Danish Generosity

Another quality I’ve found in many of the Danes I have met is their capacity for generosity. Again and again I’ve been amazed at what people have offered to do for me, to help me out with travel and sightseeing and places to stay. I’ve already mentioned the generosity of Kim and his flatmates, as they feed a large group of their friends most nights, supply them with wine and beers and spirits and have different people sleeping on their couch. In my last week in Denmark though, I’ve found this stretch even further.

I was in touch with some old friends of mine from Dahab, Kjeld, and his wife Elvira and went to see them on Monday. I had been hoping to meet them for a quick drink or similar as a catch up. Instead, however, they came and picked me up and took me out to a park/forest just outside of Aarhus where we fed apples to the deer there. I thought this was unbelievably cool. They then took me back to their friends house (as they were staying there) and cooked a massive dinner for us, and a couple of their friends. Big meals with lots of friends seem standard here and I like it. I plan on making it a custom with the teachers I work with when I get to Poland as well. At this dinner I met their friend John who was going to Copenhagen for the weekend. Kim and I had plans for going this weekend as well so I took his number and we planned to be in touch about sharing lifts.

A trip to Copenhagen from Arhus is in fact a very pricey venture. To get the train there would cost me about 350 to 400 kroner and take about 3 and a half hours. To drive there with John was going to take perhaps a bit longer, taking into account stopping for breaks and he asked us to pay him 50 kroner each as he was doing the drive anyway. This was very generous as not only was John driving us and paying for the petrol, but there is also a fee to pay when you cross the main bridge to the island that Copenhagen is on. This fee is no standard British bridge toll, or even comparable, to the best of my knowledge, to most European road tolls. This bridge costs no less than 320 kroner to cross. And that is just for your standard car. A truck pays over 1000, that is more than €100.

Needless to say, I was very taken by John’s generosity and eager to share that ride.

Something I’ve often thought about as a budget traveller is hitch hiking. I’ve never been game to try it by myself, but have thought it would be an interesting way to travel if I had a travel companion to share the risk. All great, independent minded travellers seem to include hitch hiking at some point. Whenever I see hitch hikers on the side of the road I want to pick them up so that I can have the chance to hear their story, why they are hitching and how they find it. Is it safe, interesting, boring, slow, fast. I have only ever really seen hitchers when I have been safely ensconced in a bus, and therefore not at liberty to amass these travellers.

On the trip to Copenhagen with John though, we did pick up a hitch hiker, making it my very first hitching experience. John was driving, and I was in the front and Kim the back. Therefore, we felt we made a good team for ensuring a safe hitch hosting experience. We pulled over at the entrance to the freeway leaving Arhus and picked up a guy whose name I know longer remember, who was heading to a town we would pass on the way. Introductions were done in English and I mentioned my desire to try hitching sometime, preferably with Kim in tow. I asked our vagrant traveller whether he found some signs work better than others. Would perhaps, I inquired, a smiley face after naming the town you wanted to get to, encourage people to stop for you? This was met with a little bit of a stare, and some sympathetic laughter from Kim. Sometimes I’m not sure the Danes quite get my sense of humour, I wasn’t really being serious… After that, John and I continued our own conversation in English and Kim and our intrepid wonderer switched to Danish.

After we’d dropped our hitch hiker off, Kim was able to tell us everything he’d learned about him. Basically he was everything you could ever want in a hitch hiker. He had been homeless for the last year. Out of choice apparently, to see what it was like. He was hitching as he’d built up too many fines from riding trains without a ticket and didn’t have any money to either pay the fines, or buy a ticket. He was some sort of a musician and off to play anarchist music somewhere. I may have exaggerated that last bit, but the rest is all true!

The generosity of the Danes was further shown to me in Copenhagen. Our first night there we stayed with Kim’s friend Anus, who kindly gave us his bed and he went to share his flatmates room. On the second night we stayed with another of Kim’s friends who actually went to stay at one of her friends houses so we could have her bed! All in all, the weekend in Copenhagen was a great experience, if an expensive one. The cost of public transport, the buses and underground, seemed even more expensive than London. It is a really cool city though, which makes up for the prices. The beer isn’t too expensive in most places either, which also helps.

The last mention I need to make of Danish generosity is of the barman at Kim’s local. We headed there on my last night in Denmark with one of his friends. We must have stood out by quite a bit, being about 15 years younger than anyone else in the pub, and clearly speaking in English the whole time. Eventually the barman came over for a chat, and when he found out I was Australian he disappeared out the back only to return with some ready made shots. I’m not sure what else to call them, but I have bought them in Australia before. It’s where there is a plastic shot glass, divided in two with a different spirit on each side, which you drink together when you have the shot. This one was labelled as a QF and, the barman apologised to me, made in New Zealand. I think this one was made with Irish Cream and Midori, although I seem to remember this shot, a Quick Fuck, coming with Kahlua as well when I’d had it previously. Regardless, I thought it was quite sweet for the barman to have dug these out especially for us, and very fitting as I definitely haven’t had one since leaving Australia.

So after nearly 3 weeks of imposing myself on Kim and his friends it is time to leave and head to Poland to start working again. I’m really very sad about it. Denmark has been amazing, and I wish it was possible to stay longer. I will though, be back to visit!

Kim and I at Skagen

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Originally uploaded by The Travelling Scribe

Elvira and Kjeld

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Originally uploaded by The Travelling Scribe

Feeding the deer near Aarhus

Feeding the deer

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Originally uploaded by The Travelling Scribe

Sunset at Skagen

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Originally uploaded by The Travelling Scribe

Shesha in Granada

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Originally uploaded by The Travelling Scribe

Fez

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Originally uploaded by The Travelling Scribe

A belated addition of a photo from the roof of the hotel in Fez overlooking the medina.

Honesty in Denmark

One of the things that has amazed me most about being in Denmark is how honest everyone seems to be. I already knew from travelling with Kim and Rasmus that they were very trustworthy people and not that I find other countries to be dishonest, but there seems to be such a high level of trust between people here.

What has surprised me the most is their flat. It is a fairly typical building with 4 flats on it, one per level.  There is a door to the building which clicks locked behind you when you enter and leave. Their flat is on the second floor. As you climb the second flight of stairs and approach the door you can tell it is a male flat. The door step is covered in the shoes of whoever is in the flat at the time, as well as about 3 full sized fishing rods propped against the wall and more often than not at least one pair of roller blades. The next thing you notice is the door itself. Not only is the door never locked, it is also rarely ever shut properly. Even if there is no one in the flat at the time.

I found this quite hard to get my mind around.

‘Don’t we need to lock the door?’ – I asked the first couple of times we left the flat. This was meant with a slightly blank stare, and I drop the subject.

‘Has anything ever been stolen?’ – I ask at another point. Here I get a surprised look, ‘No’. So in the 3 years the guys have lived in this flat they have rarely even shut their door and nothing has been stolen. I find this incredible. I personally know of at least 2 people who have had things stolen from their, albeit houses not flats, while they were actually home at the time.

I also get told that, ‘the only people who can get in the building live here so why would anyone steal something?’

A fair enough question it would seem for this country, although I can’t help but think, ‘because they can’ would be the response in many other countries! Not to mention the endless stream of visitors to the building. Or perhaps all those visitors are for their flat anyway so it doesn’t matter.

So to my tourist mind where everything is new, and different and foreign, Denmark seems to be the country where not only do people who live in small towns not have to lock their doors, but even those who live centrally in the second biggest city in the country not even have to shut their doors.

They are such an open and sociable flat. Every night, before cooking they discuss how many people might be over for dinner. There are some regular friends who come round almost every day of the week. A couple of the guys (usually one of them will not actually live at the flat) will cook dinner, for, on average, 6 people. This will be laid out on the table for everyone to help themselves to as much as they want. There will be a crate of beer in the side of the room, and a box of red wine on the shelf, and white wine in the fridge. Their other favourite is to brew some coffee and have cups of coffee with irish cream in them.

I can’t help but think that if I lived in a building with a flat like this that I wouldn’t be able to help myself for wanting to peek inside. It’s almost an open invitation, the open door, the smell of spices from the previous nights cooking, the jumble of shoes outside (I would be so curious as to how many people were actually living there). But the Danes don’t seem to be those sorts of people, instead they seem quite happy to leave each other to their privacy. What a novel idea.

This favourable discussion of Denmark I feel also needs to briefly mention something of their drinking. They drink a lot. Or certainly these guys seem to, I’d hate to generalise too much. But there is something so utterly different about their drinking to what I’m used to. It does not seem to be perceived as anything different to perhaps breathing. It is just an extension of yourself. It is a given, a fact, that everyone drinks, just about every day.

When I have been out in the town or with his friends I have seen none of the behaviour I am used to seeing on nights out. There are no staggering girls, or young men yelling at each other outside pubs. There is no one vomiting in the gutter, or anywhere else it would seem. The Saturday and Sunday morning hazard of Edinburgh, slightly dried vomit on the side of the road seems not to exist here.

Kim asked if I wanted to go to their University Bar the other night. ‘Really? A Uni bar? Wont it just be full of extremely drunk young and possibly underage people?’ I have been avoiding Uni Bars in Australia and the UK, which are often like this, for a few years now. He just looked at me slightly bemused, ‘No, it’s just a bar’. Just a bar? Well, I guess as he would say that, there was even a bar at his high school.

Yes that’s correct. There was a bar in his highschool. It was only open most Fridays between 3 and 6. I was told this with a casual shrug of the shoulders, whats the big deal?, the gesture seemed to say.
‘Didn’t some parents complain?’ I felt compelled to ask, ‘Why would they do that?’ was the response. Why indeed, but I can just imagine the outcry there would have been at my highschool if it had ever suggested doing such a thing.

Ahhh Denmark, I think I could really get used to this country.

Skipping forward to Denmark

In order to bring you up to where I am today I need to move past the end of the CELTA course (the celebratory drinks, finding out I passed, spending a few amazing days with Kim), I will fly over meeting my Mum and brother in Barcelona, spending a few days in Granada before going to Algeciras and getting the ferry across to Tangiers, our week in Morocco in Fez and Marrakech and the return to Edinburgh. I will briefly mention that I had massive change of mind about going to Asia and now have a job teaching English in Poland, in a town called Szczecin and I start on the 23 of September. Look it up on google maps, it is in the very north and two hours East of Berlin by train. I will not spend time detailing my week in Edinburgh, catching up with a few friends and family and of course my brothers 22 birthday.

I have now arrived at the point where I left sunny (ahem!) Edinburgh and went to Denmark. As many of you know this is wildly off course as far as my original plans went. But what fun are plans if you do not change them regularly at a whim?

After having a lovely time with Kim in Prague I decided it made perfect sense for me to visit him in Denmark and explore another new country. Scandinavia has always fascinated me in one of those unobtainable sort of ways as it is so expensive. Earlier in the year I had toyed with the idea of going to Denmark until Eastern Europe won out over it. I also spent a week in Sweden at the end of January and have often dreamt of being able to spend a full year there where I could enjoy a proper white winter (and maybe Christmas) and then the midnight sun during the summer months.

I headed out on a delightful Ryanair flight last Friday. Ryanair have recently changed their flight policy making it mandatory for you to check in online for your flight. I’m not sure how this makes any difference to the speed or ease of check in though as you are still required to line up with your passport to have your printed boarding pass checked against it and your bag put through. The convenience of this system was also I believe tested when the woman who checked my passport printed me out a new boarding pass and sent my bag through. I thought nothing of it at first, although I did wonder what the point in printing out the boarding pass was when I was just given a new one anyway. But I left her desk and began to wonder over to security.

I don’t normally check my boarding pass for Ryanair flights as there is no seating anyway, and the departure gates are rarely shown, so what is to check? Luckily though, as I started the ascent via the escalators to security I did check over the boarding pass details and found that instead of having a boarding pass to Billund, Denmark, I had a boarding pass to Frankfurt, Germany.

My first thought was that I had indeed made a mistake. That somehow when booking my flights I had a moment of sheer stupidity and clicked on the wrong arrival airport. It seemed unlikely, as unlikely as my not noticing until this point that I was booked on a flight to Frankfurt, but that was my first thought. I went back to the check in desks and straight to the woman who had served me previously. She checked my passport and without saying a word to me called ahead to the baggage area to say that she had checked me in to the wrong flight as there was another passenger with my name, and that my bag needed to be taken and re-tagged. I appreciated her apology and for taking the time to explain to me directly what had happened. She printed me off a new boarding pass and waved me on, without further discussion. I asked if my bag was going to be ok, ‘Of course’ she said and waved me on impatiently.

I was doubtful, but as my bag is rather annoying to carry and having travel insurance I decided I wasn’t really that bothered if it did go missing.

There were no further dramas and much to my amazement my bag was waiting for me, peacefully sitting on the luggage belt, when I arrived in Billund. It was, however, soaking wet. Denmark seemingly covered in the same thick grey clouds and drizzling rain that had bothered Edinburgh over the past 3 days.

I met Kim and, as it often seems with us, although I had missed him over the past few weeks since Prague it did feel a lot like no time had passed at all. We arrived back at his flat in the early evening (there is another story there, about why exactly I flew into Billund when Kim lives in Aarhus which has its own airport, but I can’t really explain the logic and so I wont try). Kim lives with two other guys, one of whom is Rasmus who I had met in Bulgaria. It is a fairly typical flat, and despite many (although not all) of the books on their shelves being in Danish I could have been in any of the flats I have ever lived in before. The only slight difference being that they did not have their own shower, a bathroom being downstairs in the basement and in fact shared with all but one of the other flats in the building. This, I have been assured, is unusual for Denmark and not to be taken as standard.

My first two nights here were extremely overwhelming. Although all of Kim’s friends have been extremely welcoming and friendly and all speak English, it is very daunting to be in a room full of people whose first language is not your own. Everyone speaks incredibly good English and is easy to speak with, but I am very aware that not all of them are as confident with their language as some are (even though they have no reason not to be). I find myself sitting for ages trying to think of of a topic that wont be too complex or intimidating for someone who does not seem very confident with their English. I end up spending so long thinking about it that the conversation moves on and I have lost my chance.

I myself feel far too intimidated in a room full of natives to attempt any of the half a dozen or so Danish words that I have managed to learn. Even though they would hardly be conducive for a full conversation. This makes me feel incredibly rude, that I cannot manage to make myself attempt to speak Danish, when others are speaking such incredibly good English to me.

I find myself, in the moments when the room in full of the sound of Danish and I am adrift in a sea of complete non-understanding, thinking of immigrants and refugees. How on earth do they do it? It must take such an amazing strength of character to pick up your life (however poor a standard it might be) and move to a country where all forms of communication are completely foreign. Although I know I can jump into the conversation at any moment and turn things back to English and no one would mind a bit, I wonder how it feels when that is not possible. When everything happening around you is a complete blur of incomprehensible sounds, facial expressions, and social norms of behaviour and gestures that accompany the conversation. I wonder how people cope when they know that their language, whatever it may be, is not spoken by the people that surround them, and that they cannot just jump in and make themselves understood and gain understanding of what is happening around them. The isolation this must cause would be immense, and the following feelings of insecurity would have to make it an even tougher challenge for some people to learn the new language of the country they are in.

I am currently trying to read up on the pronunciation of Danish sounds in order to help me better pronounce the names of Kim’s friends!

It is a lovely feeling to have nothing pressing to do after the stress of the CELTA course and the rush of travel after that. I have no current deadline for leaving Denmark and am instead taking my time with sightseeing. Kim and I are going away this weekend though, to see the town he is from (Herning) and then we will head west and north, hopefully with a stop in Skagen before returning to Aarhus.

CELTA: Day 18 – The Last Lesson

Oh dear.

Today did not go well. Or at least, it did not go as well as I had rather hoped my last lesson might go.

My lesson was on the first conditional. I spent a lot of time over the last two days learning about what the first conditional actual is (ahem!) and looking at the best way I could present it to the class and have them practice it. After spending a lot of time going over the chapter in the book I realised that I didn’t have enough material to make the lesson stretch to the 60 minutes that it is supposed to. I therefore, very studiously, spent some time on the Internet looking up some other possible activities for the class and pulling them together for the lesson.

I wrote a flow chart of how I planned to run the lesson as well as my official lesson plan that needed to be handd in, a detailed description of the grammar work I was looking at and its meaning form and pronunciation, and a cover sheet to go with all of this to be submitted to my tutor along with the handouts.

I was nothing if not prepared for this lesson….

Or so I thought.

15 minutes in and I realised that I was already half way through my lesson plan.

This was not good. I started to panic. I tried to introduce the other modal verbs that could be used in the first conditional to drag out my lesson further. The students stared at me blankly. They mustn’t have heard of this before. I tried a few times, and then tried to get them to do a practice. My lesson was still running dangerously close to ending before I reached the 30 minute mark.

I extended some activities and at 40 minutes I had completely covered my lesson. I decided to introduce time markers. I had a brief attempt at explaining them, luckily the class understood this part, and got them to do a practice. It was at this point I realised my tutor was looking at my lesson plan in confusion. She must have finally realised that I’d covered everything. She called me over ‘You look so calm I thought you had a plan! Do you want some help?’ Thank goodness. She helped me prepare another activity and I managed to drag my last lesson to the 60 minute mark.

I really cannot explain how I managed to finish so early after so much preparation, extra detail on the grammar form and additional activities.

But it doesn’t matter, as I have now finally finished teaching!

To celebrate, one of the lovely Danish guys is arriving in Prague tonight and we are going drinking. I can’t wait!