One for the Blog

Today, I did something.

I took the level placement test for my Danish classes!  I don’t think I’ll start until early January (if they even have room for me then) but I’m on the road!  I’m applied and everything!  Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how I did because the tester didn’t, and I was too scared to ask.  Scared that either 1) they wouldn’t tell me or 2) they would, and I would be disappointed.  So I guess it’ll just have to be a surprise when I get called in to start classes!  She said I was pretty good, so I’m not particularly worried about starting at the bottom, so I’m okay with the “surprise factor” for now.  I’ll just try not to think about it too much and get my curiosity a-stirring.

But that’s not really the part I wanted to talk about.

i was really nervous about this.  Like, really super belly-dropping nervous.  Of course I was nervous to be “evaluated” and to have to talk to a stranger in Danish (while being nervous) but mostly I was nervous about the journey there.  I’m a big fan of public transport, don’t get me wrong, but I’m still not comfortable using it here in Copenhagen.  I decided on a route last night that would take me onto two busses I’ve ridden before, and I figured that was that.  I would be golden!

Well, I got on the first bus just fine, using my handy-dandy blue-spot travel card.  You can use this all over Denmark and just have to check in and out on the blue spots when you start and end a trip.  Anyway, the first bus and the bus transfer went surprisingly well.  I was able to find where the other bus stopped and it came and I got on it and everything!  But things went downhill from there.  Apparently there has been some sort of adjustment to the route and it went to a certain station and just…..turned around.  And started going back.  And I started panicking!  I asked the bus driver if he didn’t stop at the stop that I needed, and he just said “No, I turned around.” So I got off at the next possible stop (a good three quarters of a mile from where I had to be in 9 minutes!).  So, I hesitated for a second realizing that I could have just stayed on the bus, and gone home and done it again tomorrow OR I could make a run for it.

Good thing I started running this summer because otherwise I don’t think I would’ve made it!  As it was, I made it with 2 minutes to spare and was shown into the room with four or five other women, completely breathless and red in the face.  Whoohoo!

un-under-over-qualified

So the other day I dipped my baby toe into the world of job searching.  I found a pretty standard job search site, which, while it was in Danish, I could figure out pretty well.  Then it all sort of went to hell.

I have no idea what I can do here.  I occasionally curse myself for not having a very valuable college degree, and not a whole lot of work experience.  I don’t know how to make a Danish CV (although I’m sure Andreas and probably the job center can help me out with that when I’m ready) and I don’t know what I’m qualified to do.  I don’t know how far I can get with the Danish skills that I’ve taught myself, and I fear that it’s nowhere near far enough.  There are a few jobs I think I’d like, but besides the possible language barrier, I don’t know if you have to have any specific education to have that sort of position (a helper at a daycare).  The ads didn’t mention anything like that, and although I’m sure they could let me know, if I called, I’m not quite to that point yet.

I’m not feeling particularly discouraged, (surprisingly, considering my history of being easily discouraged) but I am feeling a bit confused and leery.  I’d like to have work, but I should first probably concentrate on wedging myself into a Danish class as soon as I can.  I have a feeling I’ll have to pass a certain level before I can start midwifery school (if I even get into midwifery school) so that’s the priority, really, but I am also looking forward to maybe being able to contribute a bit, and since we’ve just moved and still need to buy quite a few things, we could use the extra money!

I’ll do a better search another day, maybe with Andreas peeking over my shoulder, and then after that see what the job center can help me with, but first, I’ll see what I can do about these Danish classes…

It’s really strange, having things to arrange and think about.  I have to shift out of neutral and get to work, but it’s pretty hard, considering I’ve been keeping myself in neutral for a pretty long period of time…we’ll see how much luck I have on that front…

Anyway, I almost blogged every day in November, and am pretty excited about that!  Now for the first day of December, and a nearby flea market!

Close Call

As I was in bed, just about falling asleep, I remembered that I did not blog today! So, with 24 minutes to spare, I let the bright laptop light assault my eyes, just for you guys!

I wanted to touch upon something kind of huge that happened yesterday.  I got a Danish personnummer!  It’s sort of like a social security number, only not nearly as secret.  Andreas decided to take off early so we could go to the office together (since he had to go too, to move his address back to Denmark from Sweden).  The nearest office was only about a 10 minute walk away, but when we arrived, we were informed that only one office in Copenhagen handles “moving-in” so we scooted off to the bus stop and were lucky enough to make it to the central office pretty quickly.  The wait wasn’t long, and while there was a hiccup in putting in the data, everything went smoothly.  It didn’t feel hard-won or difficult.  It felt really easy.

I thought I might get a packet…something like “Welcome to Denmark, Foreigner!” but I only got a piece of paper with my personnummer on it, that I can use until I get the actual card.  This (I think) means I can do all sorts of official things now, like get a bank account, sign up for language courses, etc.  Now, I haven’t done any of those things yet (I’ll figure them out with Andreas as we get to them) but it’s still exciting that I CAN!

In other news, the construction workers managed to flood my kitchen today (which resulted in a short circuit and turned off all the power in my apartment).  Luckily, I’m not completely helpless (sometimes), so I was able to sop up the mess, figure out which socket was shorting and turn the power back on myself.  The fact that I couldn’t watch Netflix unless I fixed it was motivation enough.

 

Coming Home

We’re back in Copenhagen, after a weekend in Odense, visiting Andreas’s family and having our first Thanksgiving!  It was also Andreas’s and my first Thanksgiving as a couple.  Even though all the time apart during dating and even after we were married was difficult, it’s kind of exciting that we still have some firsts to experience together.

This weekend, was also the time I felt most at home with Andreas’s family.  He stayed in Copenhagen to party it up (read: play indoor hockey) with some of his coworkers, so he wasn’t around for Friday, or a lot of Saturday (seeing as he was so tired from being out late the night before that he fell asleep at 8 pm) but it didn’t seem to really make a difference to me.  I definitely missed him still when he was gone (just because we’ve spent nearly a year apart in the past, doesn’t mean that I still don’t miss him when he’s gone for a day), but I was perfectly fine hanging out with his family on my own.  Just another thing to scribble onto the long list of things I’m grateful for this year.

Anyway, coming back home was wonderful, because we finally have one!  I really feel finally like we’re coming home.  Not coming to that place we’re staying for a few months while we wait to move to the next place we’ll stay for a few months.  So even though we’re missing a lot of important house-y things, I’m feeling more at home (in this particular apartment, and in Denmark in general) than I’ve felt in a long time, and that, I think, is really, really good for me.

I thought that making the Thanksgiving dinner my family makes would stave off my homesickness, and it did, in a way.  But to be honest, I was a lot less homesick than I thought I might be.  I couldn’t feel so lonely or far away from my home and family when I also feel like Denmark is my home and Andreas’s family also belongs a little bit to me.

PS–I still miss my family.

My First Danish Thanksgiving

So this year was the first year that I wasn’t home with my family in Central Wisconsin for Thanksgiving.  I anticipated the homesickness, especially since Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, so I decided to make everything exactly how my family makes it back home.  And it was awesome.

The menu included:

Chicken (not a turkey, since there were only four meat-eaters, and turkeys are ridiculously expensive in Denmark anyways)

Mashed potatoes with gravy (and mushroom gravy for me!  Usually I don’t get any gravy at Thanksgiving, so this was a huge improvement)

Sweet potatoes- These fell flat.  I didn’t cook them quite long enough or add enough butter or something, so they were pretty bad, but I’ll do it better next year.

Stuffing/Dressing- This caused a whole lot of controversy (“it’s not dressing!” “Well, it’s not stuffing, you don’t stuff it into anything” etc.) but was well-received.  I think it was the thing we were all most skeptical about, but it turned out great!  I almost always end up cutting the bread into too large of chunks (even when I try really hard not to) but I think I got it just right this year.  I even put mushrooms in (in an attempt to make it as Moserish as possible) and I thought it was fantastic!  I think I’m slowly winning the battle in willing myself to like mushrooms.

Fresh veggies and dip-This is fairly self-expanatory, but was also well-received, especially the dip which I had to improvise

Applesauce/Cranberry sauce- I don’t think most of the Danish family cared much about this, but I love it, and I’m kind of glad they didn’t eat so much of it because there’s more left for meeeee!

Pumpkin Pan Rolls- there was so much other food, that not a lot of these were eaten, but they work better for breakfast anyway, so we’ll see how they’re received tomorrow.

Celery with Cream cheese- This is something that my family does at Thanksgiving, and it’s one of my mom’s favorites, so I had to have it!  Usually the youngest in the family makes them, but I had Andreas make them, and he did a stunner job   Anyway, we used garlic cream cheese, and they tasted even more fantastic than usual.  I was pretty sure the Danes would think it was pretty weird, but they really liked them!

Pumpkin Pie- my family usually eats pumpkin pie for breakfast on Thanksgiving day, but I knew I couldn’t convince the whole family here to do so, so we had it for afternoon coffee, and it went well!  They liked it for the most part, even though it looked pretty weird, and I was glad since pumpkin pie is one of my favorite things to eat!

The thing that was on the menu, but not on the table, was a tray of assorted pickles and olives.  I bought them…but…you know, forgot to put them on the table.  No big deal!  We might have leftovers tomorrow, and we can add them then, otherwise I just get to eat a lot of pickles and olives over the next several weeks, and that’s fine with me, too…

The day was perfect, we all made dinner together and hung out and teased, and the actual food went over better than I thought it would, so I’m happy.  I was so happy I almost cried during dinner…(shh, don’t tell!)  It’s definitely a holiday I’ll be stubbornly celebrating every year in the wrong country!

I LOVE THANKSGIVING!

EDIT: We also had fruit salad, a staple of Moser Thanksgivings, but we were too full to eat it, so it became a nighttime snack, and it was great.  Note to self: fruit salad with whipped cream is awesome.

Negative Nancy

A lot of the time, I’m really happy.  I finally got my Danish visa, we’re finally moved into a place of our own (with our own furniture!) and things are generally going really well.  But sometimes, I still get down, and go all Negative Nancy, like I have been the last day or so.  I’m happy to finally be building our home together, but sometimes it’s really frustrating to be in this little period of not-quite-there-yet.  We don’t have any plates or bowls (or mixing bowls or baking dishes) and only a couple pots and three plastic cooking utensils.  That’s pretty annoying.

Our internet, which was supposed to be up yesterday isn’t up.  I think there’s something wrong with our phone line (through which we’re getting the internet) and it might not be up for a while.  In the mean time, I can occasionally connect to some random open network that works when you sit near the living room window.  That’s pretty annoying, too.

The grocery stores here are filled with meat.  I knew this.  I remembered it from all of my visits before, but the lack of things I can eat is really frustrating, especially when we’re looking for convenient foods that we can cook with our two pots.

Meanwhile it’s gray outside, and I’m getting a little tired of being cut off from the outside world and chain-watching Friends while I switch between my knitting project and Skyburger on the kindle.

It will get much better soon, but I’m having to work pretty hard to not get consistently frustrated.  Meanwhile, I leave Friday morning to Thanksgiving Weekend at my in-laws!  Andreas is staying here for a fun night with his fellow coders, so I’ll be doing most of the prep and cooking with my sister and mother-in-law!  I’m excited, but I wish Andreas could be with us.  My favorite part about Thanksgiving is everyone doing everything together!

In other news we got fantastic new duvets (and duvet covers!)

Danish Plumbers and lessons in Danish

 

So, as we were moving into our new apartment several days ago, we happened to turn on the kitchen tap to do something as innocuous as fill a glass with water, you know, to drink.  And the faucet hasn’t stopped running.

I’m slightly exaggerating, but it’s leaking pretty badly, running about 2 liters of water an hour, and since my dad the handyman still lives in the US (what’s that about anyway?) we had to call the plumber’s!

Our landlord and Andreas set everything up, but I’m the designated stay-at-home-and-wait-for-things person, and I did just that.  The appointment was for this morning at eight, but he dropped by yesterday just to see what he’d need to take along, and how to turn off the water and other important plumber-y things like that.  (And I found out how to work the buzzer!)  When he announced himself at the door, it sounded like gibberish.  It sounded like I have never learned or heard a word of Danish in my life, so I quickly told him I don’t understand Danish so well, and he switched to English.  I learned that our kitchen faucet is “bad….very bad…” which I already knew, seeing as the hot and cold water taps are backwards, the hot water handle is loose and wiggly and…you know…it leaks a lot.

Today he came at around the right time, and has switched back to Danish!  I can understand him much better for whatever reason (I think the Danish word for “plumber” which I’ve never heard before threw me off) and he’s there with our super in the kitchen clanking around and mumbling.  So far, I definitely like Danish plumbers.  He seems lovely and a bit jolly, and lets me abscond into my corner of the couch, and I haven’t seen his buttcrack once!

This was also my first real contact with a Dane who wasn’t part of my family, and it’s brought a few aspects of my language learning to light.  First of all, it’s a lot harder for me to understand people I don’t know.  I need to be more used to the rhythm of a person’s speech.  I can understand almost everything Andreas, his sister, and his mom say, most of what the rest of his family says, and maybe about half of what regular people say.  I’ve also learned that I’m not exactly sure how to be polite in Danish.  Polite is my default setting, and since I’m just learning Danish by ear, I think I’ve been learning pretty informal ways of saying things.  To make up for what might be too familiar or not the most polite speech, I smile a lot.  Now, I generally smile a lot, but I’ve noticed I smile a lot more when I speak Danish, just to get my point across that I am not grumpy or rude, and that it’s alright to laugh along with me as I stumble through my real-world Danish lessons.

And now the plumber is finished, and he even put on a whole new faucet and knobs!  How exciting!  Hmmmm….I just realized I got excited over a kitchen faucet, and the other day I caught myself paging through the grocery store ads without skipping straight to the candy page.  If this is what being a grown-up feels like, it’s not so bad after all.

Busy!

I have been busy!

The past several months I’ve been vaguely wondering to myself how I’ll be able to handle it when I’m busy.  I’ve felt stressed out and anxious just being a housewife and waiting for visas, and I thought “how am I going to survive when I actually have stuff to be stressed out about?!”

It turns out that my anxiety is pretty much the same, no matter how much stuff I have going on in my life.  If I don’t have things to feel stressed about, I feel anxious about leaving the house.  If I don’t have to leave the house, I feel anxious that I *should* leave the house.  The past few days have been sort of a whirlwind, and we have a lot to figure out, but I feel just as or even less stressed than I normally do.  I’m perfectly confident that when I have to start language classes, I’ll definitely be nervous, but I’ll be fine.  I won’t fall to pieces.  I’ll just sweat a lot, stutter a bit, and be perfectly fine.

If anything, having real things to stress about really helps my anxiety.  Last week, I was preoccupied with getting an apartment, and as I got myself ready to run to knitting group, I realized that I was so preoccupied that I wasn’t even nervous!  I just kissed Andreas, ran out the door, and was fine!

Anyway, before I start anything life-changing like going to class multiple times a week, we have to complete the actual move.  We’re hopfeully moving most of our stuff tomorrow, so I’ve been a packing maniac today!  It started off slow, but has picked up and I’m nearly finished already!  We’re not going to move in completely until we have internet there, so we can look important stuff up like how to get places and “leaky faucet fixes,” so until then we’re going to be staying in Sweden, but without all of our stuff.  Should be fun.

This is my life today:

Voting Day: Is America Really #1?

So today is the day Americans choose their president!  I’m going to try to write as politically neutral post as possible, but I wanted to address something I’ve been seeing on my newsfeed all afternoon.  There are certain times of year when patriotism suddenly peaks: the 4th of July, Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, etc. aaaaaand election day.

Most people who know me know that I am not a particularly patriotic person, so in general I try to ignore these surges in American pride, but there are two things that really get me.  “America is the greatest country on earth.”  and “We’re #1!”

First of all, who decided that America is the greatest country on earth?  Oh yeah, Americans.  You know, if anyone ever names themselves the “greatest” anything, it probably means that a) they’re not the greatest and b) they’re really arrogant.  Now, I wouldn’t call myself “worldly” by any means, but within my limited experiences outside of America, I’ve seen other countries, and their citizens, doing things so much better than the states does them, from tax and healthcare systems to how safe one feels walking the streets (or you know, leaving their baby out on the street) to their very ideas about patriotism.

In Denmark, you see the Danish flag everywhere, but not in the same way as you see American flags.  An American flag most often signifies pride in their country, and goes back to that “we’re #1″ feeling that almost always accompanies American patriotism. Danish patriotism is, I guess, a bit softer.  Danish flags are used for celebrations that don’t really have anything to do with patriotism at all.  They’re used to decorate birthday cakes, and during any and all parties (New Years, Christmas, etc.) They think Denmark is great, but they don’t take it so far as to say they are the best, no questions asked.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think it’s dangerous (yup, dangerous) to believe that you’re the best.  If you’re the best, where can you go from there?  You can’t be the bester.  Saying that America is the number one country on earth is like saying they do everything better than everyone else, and I think this is partly why people over here in Europe tend to roll their eyes at us.  How is America going to get out of the dunghole it’s gotten itself into if they still think they’re the bee’s knees?  How is denying that we have problems going to help us solve them?

The United States of America is great, and they do a lot of things well.  You get free drink refills and candy doesn’t cost as much as a car (and your car doesn’t cost as much as a house), but the US has a lot of work to do before it can even try to proclaim itself as the best country in the world, and it could start by working on humility.

Copenhagen Apartment Search Part 1 (of God-knows-how-many)

When I first got news of my residence card in Denmark, we knew we’d need an apartment as quickly as possible.  We signed up immediately with Herlev Kommune, who can help with placing you if you want to switch apartments in or move to Herlev.  They don’t have a waiting list, but rather take customers according to need.  They took our application but we can’t be sure we’ll get anything soon, or even at all, considering after a few follow-up phone calls, we found out that they currently have more than 800 accepted applications.

After waiting a tentative few weeks to see if we would get a gold-mine of a letter from Herlev, we knew it was time to move on and start our own active search.  To be fair, I thought we should right away, but tried to be patient since Andreas wanted to wait.  Now, however, we’re both on board, and I’ve been browsing the Danish equivalent of Craigslist (although more official, as far as I can tell).  I sent out a few emails throughout the week, and we saw two apartments today, one which we decided not to pursue, and the other which we wanted, but didn’t get.

I know that apartment-hunting takes patience, and I can’t expect to magically get the ones we want, but it feels sometimes that our choices are few and far between, and I can’t help but feel completely disappointed that we didn’t get the apartment we checked out today (it had a washing machine!).  It was also located in a really quiet neighborhood, close to the train station and lots of shopping options, but I’m trying not to think about it too much.  I know that more opportunities will present themselves, and that it just wasn’t…meant to be, I guess.

I’m not, however, looking forward to starting over with the search, refreshing the “apartments” page every quarter of an hour.  We’re looking more into paying a subscription for one of the apartment-search sites, and hope that gives us more options.

Let’s just hope Part 2 of the search ends with fewer tears and a smidge of success.