Our new washing machine is so rude

Table Manners

Danes and Americans have nearly opposite ideas of good table manners. Good luck, kids.

In America, you hold the knife in your right hand and the fork in your left. You cut up a couple pieces of food – not too few, or it’s just a hassle to keep switching your hands, and not too many, or you look like a baby with a plate full of bite sized pieces. Then you put your knife down, switch your fork to your right hand, hold it almost like a pencil, and eat your pieces. Repeat. Napkin goes in your lap, where it shall stay until you leave the table.

In Denmark, you hold the knife in your right hand and the fork in your left. You cut up one, maybe two pieces of food. You use your upside down fork to eat these pieces immediately, as if their small sizes implies flightiness and they’ll dart off your plate at any second. The eating off the back of your fork thing is really tough if you have something like rice on your place, but you make do. And it is considered childish to cut too many pieces ahead of time. Your napkin can go anywhere it wants – it is a free spirit.

Danish dinners last at least an hour, if not two or more. Some meal-oriented parties involve people staying at the dinner table from afternoon tea and cake all the way past dinner in the evening. The long hours of food and company provide an opportunity for hygge, or coziness. Candles are a must. And to give you an idea of how luxurious Danish meals really are, you might consider that a standard candlestick only lasts for about one dinner. Maybe two dinners, if the group really has a train to catch that night.

Prag und Wien

I am the queen of procrastination. I boast an unparalleled ability to flee from deadlines, bypass reasonable requirements, and avoid all tasks, big and small. So when I say that the extent to which I did not prepare for my trip to Prague was appalling, I mean it.

I was traveling to visit my Bowdoin friend Tina and her three roommates. All four had come together from Vienna and had been rabblerousing around Prague all afternoon, finally landing at the apartment of one of the girls’ high school friends who happened to be studying there for the semester.

I sheepishly admit that, before departure, all I knew about the city was vaguely where it is situated in the Czech Republic (the middle) and that it houses a building that looks like two people dancing called, appropriately, “The Dancing Building”. I had not “had time” (read: bothered) to do any further research before embarking.

The plane touched down at Vaclav Havel Airport at 22:35 and did donuts on the Tarmac for another forty-five minutes. I used this time to inhale the perfume of the elderly woman seated next to me and ponder the important questions of the hour: do people here speak English like they do in Denmark? What kind of currency did they take in this country, anyway?

It wasn’t until I had separated myself from the travelers in search of baggage claim that I realized how very alone I was. Everything was barred up. Not a single person was in the terminal. There were no clacking high heels, no droning roller bag wheels, not even the whir of a moving walkway.

For a second I just stood there, in that linoleum tundra, and marveled at my own idiocy. Eastern Europe must not have any crickets because if it did, every single one of them would have stepped up to the plate in that very moment.

What could I possibly have been thinking? It was midnight. I didn’t speak a word of Czech. I had no money. I had no map. I did not know the address or name of our hostel. I did not have a Czech phone. Tina and her friends didn’t either, so I had no way to contact them. The airport Wi-Fi did not work. My phone was at 29% battery and I had no adaptor.

What I did have was the residual caffeine from some bad airplane coffee, practical shoes, and the will to live. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and it was this thought that came to me, as I stood there by myself in the cricket-less terminal, and made me walk in some direction that eventually led me to an ATM.

I had the good fortune of waiting in line behind a gloomy American couple who were reasoning through their transaction out loud. From them I learned the conversion rate between Czech korunas and the US dollar, and an approximation of how much I should spend for a weekend in Prague when, don’t forget honey, Vienna is going to be even more expensive.

The girls behind me in line were American as well, but thoroughly uninterested in my predicament. When I told them I was traveling alone, they sneered a “good luck” that was so acidic it could have eaten right through the linoleum floor. I switched the ATM to Chinese and resolved to write a judgmental tweet about them as soon as Czech Wi-Fi would allow it.

The plan was to go outside and wait for some cosmic sign regarding which bus to take into the city when I encountered a fashionable woman smoking a cigarette. She was like the Czech Audrey Hepburn. Tall, wiry, dressed in all black, high cheekbones, crisply penciled brows, blond hair piled into a messy bun that mingled with the rising tendrils of smoke leaving her mouth after every haphazard puff.

“There is the bus,” she said nonchalantly, nodding at a yellow thing pulling up about four hundred meters down the sidewalk. She didn’t move. “I’m still having this cigarette.”

I thought this was a hint to leave, so I tried to. “No, you’ll get lost. I will take you after the cigarette.” To her, this was the most logical thing in the world, but in my experience, you wait for buses; buses don’t wait for you.

This one did, though. In charge of the bus was a huge, gruff man who spoke poor but aggressive English through a beard that seemed to consume his whole wrinkled face. He wasn’t just the bus driver; he appeared to be the bus. His stature was such that he was imposing even whilst sitting down. This guy was straight out of a Roald Dahl novel, like Mr. Twit incarnate. Trying to buy a ticket from him was a mistake, and my fairy godmother quickly pulled me back to the recesses of the crowded bus. She saved me sixty-four korunas and probably my life as well.

The bus spat us out on a street corner where my guide immediately began work on another cigarette. She pointed to a nearby metro station. “There it is. You want green, then you want red, but I can’t explain it. It’s complicated. You’ll get lost.” She dictated how to spell “Staromestske” into my phone, and bid me farewell with a final wisp of smoke.

Everything about her instructions turned out to be wrong except for the Staromestske part, which I learned translated into Old Town Square. This square dates back to the twelfth century and is home to the Old Town Hall Tower with its Astronomical Clock, two big churches, and, not quite as old, a 1915 statue of John Hus. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but together these landmarks offered quite a nice first glimpse of non-airport Prague.

The cobblestone streets were shiny from a recent rain and everything glowed yellow from the streetlamps. It reminded me of the illustrations from the Rumpelstiltsken book I’d had as a child, specifically the page where Rumpelstiltsken first produces a room full of gold thread for the king.

The young couple I asked for directions was much more concerned with whether I saw a picture of a dress as blue and black or white and gold than whether I would ever find my friends. The dress was obviously white and gold, so I enlightened them. The boyfriend stormed off in jest and the girlfriend gave me a high five. Neither one of them could give me directions until we had discussed the optical illusion for several minutes. Finally the boyfriend replaced the image of the dress with a map of the city, found my address, and told me to walk straight until I saw a huge sculpture of a naked woman (“You can’t miss it, she’s really so naked”) and then turn left.

The naked woman was, in fact, unmissable. In Utero, as it’s called, was created by the controversial Czech artist David Cerny. The woman is pregnant, squatting, with legs akimbo and arms up behind her head, and is as tall as a house. She’s made out of a single, pixelated block of stainless steel, but when the light hit her that night she looked like she was made out of clear Legos.

Google Images, not mine.

As welcoming as her stance was, I turned away from her down a darker street, borrowed Wi-Fi from outside a café, and eked out a “Let me in!” text to Tina from the remaining 7% of my phone’s battery. She and seven other people I’d never met opened a door that didn’t even look like a door. They led me upstairs, handed me a family-size container of orange juice that did not contain orange juice, and taught me how to say “na zdraví”.

All things considered, I don’t know if I learned from this experience. I’d probably do it all over again. -from Creative Travel Writing class The Lennon Wall – it took us approximately one hour to find this stupid little attraction. None of us really knew what it was or where it was, except that someone said it was near the French Embassy. We not-so-quickly realized that they’d meant the front of the embassy, which you cannot access if you approach from the back via cobbly side streets, like we did. Our only guide was a golden retriever, pictured below, who seemed to know the lay of the land better than we did but still wasn’t of much help.  My phone keeps track of how many steps I take in a day. This day was an outlier. I didn’t think my feet would ever recover. After Prague, the five of us travelled back to Vienna. Tina took me on a tour of the city as we endured some sideways hail, not pictured. The rest of the week in Vienna was warm and sunny, so that’s when the camera came out. Apparently these guys are a thing in Vienna. They just sit around wearing horse masks and playing the accordion. It’s subtly terrifying.  Skating rink set up outside the Rathaus. I wish I’d gotten some pictures of the whole layout. There are a couple main rinks, as you can see, but there are also a bunch of skating paths that wind around the park. The whole place is lit up with Christmas lights at night.  A purple cathedral. Not sure why it’s purple. We went to a cat cafe. In case you’re not familiar with this concept, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a cafe where you can also play with cats. They just live there and paw around at things and hopefully don’t knock your cup of wiener melange off the table. Mostly, they just sleep and endure kids like us who wander in to pet them.  “Miav!” – an Austrian cat No one can smize like this cat. This sign is all over the train stations. No one’s really sure what it means. Tina and I actually waited at Museumsquartier around noon one day, hoping to see the rapid crossing, but came up with nothing. Could be a hoax, could be performance art. Could even be that our standard of “rapid crossing” or definition of “a plastic bag” were off the money.  Public transportation in Vienna. The seats are not nearly as comfy as the lovely Copenhagen S-tog. Also note the blue sign on the right of the picture with the muzzled dog on it. This is a rule here – if you bring a pup on public transportation, it has to be muzzled. 😦 Swings at the Prater on a sunny Tuesday morning.  The famous ferris wheel! It’s 212 feet tall and used to have 30 cars but they took half of them out, so now only the even number cars are actually goin’ around. The odds are on display in the museum part.  Some views from the top! Super ugly Furby thing on the side of a building. We bonded with a random pedestrian about how ugly this thing is. Mozart, looking dashing as always. Weird trees.  View from the top of a tall thing, pictured below. This was the tall thing we climbed.  Some art. Some graffiti. I liked the bunny.  The Danube. Serious bike locks here – not something you see so often in Copenhagen.  I tagged along with Michael and Tina’s class to visit a Turkish market.

What do you think is exotic about Denmark?

The most exotic thing about Denmark is the level of trust you can see on a day-to-day basis. Maybe it’s sad that this is considered exotic, that we don’t think of trust as a standard but rather a bonus. Why should we be impressed that this culture is full of people who don’t want to steal each other’s babies? But we are impressed, and we still marvel at the strollers and sleepy, al fresco children the way we would marvel at a jungle full of monkeys or a tropical island overrun with friendly deer.

– from Creative Travel Writing class

The thing in Radhuspladsen

This thing is in Radhuspladsen (City Hall Square) in Copenhagen. It just kind of stands there in the middle of where people want to walk but I kind of like it. It has markings on it that tell you how far you are from different places in Denmark, including my little city of Roskilde.

Middelfart Sparekasse and Aarhus

Pictures from a positive psychology class trip to western Denmark!

First stop was Middelfart Sparekasse, which has consistently been rated as the happiest workplace in Denmark/often in Europe. It’s a small bank, so the only way they could compete with the larger Danish banks was to provide terrific customer service, and the way to do that was to make sure they had terrific employees. So they let the employees manage themselves almost completely.

They get to decide when they work and what they work on. And no one, not even a senior manager, can override any decisions they make. Apparently this works really well in Denmark. Really makes you wonder if it would work in America, though.  We stayed in a hostel that night that was more scenic than any summer camp I’d ever been to.

A little gloomy, but still quite a nice place to spend the night.Our professor, Gitte, showed us how to roast twisty bread over the fire. Cute in theory, but after thirty minutes you were left with a gritty, ashen crust on the outside and sticky dough on the inside.

Next day was a trip to Aarhus, which is the second largest city in Denmark. Definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in the area, even if just to check out the art museum there. Allow me to introduce you to Ron Mueck’s “Boy”:

This next exhibit consists of a zillion jars of petrified horse meat. Yes, really, horse meat.

It was actually a very controversial piece of art that was questionably argued to be a protest against the Vietnam War but might just have been animal cruelty. Basically, this guy took a horse out to a snowy field, killed it, and videotaped himself chopping it up into jar-sized pieces.

A room completely clouded up with dry ice and lit up with different colored lights. This is Sydney and our professor, Gitte.

A carpet designed as an optical illusion. I’m not sure if there was some big idea behind this bit of artwork or if the whole point was just to make you forget where your legs were and end up falling on your face in the middle of a flat room.

At the very top of the museum is a circular catwalk with rainbow glass. You can see all of Aarhus from up here.

It would have been cool if the whole thing spun around on top of the building, but we weren’t complaining.

Positive Psychology C!
And goodnight to Aarhus!