, a holiday marking the beginning of lent and traditionally associated with feasting, killing a cat, and beating your children. "At slå katten af tønden" means "to hit the cat out of the barrel", and originally this was taken literally -- people would hang a barrel with a cat in it from a tree and hit it with wooden clubs until the barrel broke and the cat fell out. Then they chased the cat with their clubs, killing it if they could catch it and otherwise just chasing it out of town. Sin and bad fortune were supposed to be abolished along with the cat. Today, the cat has been replaced with food and candy, and kids take turns hitting the barrel (usually decorated with black cats) until someone breaks it or knocks it down. The lucky child is then dubbed the king of queen of cats, and everyone grabs the candy, like with a piñata.

Another lovely Fastelavn tradition is the Fastelavnsris. This is a tree branch which is decorated prettily with ribbons the night before Fastelavn. In the morning, parents would wake up their children by beating them with the Fastelavnsris to remind them of the sufferings of Christ. Today, the beatings are gentle and just for fun, if they are done at all. Afterwards, the kids put on costumes and walk around the neighborhood singing the Fastelavn song (which we learned in Danish class). Originally, they would go door-to-door asking for Fastelavn buns, but now they mostly ask for money.

So anyway, yesterday I was chaperoning a student trip to Ikea, where some Fastelavn festivities were taking place. They set up a few barrels which the kids eventually managed to break, although it took a pretty long time -- a wooden barrel is sturdier than a normal piñata, apparently. But what was particularly shocking to my American sensibilities was a child there who was dressed up in blackface! Including an Afro wig and brown face paint -- I have a feeling that kind of thing wouldn't fly in the US. Crazy Danes.

Eurogoogle is bollocks

The other day I noticed that in my Gmail, what would normally be called the trash folder is called the BIN. As in, "This conversation has been moved to the bin". WEIRD. I guess they think that since I'm using Google in Europe I must be British. Wrong, Google.

Actually, I enjoy British slang and the fact that most Danes sound somewhat British whilst speaking English. Maybe by the time I come home I will have picked up a British accent -- I can be the next Britney Spears!

I also just got home from like the worst bike ride of my life. Sleet and "gale-force winds" make for an unpleasant ride, and in this case a longer than usual one as I was forced against my will down H. C. Andersen Boulevard, being unable to continue straight through the intersection during a particularly strong gust. But I am home unscathed, so no worries! Bedtime now.

Copenhagen vanity

In Copenhagen, all of the electrical wires are buried, instead of running overhead like in American cities. It's an aesthetic issue, and I guess overhead wires are somewhat unsightly, although I don't really tend to notice them personally. However, this means that whenever they need to do anything to the wires they have to dig up the whole street, which seems like a lot of work and inconvenience just to shield people from the eyesore of exposed wiring. It also apparently takes forever for them to fix these things, so the road will remain partially blocked off for months -- probably because unemployment is so low that they can't find anybody to do this kind of work. There's a place I ride by whenever I go to Danish where one lane of the road is all dug up and blocked off; it's been this way since I got here but I've never seen anybody actually working on it. Granted, that may be because I only go by after work and on Saturdays, so maybe it's just that they're not there when I go by -- but there also never appear to be any changes, so who knows. There has also been construction going on on the street outside my work ever since I first got here, which means that people driving by get stuck behind parked trucks, etc, and deal with it by honking nonstop on their horns for minutes on end. Which is annoying, since it's right outside my window. But what can you do. At least it's not quite as loud now as in the summer when I kept my window open.

Danish Dynomite

"Den her er for mine boys, og for mine ladies, aiight?
Det her er Nik og Jay, det er Danish dynomite"
-Nik og Jay, "Det Vi Gør"

The amazing hiphop duo Nik and Jay is my new obsession. They're one of those bands whose music is so ridiculous and terrible that it's actually enjoyable. They think they're gangstas (see pic), but apparently don't realize that it's just not possible to be a gangsta if you're also Danish and white. It's also hard to rap in Danish, because the pronunciation isn't precise enough for good rhymes -- or maybe that makes it easier?? I guess in a sense you could say everything in Danish rhymes with everything else, since all the words have the same kind of in-the-throat vowel and swallowed consonants at the end -- at least it sounds that way to me. Their videos (for example, this one for the song "Boing") look like SNL spoofs of hip hop videos, but apparently they're made in all seriousness.

Their lyrics are pretty much all really stupid, (ie, their biggest hit from when I was a student here, Lækker, consists mainly of the word "delicious" repeated. They also make a clever double entendre using the number 6 (seks) and the word sex. Nicely done, boys.) However, I do like that in a lot of their songs they use the phrase "f*** Janteloven" -- Janteloven being, as you may know (but definitely would if you were Danish), the philosophical doctrine that nobody is better than anyone else, and which can be summarized in the following 10 rules:

1. Don't think that you are special.
2. Don't think that you are of the same standing as us.
3. Don't think that you are smarter than us.
4. Don't fancy yourself as being better than us.
5. Don't think that you know more than us.
6. Don't think that you are more important than us.
7. Don't think that you are good at anything.
8. Don't laugh at us.
9. Don't think that anyone cares about you.
10. Don't think that you can teach us anything.
(Thanks, Wikipedia)

While egalitarianism is good, I suppose, this is a kind of disheartening way of phrasing it. I don't think it's really stressed that much to kids anymore, but I can imagine it would have been a rather bleak paradigm to grow up with. Kind of opposite to the "everyone is special, everyone is valuable" messages that American kids are given all the time.

Anyway, so the general idea behind "fuck Janteloven" is that yes, Nik and Jay are better than the rest of us, which is a common enough theme in certain music genres -- but I think it's cute that they reference an relatively obscure (to most of the world) philosophical concept to make this point.

Hopefully they'll play in Tivoli or something this summer so I can see them live -- actually, it's entirely possible I've passed them in the street; I probably wouldn't recognize them in normal clothes...

Footnote: To be fair to the Danes, nobody really likes Nik and Jay -- they're generally the subject of mockery. Nevertheless, when one of their songs comes on in a bar, everyone seems to mysteriously know all the words...