Archive for May, 2008

Seriously, she can’t sing. She didn’t win, but Armenia did quite well. I don’t get it. Is all of Eastern Europe just tone deaf or what? 

On another note, I find it disrespectful to screw up a person’s name in any instance where it’s easy not to. If I write you an email, and you’re replying to it, my name is in front of your face. You have no excuse to spell it wrong. If you don’t take the time to look at my name before typing it again (or hell, you can even copy and paste it!), then you don’t care, and that’s disrespectful. If I introduce myself to you, and you immediately reply calling me some shortened version of my name, that’s disrespectful. If someone says, “hi, I’m Jennifer” and they don’t follow it up with, “but you can call me Jenny,” then you have to assume that you can’t call her Jenny. The end. To assume otherwise is disrespectful. 

My name is Lorry. Not Lori. Not Lorrie. Not Laurie. Not Larry. Not Lor. Lorry. My husband is Thomas. Not Tomás. Not Tommy. Not Tom. Not Tomboy. Thomas. Got it? Good.

Comment from old blog

I too get annoyed when I tell people that my name is cristine and they start calling me something shortened. why do they do that?? as you can see I have no H in my name and as i spell it out to people, they put the H in. they obviously are not listening. so why do they ask me to spell it??
Cristine | 2008-06-22 16:07

That woman for Armenia can’t sing at all. Why did that get through but not The Netherlands?

I have mentioned before that I don’t like strollers. The devices that Danes put their infants in are larger, more elaborate contraptions than what Americans do, and I prefer to call them prams. It sounds like something bigger and more substantial than stroller, IMO. Regardless, I don’t like them much either. Even so, put aside the fact that I have no desire to own or use one and admit that some of them look kinda cute. This post isn’t about the cute ones, though. 

Seriously, am I the only one who thinks some of these prams look as if they were designed by the same people who make coffins and hearses? I wish I had a picture of one I saw being pushed around Hellerup this morning. It was baby blue, but they still managed to make it look like a wheeled baby coffin. What’s the attraction to that? I don’t get it.

Thomas had Thursday and Friday off. He’s not sure if the day off is because of Ascension or because of International Workers’ Day, both of which happened to fall on Thursday this year. Regardless of the official reason, the overwhelming majority of Danes only care about the latter. We went to Fælledparken to see what sort of festivities there would be. As it turns out, there was also a football (soccer) match that day between the yellow and blue people and the blue and white people. That is about as much interest I have in football, but a lot of other people cared a lot more and were prompted to consume copious amounts of beer in honor of their preferred team. Walking from the train station to Fælledparken, we were a part of a large mass of similarly travelling folk, many of whom were drunk and/or drinking (unlike in the US, it’s completely legal to stumble around with your open bottle in hand, much less towing several cases behind you in a wagon). Several men had to stop along the way to piss against whatever fence or wall happened to be nearby. 

Once we got to the park, we found lots of booths with overpriced fair-type foods, or promoting various political causes such as freeing Palestine, freeing Kurdistan, freeing Tibet, etc. There were stages set up, some empty, and some with people reading or shouting in Danish, probably about freeing countries. At some point I could vaguely make out what I believe to have been a woman singing the Danish “Internationale.” Really, it was not much unlike many rallies I went to in college, except much larger and with more drunk people. Had the weather been more agreeable, we might have stayed longer, but it wasn’t really a “be outside” kind of day, so we cut it short and went to see Iron Man instead. 

Yes, on Thursday. Peculiar, but not unappreciated: a non-Danish movie was released in Denmark before it was in the US. Iron Man came out on Wednesday, a full two days before the US release. I hate reading spoilers so I never give any, and this is all I’m going to say about it: I liked it. 

Friday was “Orange Friday” which is an annual promotion from DSB (the train and bus people) making train travel dirt cheap. We went to Odense for the day, and it cost about 25% of what it would normally. We used our Copenhagen Zoo year passes to get free admission to the Odense Zoo. I will be uploading pictures eventually. It is not as big and impressive as Copenhagen Zoo, but I liked it a lot. They have an “oceanarium” with one of those aquariums you walk through, and the animals are above you as well as to the sides. (Like in Underwater Adventures, for you MOA folk, but smaller and with no moving sidewalk.) They have several manatee which is pretty cool. They are opening a new tiger habitat next week so we were a bit early to see that, but we did see a snow leopard chowing down on some raw turkey. Yummm. 

Today we went to The Bagel Co. near Forum and I had a bagel for the first time since moving here. Most places I’ve been to here have screwed up whatever food they are claiming to serve (in case you forgot my Mexican food entry!) but these were actually good bagels! They make bagel sandwiches, really. My bagel was sun-dried tomato. I got an “omelet” sandwich with egg, bacon, and melted cheddar. The have some standards, but then you get to pick toppings, kinda like at a Subway. I got plain cream cheese and tomato added to my omelet bagel. The guy behind the counter was American, but for whatever reason he only spoke Danish to me. Perhaps he was confused because Thomas was speaking Danish and I was speaking English, or perhaps he just didn’t notice? I didn’t mind, since I could still understand him, but I thought it was kinda funny since I had just heard him speaking English to another customer. Anyway, I really enjoyed my bagel. They also sell Oreos and brownies at this place. It was almost like being in America, except for everyone speaking Danish. And except for the bagel sandwich costing nearly 50 kroner. We can’t afford to go every day or anything, but I definitely know where to go for my next bagel craving. If it weren’t such a tiny establishment, I’d make one of my American Expat meets there, but it was just big enough for four people to stand there and look at the menu and that’s about it.