Brady’s First Report From Copenhagen

Brady wrote this letter to his friends, and kindly cc’d us:

Hello to all,

Apologies for all the typos–danish keyboards are really weird. On the plus side, i can type some wicked letters. øøøøøøø æææææ ååååå
I hope everyone is doing well. I arrived in denmark a few days ago, and have so far been doing reasonably well. My host family is very nice, and were quite forgiving when I rolled over and slept through dinner the other day after they came in and woke me up. I’m pretty sure the 3 little girls are frightened of me, as i tromp aroudn their home, loudly speaking a language they don’t understand. The oldest of the 3, who is twelve, has a tiny bit of english, but not enough to understand me. Their home is in a really nice (read- ritzy) area known as fredricksburg, a section of copenhagen that is actually an autonomous entity, though it’s completly surrounded by the larger city. Their house is technically an apartment, but itøs a really big one. I have my own room–pink, with flowers hanging over the threshehold. Itøs dainty-tastic.

Jet lag has not been kind to me, and every night so far, i have settled in for a nap at about 6 pm and woken up the next morning. It doesnøt help that one of my alarm clocks died on the plane flight, while the other refuses to accept danish voltage. as a substitute, i have been using my itunes–i set a playlist with about 8 hours of quiet songs, followed by a cacophonous rendition of pink floyd’s ‘time’. So far this has worked, though i’m sure iøll soon learn to sleep through that, too.

The weather has been pretty bad since i arrived. This morning about 4 inches of snow fell, which shut down most of the buses and trains. I stood alone at the bus stop (amazed, of course, that there was no crowd at rush hour), unaware of the closings, for 15 minutes. At that point, two ladies went by, and both told me the same thing. Unfortunately, my danish is ‘somewhat limited’ (i can say hi and thank you, as well as the word mayor, which i saw on a subtitled episode of the simpsons the other day). A few minutes after they were gone, however, i realized that perhaps they were telling me something about the bus. I decided to walk, and saw no buses the entire way in. The Danes aren’t very good at clearing the roads or sidewalks, though they do have tiny little plows to clear the jam-packed bike lanes. The bike lanes are absolutely amazing here–they’re like roads, and at rush hours, the bikes ride bumper to bumper. There are bikes with trailers, bikes with little carts on the front, and bikes with mjultiple children in brightly-coloured snowsuits piled on behind the rider. The rules seem to be that pedestrians avoid bikers, not the other way around. I haven’t been run over yet–a victory of sorts.

This afternoon, i have another class of ‘survival danish,’ (a fast overview of key phrases, which precedes my full-on danish language class where we willuse a a book called ‘danish for ducklings’)followed by a tour of the carlsberg brewery. I hope to be able to stay awake through both.

Alright, i have rambled on enough. Across from me, a couple are discussing how trashed they were last night (from the sound of it, quite). Itøs time for me to go get lunch.

Brady