Reading between the lines really becomes a life skill when language-hopping is involved. Maybe it’s easier to give up language altogether and just paint or draw what you see, avoid any talking, and subsequently give up the use of words, completely.

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Thus I was exploring Copenhagen in felt pens, pencil drawings and creating my studies in water colours. This is how the 2010-11 winter looked for me.  Making heaps of the free- hand sketches of the castle towers, completing many windy walks along Fridriksholm kanal and the harbour promenades, inside the Castle Island , drinking ever more warming cups of coffee, and going for long  life-saving museum visits. The first winter in Denmark was seemingly ALWAYS windy and freezing cold.  The snow fell in November and still hadn’t melted even by the end of March.

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My best investment in the first lean year in “Scandinavia world” was buying  a bushy fox fur at a flea market, complete with the claws and eyes, and turning it into the luxurious warm collar with a golden button to fit over a frilly English winter coat. The other trick was learning to cycle in the light snowfall with two shopping baskets, front and rear, full of milk and Danish rye bread, and going for a 5 km run without slipping off the path.

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Eventually I acquired an ability to talk to Danes, those allegedly open Scandinavians, who all can speak a bit of perfect English, but in reality are very determined to keep it a one way street in their social life and be as silent as possible alongside other humans. You must be joking when you say the English are reserved. Try speaking to a Dane, and get a third of a paragraph out of them.

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However, every rule has an exception, namely my stylish sixty-year-old Danish language teacher, Bodil, who invited us all for a Christmas risalemand  party. Risalemand itself is a sort of a dessert, a rice pudding with lots of full-fat milk, cream, and almonds inside.  She invited us 12 international students to her compact little flat in the Østerbro area of Copenhagen.

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She finally taught us to speak Danish, in just 9 months! But this Christmas party was half way through the course. A blizzard developed as the evening progressed, and most of the guests quickly lost the thread whilst talking. Most of us had learned lots of new Danish words since August, but still not enough to hold sensible small talk.  The advantage was on the German and Belgian student’s side, as these two nations have more common language points with Danish.

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Bodil’s husband was asked to speak exclusively in Danish to us, her lame thirty-plus language learners, and she served mulled wine out of a hot saucepan whilst we tried to do the talking. Lunch consisted of twelve different dishes, all brought for the collective festive meal.  It is a very Danish thing to do, called sammenspisning, which literally means bringing and sharing the food together.

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We ate delicious Bulgarian pastries, Iranian spicy balls, Belgian pasta salad, Russian vinaigrette, and a home-made guacamole by the Mexican PhD student studying Danish in order to be able to read Søren Kirkegård in the original. Having dished out all twelve platters and having displayed small presents at one end of the white clothed long table, all twelve of us sat down, hungry  to taste the array of foods, and two hours later, after many a struggling conversation in Danish, arrived at the main part (højdepunktet).

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The hostess had hidden a single almond in a large pot of rice pudding (risallemand). The lucky person who found it was to receive a present and we all waited in anticipation. The winner, a charming Kazakh with a Canadian passport, received a box containing a Rubik cube, a nice symbol for our common linguistic struggles. Our hostess also got a gift, a bright turquoise scarf bought for a mad sum of money at Illum, the department store.

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My first milestone in mastering SOME Danish finally came when I casually opened a newspaper on a train at Svanemøllen and realised that the news headlines made enough sense to want to read on, at least for 10 minutes before getting off at the main Copenhagen railway station, the impossible to pronounce Hovedbanegaard.

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My second milestone came with a conversation with my elderly Danish lady neighbour and being able to discern her brief responses.  Brief that is, because even the friendly talk about flowers peeping out in April can be treacherous, notwithstanding the sunny skies and shiny pretty leaves looking back at you from the edge of a spring lawn.

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Now, the third milestone. A five minute telephone conversation, booking an appointment at the job centre. That wasn’t so hard, but almost useless, because the job centre apparently didn’t know what having a second degree actually means, in English let alone in Danish.

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So, after five months of trying, I decided to give up calling various Danish institutions and launched a new career as … a language teacher. They all say they can speak English, but some, luckily for me, cannot get further then two sentences about their age and the name.

 

Now I can really read between the lines. I hop between English and Danish out loud, and whisper to myself in quiet Russian : my life is full of words. One day I’ll place them all in a book and illustrate with a motley array of my own pictures, all with white snowdrops on the even surface of the frozen pavements, with cobblestones. “December in Copenhagen” will be the title.

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Maya Korlas-Martin