Nothing Like a Dane by Keri Bloomfield

Author:Keri Bloomfield [Bloomfield, Keri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: living abroad, Denmark, New Zealand, hygge, emigration
Published: 2022-02-23T12:22:45+00:00

Arriving home, I refrained from throwing my bike down the steep steps into the basement. The steps were on view to the street, enabling our neighbours’ front row seats to be entertained with my daily Bambi on Ice impersonations as I failed miserably to retrieve and return my bike elegantly from the basement. Others effortlessly wheeled their bikes up and down the concrete ramp one handed, rather than clinging onto it for dear life as I did – yet another thing to master.

Entering our apartment, I began shedding my outer layers. Around the corner I could hear The Dane in the kitchen preparing dinner with BBB at his feet wrestling a toy butterfly.

“How was it?” he asked.

“Okay,” I lied, deciding not to share my uselessness at verb identification just yet.

“I start in Week 32. When’s that?” I asked.

“It’s in Week 32. After Week 31,” he unhelpfully informed me while continuing to stir the white sauce in front of him.

I resisted the urge to clobber him over the ears.

“Week 1 is the first week of the year, and week 52 is the last week of the year. And everything else in-between is numbered accordingly,” he elaborated.

“And everyone calls them that? It’s an official thing? This naming of the weeks?”

“Of course it is,” The Dane replied, oblivious that many of us didn’t organise our lives by numbers. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

No. No it doesn’t. Not at all.

Looking at the wall calendar I had four weeks until I began my Danish language classes. Hopefully that was going to be enough time to work out what a verb was.

The week system is the habit the majority of Danes use, referring to each week of the year by its number. It makes a lot of sense in a predictable and efficient Danish sort of way, but for those of us who have never referred to weeks by their number, it provides a few challenges. There is no early August or mid-August, Denmark is a precise land in which it will either be Week 32 or Week 34.

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