Vegetarianizing Denmark

It occurred to me a couple weeks ago that, as proud as the Danes are of their national butter industry, and as delicious as the derivative "small cakes" (i.e., cookies) are, they don't quite constitute a balanced diet on their own. So, I set it upon myself to find some other delicious, veg-friendly, traditional Danish food with which to diversify our diet. So, as Andrea mentioned the other day, we've been eating a lot of potatoes.

But, at least within Denmark, Danish cuisine is known for a few other specialities. One that a fellow sees pretty well everywhere is smørrebrød, an open-faced sandwich with some sort of rustic (and dry!) bread, butter, meat (such as liver pate), a slice of Danish cheese, and perhaps a token vegetable or two. Supposedly it's quite filling, but I've never tried it myself.

Instead, I've designed a new and improved version, one that's probably even kosher. I won't describe exactly how it is created until the patent is approved, but you could probably reconstruct it from the picture to the right. The key insight is to replace the meat (uck!) with delicious little red lentils. And then, presto!, you have vegetarian, traditional Danish food!

Fortunately, we don't have any Danish readers, because I gather from my research colleagues that my claims here are kind of similar to inventing a new improved version of ice hockey that doesn't use sticks.  But at least now on some nights we eat more than just potatoes for dinner and cookies for dessert!

The Potato Holiday

There is no Thanksgiving in Denmark, instead there is the autumn break. This holiday does not have any religious reasons. It is just a much needed break in the middle of autumn, always week #42, a Danish school holiday giving kids some time off from school and families some time off from work. In the old days, schools closed because the extra hands were needed to help with the potato harvest, which used to be essential in the Danish diet. 

Potatoes have recently become a fundamental staple in Sean's and my diet, despite my previous dislike of potatoes and a preference for yams. Sean has made continuous attempts to hide potatoes in various dishes and I have been tricked into eating them time and time again. Now I have come to tolerate them, and even enjoy them, especially since they are cheap and don’t die in the fridge after a week if you forget about them.

The Danes call this holiday Efterårsferie (Autumn holiday) or Kartoffelferie (Potato holiday) and it is the only holiday during the fall. Unfortunately, the university does not officially support this break so I won’t be getting extra play time with Sean.

Since I like mingling among the crowds – I will be out in the streets to enjoy the festivities of this holiday and hopefully collect a couple of cans for my winter coat, as today was the first time I felt a chill in my bones. Rumour has it that many people from the Jutland area come to Aarhus, the big city, this week to shop and enjoy city life and several cultural events for familiars take place. So, the crowds should be really big.

Superstitions and short beds

"Don't step on a crack or you'll break your mother's back" is a superstition or famous rhyme us kids played and tried to do, that is, when we remembered. It was just a childish superstition, as we do not see thousands of mothers walking around with broken backs. I’m unsure this is a game played in Aarhus, as cobblestone streets makes crack stepping unavoidable. So, like many others out there in the world, I still play by the rules with some superstitions such as, not walking under ladders or crossing in front of a black cat or breaking a mirror or spilling salt at the table and so on, as I want to avoid something terrible happening to me.


 These beliefs get passed down from the generation before us; however, we often act without knowing the reasons why. I learned of an interesting superstition, a Danish one, when we visited "The Old City" – an outdoor museum in Aarhus. Here you go back in time between the years 1700-1900 and you get to walk into the houses and shops and get a glimpse of what life was like back then.
One thing that stood out was that in several of the homes the beds were half the length of regular beds, but the adults were not as short as children.
The reason for this is that some of the Danes believed then that if one were to lay down to sleep that the soul would exit the body through the mouth – a tragedy. To avoid this, beds were made short, padded with pillows, and a person slept sitting up.


Personally, I choose to take a chance with losing my soul and like to sleep horizontally but can you imagine if you truly believed this? If you fear the worst, to keep safe it is believed that if you hang a horseshoe above your front doorway it will catch good luck and ward off evil. Sweet dreams.

Evidence

Dinner last night wasn't the healthiest we've had

A one stop shop!

“Everything in closed on Sunday, so you better stock up at the grocery store which closes in thirty minutes,” said the guy at the front desk of the grimy Hamburg Hostel. I booked us into a twin room, it was cheaper than the double, and we ended up with a bunk bed - not such a good deal after all. We relocated the mattresses to the floor only to find used tissues and a dust bunny the size of a tumble weed under the bed. We made sure to consume enough beer so we could forget the mess and get some shuteye.

We rose early, although not the most restful sleep, but the one thing that we were positive we could get up to on a Sunday was the Fischmarkt. At 6:30 am the front desk guy gave us detailed directions to our destination that included riding on a bus, a train, and a ferry when it didn't look that complicated on the map. Lucky for us, Sean checked the map since the bus only came every hour and we had just missed it and we made a much more direct route.

We thought the Fischmarkt might be like Granville Island Market in Vancouver or the Pike Place Market in Seattle, or maybe it would just be a couple of stalls, but it was so much more.

There were dozens upon dozens of fish auction halls, also known as stalls, spread out along the port, flower auctions at opposite ends with sellers yelling out prices and people bidding below, and fanciful fruit baskets for 8 Euro at every turn - and I just had to have one of those. I really just wanted the basket and the fruit was an added bonus, which happened to weigh 10 kilograms. The spectacle at the Fischmarkt attracted both the early morning risers (that was us) and the all night partiers desperate for a fish sandwich – some grease is often required to absorb alcohol, or at least this is what I believe whenever I eat pizza at 3:00 am.  And wouldn’t you know, at 8 in the morning, we followed the sound of a live band into a warehouse and joined in with the festivities of yesterday’s still ongoing party, at Oktoberfest.

Sundays in Europe are different then I am use to, one cannot go out to grocery shop or head to the mall to fill the time – but if you wander out of your cozy apartment (or a grimy hostel), you never know what you may stumble upon. Such as the Red Light District, which we can confirm is always open for business.

P.S. There was no way two of us were going to devour all the fruit before our trip was up – so that fruit came all the way back to Denmark with us.

Day Tripper

A cool aspect of living in Århus is that you can nip off on a four and a half hour train ride to the third largest port in the world (next to London and New York). Nine hours of trains for a weekend trip might sound rather intense, until you consider how long is a bus ride to Swartz Bay, a ferry across the channel, and a subsequent bus/train ride to downtown Vancouver. Here one might not see orcas nor eagles, but the rural Danish/German landscape has its own charming appeal.

Andrea and I both love visiting Germany. The cities are overwhelmingly large, and it seems that everything else is correspondingly large, as well.  For 1.89 euro, you can find Ritter Sport bars the size of a dinner plate.  Cups of ice cream come with three flavours and a mountain of whipped cream.
And there's always a spectacular Botaniske Have.
In Århus, we live beside the Botaniske Have, and it makes for a very pleasant twenty minute walk to make one's way around it's perimetre.  In Hamborg, we ventured through for about 90 minutes, from roses to cacti to olive trees, and still missed the majority of what was to see.  But we had little choice, if we were going to walk the hundreds of rooms of Picassos and Cezannes at the kunsthalle before it closed.

So, really, given the nature of these cities, it's good that we're only there for a weekend.  Even by the end of that, we're starting to feel a little "groß" (pronounced "gross") ourselves...

PS. Can you spot the difference between these two photos?

Nürnberg, Oct/2011

Hamborg, Oct/2013

Two Hours of Danish Lessons a Day

The apartment that we've subletted is fully equipped. Really. It's brilliant. C&K left us not just the wine glasses and frying pans, but the balcony plants, dvd collection, and third year Psychology lecture notes.  The only thing that we had to add was a can opener.

There does seem to be a disproportionate assortment of chick flicks among the dvd collection.  But I'm starting to get into them in a way.  After a long day at work, followed by training and cooking dinner and what-not, it's a sure daunting thought of putting in a couple more hours of Danish language learning. So, sometimes I'll just pop in a chick flick instead.

It seems to be a good approach to learning when I turn on the Danish subtitles.  Everything is translated for me out loud as I "read" the movie. I miss a line here and there that I don't quite hear, and I miss some of the stunning visual effects, but it is amazing how many new words one picks up.  I also tried this with Phantom of the Opera, rather than a chick flick, but the difference there was that the characters were engaging and the plot wasn't trite and predictable.  So I found myself wanting to actually watch the film, and quite peeved when I missed a key plot detail because I couldn't understand it in Danish.

We also tried it the other direction, watching a Danish programme with English subtitles.  The trouble was, the English subtitles are completely incomprehensible. What on Earth does "You know how we management Johnnies get ticklish about the archives" mean?

Anyway, the point of this post is that you shouldn't ask me for any movie recommendations in the next month or two.

A New Beginning

Before Andrea and I expatriated ourselves about 45 days ago, we made promises as nonchalantly as we turfed decade-old possessions into the Hartland land fill.  One of those promises was that I told everyone that Andrea would begin to blog of her adventures abroad. But to understand why you're hearing from me instead, and so late at that, I have to share a recent story.

In Denmark, Scandinavia as a whole, in fact, one gets an entire krone (almost 20 cents) for just one bottle or can return.  Find six hundred cans and you can buy a nice winter jacket.  And, by the time you've wandered about enough to find six hundred cans, you've gotten a good deal more exercise than if you'd been busking, instead.

My salary is good, but we weren't really very sure how far it would take us in an expensive country like Denmark; so, based on some conservative preliminary budgeting, we figured it wouldn't hurt if Andrea could scrape together, I don't know, say, $7/day, and preferably without deep-frying cow carcasses inside yellowy-orange, plastic buildings for an hour. Cans seemed like the perfect option.

But after a month in Århus, she still had not found a single can.  This, despite having wandered hours over the city joining Toastmasters groups, volunteering at student bars until 5 in the morning, and searching every alcove for coffee that I wouldn't dump down the sink.  So, on Saturday, I grabbed her by the hand and led her on a short walk through the university, to return the 30 or so empty beer cans that I had begrudgingly produced for her.  She emerged with enough money to buy herself a tasty little cortado, or one twentieth of a jacket, if you prefer.  On the walk home, she found another 30 cans, and had to go back to the return kiosk.  Every day since, she returns from her daily adventures with some four, five, six cans and a clearer idea of which jacket she would like.

So this is what I have learned about her since a fair while ago.  In general, she is very open-minded and enjoys new experiments, adventures, and escapades.  She just needs a good shove from behind to get going.  I suspect that soon now you'll hear the afore-promised stories more often and not written by me.