the conventions of politeness

my child has a bad habit of never saying "please." it's not that she doesn't ask nicely otherwise, it's just that the word "please" is never included without prompting. this has been bugging the hell out of me of late. in some sense, she comes by it honestly, because danish has no word for please. there are nice ways of asking for things, but no one word that just means "please." mostly, danish uses a kind of distancing technique to ease the blow of what's being asked for. "would you be so friendly as to let me off the bus" (not that anyone would ever say that particular phrase, they just fidget at your side until you get the hell out of their way.) "pray, hand me the remote," "i would like to ask for a cheeseburger." "are you so sweet as to get me another martini?" and the like.  but "please" as a word and even as a concept is curiously absent.

and naturally, this got me thinking about other linguistic politenesses. like "bless you" when someone sneezes. i remember my mom saying when i was a kid that "bless you" was a holdover from a time when people thought you sneezed out your soul, so you needed to be blessed for it go back into place after a sneeze. mom thought that was quite a ridiculous notion, as our souls could not possibly leave our bodies in that way. so we didn't say "bless you" in our family. as a result, i always felt rather awkward when someone blessed me when i sneezed - i never really knew how to react. do you say "thank you," or express some sort of relief that you still have your soul? i never really knew. let's face it, no one really believes that you're sneezing out your soul, it's today a matter of simple linguistic convention/politeness. so really, why is it that we feel a need to acknowledge when someone sneezes? we don't do it when they burp or fart. aren't bodily functions in general best left uncommented?

another politeness convention that i don't get is the notion of telling someone hello through another person. this is one that there is a word for in danish - at hilse. when signing off a phone conversation or parting from a friend, they will often say, "hils familien" - "tell your family hello." and like with "bless you," i never really know what to do with that. i end up mumbling some awkward, "please tell YOUR family hello." but really, why on earth should they do that? if i want to greet them, i'll do that myself. and if they want to greet my people, they can do it themselves. plus, there's the whole fact that i don't do it. i don't pass along their greetings. it's too awkward and frankly, my family doesn't mind. they think nothing of not being helloed by whoever i talked to on the phone that day.

what weird linguistic conventions of politeness puzzle you?

how can you house culture?

i took these photos ages ago, with my iPhone in the henie-onstad museum in norway. i neglected to note whose work they are, but i vaguely recall it was a scandinavian poet of some renown. i've been thinking a bit about culture the past few days and they seem to fit my thoughts.

it strikes me that the word culture has, like socialism, become a bit of a swear word. it provokes people with visions of snobby opera-goers or hipsters attending avante garde theatre performances or gallery openings. and of course opera and theatre and art are cultural artifacts, but isn't culture more than those things? culture is the whole of a society - the customs, the norms, the traditions, the language, the food. it's words, art, images, music, lamps, chairs.  it's also sports and concerts and films and yes, even television. it's such a broad word. but i think that sometimes we forget that.

our community is going to build a new "culture house" (or renovate the old one, that's not yet decided) and it's bringing out the community's emotions. some are provoked at the thought of latte-sipping fashionistas on the square with their little boutique doggies (an unlikely sight in the countryside, but apparently a fear, just the same). those who are provoked that art and theatre might have a place in our town want the money to go to a sports facility instead.

but it's all a matter of categorization and prioritization, isn't it? and both exhibition space and a place to play handball have their place in a community. they give us different aspects of culture. because culture is multi-faceted. and multi-fascinating. and although i'm now involved in this, i'm also an observer, an anthropologist, amazed at the breathtaking speed at which committees are formed and factions delineated. and people provoked at the notion that there might be a space for the local ladies to quilt or for the big mess of a ceramics workshop. instead of space for a bunch of sweaty people to chase a ball around.

hmm, i guess you can see which aspect of culture i prefer...

stay tuned, this isn't over yet. not by a long shot.

culture clash or the ribbons are the wrong color

whenever you enter into a new activity, you find yourself immersed in a new and sometimes bewildering culture. tho' i grew up showing horses, it's apparently very different to show horses in the US (admittedly 25 years ago) than it is in denmark.

the first thing i did was read the rulebook. i could see that all of the photos of dressage competition showed people with white saddle pads, white breeches, white gloves and white leg wraps on their horses. i found the white breeches in the rules and a paragraph that said you could wear gloves that were the same color as your coat (which had to be black) if you wished. i read that the saddle blanket should be a neutral color and could find nothing at all about the color of the boots/legwraps. but when we got to the show, it was obvious that only white would do. our black saddle pad with a hint of purple stitching and purple legwraps were not going to cut it. luckily, we could borrow a white pad and just forgo the legwraps.  it seemed to be some strange and unpredictable collusion of rules and what's in fashion.

the next thing that seemed strange was that the judge sat in a vehicle that was parked down at the end of the arena. not along the side, where she might have been able to see something, but at the far end. furthermore, the judge would honk the horn of the car when the person should begin their program. because a honking horn isn't at all going to scare a highly-strung warmblood. the weather was iffy and there were patches of showers all day long, but the judge judged on from the front seat of the car, windshield wipers flapping. i was incredulous, but everyone else seemed to consider it completely normal.

then, there were the ribbons. where i grew up, first place is blue, second is red and yellow is third. here, apparently red is first place, blue is second place and green is third. so you can see above that matilde won a first and a third in the jumping, rather than the second and sixth place that it looks like to the conditioning of my culture.

for the dressage competition, everyone is dressed and outfitted the same, so it seems very egalitarian (and thus very danish). apparently, there's more leeway and fashion at play in the jumping, as people had bright colored saddle pads and boots on their horses and one girl even wore pink britches (tho' i did hear some people expressing surprise over that). everyone has a bright, pretty fleece that they cover their horse with before and after they compete and there seems to be some fashion at work in those as well. because despite the uniform involved, people do want to express themselves.

but it's interesting, these clashes of culture. i do tend to like things that push me out of my rut, but the judge sitting inside of a car during the judging was where i drew the line. i just can't get my head around that. i can appreciate the need to stay warm and dry, but what about the need to actually be able to SEE the performance of the horse you're judging? still, i didn't hear any complaints about the scoring, so i suppose it must work (either that or people have just been culturally conditioned to accept it and not question it).

such an experience also engages many conflicting feelings...the need to belong and fit in and the need to resist. i can see that i have much more need to resist than my child has - she wants very much to belong and be like the others. so i guess i'll be buying her some white gloves, a white pad and white legwraps for the next time.

oh, and i can't resist showing you how brilliantly matilde jumped on sunday to earn those ribbons above. one of the older, more experienced girls from the riding school rode her very well. and she looked fetching in red. 

inner prudish american alive and well

it was a glorious afternoon on the beach. much better than legoland. no one was wearing any shoes at all. and sand feels gloriously wonderful on your feet. the only unpleasantness encountered was my own inner prudish american, who i was surprised to find was still there (after 12 years) and in apparent robust health. she was suitably shocked by the sight of a 60 (possibly 70)-something german woman with more than a slight mustache sunbathing topless on the beach.

i know, i know, i'm in europe, it's not unusual here. and really, after 12 years, shouldn't i stop being shocked by such things? on one hand, i really wanted to admire her and her body confidence and on the other, well, eww.... sometimes, as a member of a civil society, you have to participate in societal norms and being properly clothed in public is frankly one of those. especially if your bits are hanging down to your waist. real life is not an issue of national geographic.

but speaking of that, i do wish i'd dared to sneak a photo, if only to subject all of you to what i was subjected to...but i guess i'll have to leave it to your imagination. and honestly, we should all be thankful for that. the picture in my head is haunting enough.

am i just a prude, or is it a bit ew?

thank you for the conversation

i have now closed the comments on the it's hard to be original post below.  this conversation clearly struck a chord with makers and etsyians around the world - some who commented, some who emailed and many who visited silently. tho' i was simply blogging because i had something on my mind and i was trying to work it out (which is why i blog at all), i am surprised at the conversation that started. most of it fruitful.

it's clear that this is an issue that means a lot to a lot of people. i think it's difficult as independent artisans to protect our ideas and our creative endeavors and it seems we won't always be able to do so. we can only hope that the community around this handmade culture will foster an ethic and a set of norms and behaviors that mean that people do the right thing in giving credit to others for their ideas where credit is due. having the conversation we've had here is an important step in fostering that environment.  and for that, i thank all of you.

reason doesn't live here anymore

there will be an election in denmark sometime this year. and that's increasingly obvious from the heightened political rhetoric.  it's also obvious in the media coverage. our newspaper is, on a daily basis, turning up the heat on the sitting government coalition - investigating their policies - especially as they apply to immigrants. and the stories they've uncovered don't paint a pretty picture. they paint a picture of a government that increasingly kowtows to the conservative and foreigner-fearing dansk folkeparti.

a new law went into effect in january. it affects how foreigners in denmark are approved for both work permits and permanent residence.  it sets high standards for education (more points if you come from an arbitrary list of the world's top 20 universities) and work experience, as well as danish language skills (how you're supposed to learn passable danish outside of denmark, i'm not sure and they don't say anything about that).

when the law first passed, there was a calculator online and i put in my data and was relieved to see that i would qualify. however, i put in my husband's data and i'm afraid that he, as a native-born dane, didn't meet the point requirements. i have to wonder how many of the legislators enacting this system would qualify.

recently, information has covered several foreigners in denmark who were turned down for permanent residence:

~ one young man of afghan parentage, who is about to depart on his second mission to afghanistan as an interpreter with the danish military, was turned down because he didn't display "active citizenship." apparently serving denmark on what will now be a second dangerous mission in afghanistan isn't enough citizenship for the immigration office.

~ a young american who has been in denmark since 2003, completed a danish master's degree with top grades and is married to a dane and works in the social ministry was turned down because she didn't work enough while she completed her full-time education.

~ a young mexican woman, who has been in denmark in a full-time job for six years is denied permanent residence because her recent return to a full-time university education cancels out her six years of work experience and she has to start the qualification time over.

it makes me quite happy that i "got in" and gained permanent residence before all of this absurdity began. tho' i am increasingly worried about what kind of place i'm now a permanent resident of.  and it's not just on the immigration front - yesterday, it came out that the new media agreement that funds the state-owned danish radio - which has a fleet of channels on both television and radio - mandates that they are now to "give special weight to the christian cultural heritage." excuse me? but WTF? denmark is one of the most secular places i've ever seen. the people attend church only for the big events...birth, marriage, death and the odd christmas service. that the national television station has to have a christian bent is absurd beyond belief and cannot be what the people in this democracy actually want. it's nothing more than a thinly veiled stab at other religions, especially islam.  and it's worrying, to say the least.

but all over europe these conservative, we-must-keep-ourselves-to-ourselves parties are on the rise - whether it's geert wilders in the netherlands or the sweden democrats (i recently saw the head of that party flayed wide open on BBC's hardtalk). there are dictates about showing outward signs of religion - e.g. head scarves, tho' the sweden democrat leader fumbled around when it asked if that included not publicly wearing a necklace with a cross. because it turns out that it didn't. i won't go into the whole head scarf question here, as i've ranted on long enough, but if you're interested, poet has written a very excellent post on the implications of the whole debate around headscarves.

i'm not saying that i'm ready to move back to the US on the next boat, as it's even worse there (i recently found out my own aunt is a regular viewer of fox "news!"), but i think the trend is a very worrying one indeed.  where in the world will reason reside?

intersections 2: denmark meets iran

more of the shots from the film swap with shokoofeh. i'm still finding it difficult to put words to how amazing and profound i think these layered photos turned out, so i think i'll let them speak for themselves...

intersections 1: copenhagen meets tehran

since shokoofeh shared the album of our film swap pictures with me on picasa, i have poured over it again and again. on first viewing, i felt that only a few of the shots had turned out. some are aligned and some split frames. the one i was most hopeful would turn out - a shot of a bus in copenhagen where it was spelled cOPENhagen was a split frame and not as good as i had hoped. i was initially fixated on the technicalities - should i really have doubled my ISO to 800 when i took the intial shots here in denmark? what could we have done to align? should we have left well enough alone on the cross-processing? but then, i looked again, and the technicalities melted away and suddenly the magic jumped out at me.

~ a parted curtain in tehran opening onto a copenhagen street.

~ a chocolate cupcake on the ghost of a bicycle

~ another ghost of a bicycle viewed through a magical white curtain

~ a peaceful afternoon coffee scene on a graffiti-covered window

~ a cup of colorful pens and pencils juxtaposed on that copenhagen bus. 

the magic was there. all of my hopes and expectations were there after all. all of the layers of meaning. the surprises. the beauty. quietly profound. calm and zenlike.

for more, please visit shokoofeh.  i will be sharing more as well in the days to come.

identity and other mysteries

identity is a funny thing. sometimes you don't actually know what it is until you don't have it anymore. take our child, for example. she considers herself a sjælland girl (the big island where copenhagen is located and more or less affectionately called the devil's island if you're in jutland). she's strongly and solidly sjælland girl, but never professed this until we moved her to jylland. anyone who's spent any time in an ex-pat community knows that nothing breeds patriotism like displacement.

i never identified myself as an american until i was 27 years old and in russia for the first time. before that, my identity was my state, my hometown, perhaps my family, my university, but never my country - but when you're actually IN a place, and OF that place, it seems you have less of a need to call yourself by its name (or at least that was true before sept. 11, 2001 - but i'm not going to go there at the moment).

ever since that first experience abroad, i have to admit that whenever i've been abroad, i've been wary of the ex-pats, as they always seem a waspish bunch. not in the terms of the bush clan sense of WASPs (as in white anglo-saxton protestants), but of actual stinging and nasty and generally-to-be-avoided. i've found them generally condescending towards the locals and more nationalistic than usual.

there's something in us that paradoxically wants very much to belong where we are, but also does not, which wants to be special and other. part of the not wanting to belong is a defense mechanism, we reject them before they can reject us.

i think this whole phenomenon isn't just limited to national cultures, but sub-cultures, like a company culture, for example. do you identify yourself with the company? do you feel proud to see your company's name and products when you're out there in the world? do you want to identify with that logo and brand or not? i think in the past, i've wholeheartedly given myself over to the company culture, even when i accidentally worked for microsoft (sorry, mr. jobs). but i find myself holding back now, wanting to preserve myself for myself and actively resisting. why is that? what is it about certain groups that makes us want to identify more than others? identity is a mysterious thing.

in which she thinks bourdieu was right about cultural capital

i've been pondering social capital in recent days. pierre bourdieu's distinction lays out the theory and i read it a number of years ago when husband was working on his master's. it comes back to me again and again...basically, we are all born with a cultural, social capital at a certain level and it's very hard for us to change that. it shapes who we are and is not easy to escape.

i had occasion to observe someone trying to overcome their social capital in recent days. and it is a painful sight indeed. because cultural capital is a mysterious beast and it's definitely not easily overcome. the efforts involved are superhuman and if they're not, it ends up somehow sad and pathetic. sad to have reached a mature age and not be able to accept who you are. sad to be trying so hard and so strenuously to so little effect.

society is harsh and it has programmed us not to accept people's attempts to rise above their station. despite all that talk of the american dream and being whatever you want to be, there is still a scent of tastelessness over the nouveau riche. so if the person trying to climb up out of their social layer doesn't actually have the benefits money brings, the attempt is all the more unpretty. a set of strange rituals that are awkward and stilted because they're so unnatural.

i ended up with a kind of perversely fascinated revulsion to the sight and although i wanted to have a more anthropological view on it, i will admit that i was quite disgusted at the sight. a mixture of pity and loathing rose in me. unless you have a special talent, without education and sophistication, it's simply not possible to change your cultural capital. isn't it really just better to be content with who you are?

* * *

if you'd like a bit of a diversion from all this cryptic seriousness, why not try to mad men yourself?

the fifth circle of hell or weird wednesday gets even weirder

descending to the fifth circle of hell (wrath and sullenness)

my morning found me trudging up a staircase, following a fifty-something woman who had clearly eaten loads of garlic for breakfast, or perhaps just used it instead of perfume. i prayed frantically silently to odin that she was going somewhere else, but no, she was headed to the same classroom up on the top floor that i was. apparently odin was otherwise engaged.

because there is a gap of time between old job and new job, i have applied for unemployment benefits and one of the hoops one must jump through is to attend a two day "competence assessment" course during which one ends up with an online "CV" in a government system (the one which, if you recall, suggested after analyzing my education and experience that i do telemarketing). thus, you know that i have already placed my CV in the system on my own and am, as it were, well aware of my competence(s). so anyway, that's why i found myself following the clearly-afraid-of-vampires woman up the stairs early on a wednesday morning.

myself and 17 others were attending the day's sessions, which opened with the most patronizing 30 minutes of instructions and warnings i've witnessed in as long as i can remember. we were referred to as "unemployed welfare recipients" (very motivating) during the entire spiel, which included a whole lot of references to the apparently given fact that we were looking for jobs as chauffeurs and nursing home attendants (not that there's anything wrong with those things, but i didn't spent nine months on a fulbright in the balkans to lift old mr. hansen from his bed to his wheelchair). anyone who came in late was subjected to cutting and even more demeaning and patronizing remarks about their ability to tell time.

once i realized that i was making serious fingernail marks in the palms of my hands from holding them in fists to keep from screaming, i tuned out the capri- and thigh-length "sporty" boot-wearing woman's patronizing droning and looked around. nearly half of my fellow participants were in their upper fifties, four were clearly carpenters or bricklayers or the like, there were two who looked a bit like me and a few young women who looked like candidates for channel 4's the young mothers program.

the capri-clad woman with her asymmetrical haircut turned us over to an energetic bald man who told us straight away about his messy divorce and life with his three kids, who only spend half the month at his house. for otherwise cold, closed people, the danes surely do share some all-too personal details rather easily. he proceeded to throw every remaining scrap of political correctness out the window in what i eventually decided was a charming way (after i recovered from the shock that he outright called me an asshole for joining that more general union instead of the one for people with master's degrees). he actually said to a young girl who worked part time in a church, "what the hell does a kirketjener (her job title) do?" not really appreciating the irony of swearing about a church. i had to actually cover my mouth to restrain outright boisterous laughter at that one.

one of the women, who i thought i had spotted as a fellow academic, turned out to be a former computer programmer turned papergirl turned failed nursing student who left her 4-year nursing program after 6 years without finishing due to "ideological reasons." i came to feel real empathy for her, because i think she had a soft heart and it caused her to be unable to take the overwhelming reality of the world. on the other hand, i do think there are meds for that.

once i arranged not to be forced to go back for day two (i was clearly in the wrong room and apparently the wrong union), i sat back and enjoyed it. some of the more amusing stories that came out during the day:

~  a girl in her late 20s with two kids and no husband who wanted to be a mechanic because she liked cars (but had no training or skills in being a mechanic whatsoever and no idea how to get them. and she didn't even have a car).

~  a sweet (and very talkative) man of nearly 60 who had spent a lifetime as a salesman and had already applied for 500 jobs (he had a stack of documents to prove it).

~  a boy in his early 20s who said his ambition was to become a garbage man (after he attained the correct qualifications, including a driver's license, which he currently lacked).

~  a real asshole of a (self-declared) dyslexic bricklayer whose phone was in his coat pocket and kept ringing every 15-20 minutes all morning and who actually refused to turn it off or on silent when asked to do so (turned out he didn't know how to do it, so the future garbage man helped him out, but not until it had rung 4-5 times).

i'll admit i didn't get a whole lot out of the day, other than 11 pages of notes in my "blog about this" notebook. so perhaps it was worth it. but thank odin i don't have to go back tomorrow. so i can stay home and write some more about it, because there's so much more to share.

things i hate

things i hate:

~ sleeping badly.
~ feeling incompetent.
~ not being instantly good at everything.
~ feeling frustrated.
~ feeling made fun of.
~ asking for help when i should be able to figure it out myself.
~ being dismissed when i actually do finally ask for help.
~ ten years of cultural oppression by a cold and closed culture that's not my own and which is prone to dismissing anyone who is not family or someone they met when they went to kindergarten together.

when these things happen all at once, watch out.

and i decided january 1 that i wasn't going to be quiet about it anymore when i felt dismissed and negated as a human being by this culture in which i live. and so it wasn't that pretty this evening when all of these things happened at once.

i was having trouble with a simple task at weaving and after trying on my own for ten minutes, i finally asked for help from one of my fellow students. it was actually a really simple task and all i needed was about 10 seconds of help, just to get me started. the person i asked totally waved her arms and dismissed me so she could continue her endless stream of chat standing at someone else's loom and then as i walked away, muttered something under her breath about me. and i can tell you that it made me very angry. and i can tell you that she and everyone else present now know how angry it made me.

and i can also tell you that i'm not sorry. treating people as if they are invisible or stupid just because they're not native speakers of your language is not cool. is. not. cool. and i won't enable you do it to me anymore.

please note that i am not at all complaining about my weaving teacher, he's amazing and helpful and kind and patient. this was a fellow student who did this, and it's her and only her i'm complaining about. :-) just for the record.

cultural perspectives

this afternoon, we put the child, age 8, on the train by herself, to go into copenhagen to see a movie. her big sister was meeting her halfway, but for half of the journey, she was all by herself on the S-train. it felt momentous both to her and to us. she was giddy with excitement and pride. when she's proud of herself and you praise her, she does the cutest little exhale through her nose, not quite a snort, but quick, heavy breath. it's one of my favorite things. she met her sister as planned, saw the movie and came home again on the train, the last half of the journey by herself. in all, a wholly successful journey. she was proud and we were proud that our little girl was so grown up.

after she left for the movie, i was thinking about how such a thing wouldn't be possible if she were growing up in the US. we'd surely have been turned in to social services for trusting our 8-year-old child to make a journey by herself on public transportation. and for a moment, i was really glad she's growing up here, where kids are trusted and so are the other people in the society around you. because in addition to us being confident that she could make the journey, we also knew that no harm would come to her on the train, especially not on a sunday afternoon.

i guess i have the US on the brain because of the IOC meeting last week in copenhagen.  as you may be aware, the IOC met in copenhagen last week to decide where the 2016 olympics will be held. with top officials, royalty, sports stars and VIPs from spain, japan, brazil and the US fronting up to campaign for their respective cities (Madrid, Tokyo, Rio and Chicago), it was a big news week for the danish t.v. stations. since oprah and michelle obama were speaking on behalf of chicago, the news was fixated on them for several days. they were only eclipsed by president obama himself coming into copenhagen for five hours on friday.

after chicago was out in the first round of voting, much to the shock of everyone, who had thought it was a dead heat between rio and chicago, oprah apparently sneaked quietly out of town, as we didn't hear anything more about her. sadly for president obama and michelle, their departure was a bit more public, as cameras were obsessively trained on air force one from the moment it landed 'til well after it was but a shining dot in the sky. however, at the time they left, the results weren't yet known.

the coverage was non-stop and it was DR's (the state-owned television station), turn to pretend they were CNN. and pretend they did. speculating like mad about who was in an unmarked white plane parked on the runway near air force one. speculating like mad about which city would win the olympics. asking danish rock stars their opinions as to who would win (as if they knew). commenting live on a big event held for the IOC members and the cities' celebrities at the copenhagen opera (without knowing more than a handful of the names of those arriving, which ended up rather embarrassing and far more comical than they meant it to). and then there was the bringing in of danes with loose connections to the obamas and oprah to the studio to comment on all of the hype. one connection was so thin that all a danish model living in the US had to offer was that her african american husband reminded her a lot of obama. i laughed quite a long time at that one. poor DR, they were totally unaccustomed to being on air nonstop and clearly struggling with the task.

i hope they learned a lot of lessons because the next big international event on the horizon is the COP15 climate meeting here in copenhagen in december and i hope at least they get a list of names of the attendees at that one, so they can at least say who people are. copenhagen will be filled with strangers then, so i don't think we'll be putting the child on the train alone.

language and connections

i'll admit it, since i took this photo of pretty purple chain onboard the ship last friday, i've been wracking my brain for a use for it. and then, this morning, a use for it fell into my lap. my blog friend Ju tweeted about an interesting post on raising a bilingual child on mummy do that! cartside, who i didn't know until the tweet, has assembled a wonderful collection of links to people who are blogging about raising bilingual children. you know, people like me. only strangely, it had never occurred to me to seek out blogs where people were writing about that. i've just sort of been fumbling along on my own. and i've only written about it once, over here on sabin and addie's blog. but what does any of that have to do with big-ass piece of purple chain, you ask? well, it's all about the connections, isn't it? and nothing says connection better than chains.

but this is actually about raising a bilingual child, so i'll get back to that now...

sabin is 8 and has lived her entire life in denmark. i have always spoken english to her and with her and so did her father until she started school. we discovered that she had some trouble cracking the code of reading in danish and we decided it would help her if her dad spoke danish to her a bit more often. and in all honesty, it did help.

sabin was slower to begin speaking than other children in her kindergarten, but i'm not sure we can blame that entirely on the two languages, it could very well be part of her personality, which is one in which she hangs back and observes before she jumps in. she also is a real perfectionist and doesn't want to make mistakes, so that may have been a factor as well. she wanted to be sure of herself in both languages before venturing out.

danish is difficult, in that the spelling has little or nothing discernible to do with the pronunciation, so cracking the reading code is difficult. that was surely compounded somewhat by my speaking and reading to her in english at home. and all of the english she hears on a daily basis on television and in music - because denmark doesn't dub extensively (the market's simply not large enough). we were fortunate that her school, which is a public one (not in the english sense of private), was very on top of the situation and she has had several rounds of extra reading help to help her crack the code. one of these was the fantastic reading recovery program, which completely did the trick last year. she's now reading very well in danish and using her reading strategies to quickly pick up reading in english.

and she's started to have english now at school, now that she's in the 3rd grade. it undoubtedly handicaps her a bit to be way ahead of the other kids because sometimes restrictions are placed on how much she's allowed to come forward with. for example, on the first day, the kids were asked to name the words they already knew in english. and sabin was only allowed to say two, which in my view, was fair enough. her teacher is great and super aware of sabin's needs, since she raised bilingual children herself. she's giving sabin as much extra work to keep her challenged as she seems to want, so she's not really being held back too much by the others being total beginners.

i actually don't worry that much about her ending up fluent in english, she already is from a speaking and understanding standpoint. and it's been our belief all along that she needs a native language. since she's growing up in denmark, danish is her native language.

some of the things i worry most about are cultural aspects. we do our best to give her a taste of the other half of her - american culture. and because so much of our television here is american and so much of the music and films american, she gets some taste of that. she's been the US lots of times and spent five weeks there a year ago in the summer, hanging out with her aunt and cousins, so she has also had the chance to partake of swimming lessons and T-ball and a fishing derby at the lake up close. but the fact is, she's a little danish girl and her main cultural grounding will be in denmark, regardless of what passports she carries (she has both).

i think raising a child to be bilingual is such a gift. i'm hopeful that she will inherit her father's ability to code switch flawlessly between languages and she seems to have that to an extent, tho' she sometimes does some really cute direct translation of danish words into english. and there are certain mistakes she makes consistently - like not saying "without," she only says "out" because that's how it is in danish. she doesn't understand that she also needs the "with" part of it, since that feels like the opposite to her. so she'll ask for a toast with nutella out butter.

we've been reading the junie b. jones books and junie b. makes a lot of grammar mistakes, so i keep talking to her about them, since i'm not sure she gets the nuances of that well enough and i don't want her to think that junie b. speaks correctly. so far, she seems to understand it and she just finds junie b.'s view on the world amusing, so the language doesn't matter that much.

it's interesting raising a bilingual child and my hope is that it makes her more able to understand and get along across cultures. and i think that it's really wonderful, through the miracle of the blogosphere, to have suddenly found a whole lot of other people who are thinking and writing about their challenges with raising bilingual children, too. see, you can learn things on twitter.

jarring transitions

i started my morning in barcelona. it was sunny and a lovely 18 degrees. there were several thousand madmen and -women running a marathon through its streets. a number of hours later, i landed in oslo, where it is -3 and snowing like mad. only when you fly do experience such jarring transitions. i'm not sure it's good for us, as human beings. how can we catch up with ourselves when the differences are so great?

lucky for me, i'm at the most lovely old hotel up on holmenkollen, sitting in the pretty, quiet lobby, all alone by a fireplace, so i have the peace and solitude in which to make the mental transition to match the geographical transition i made. one doesn't always get that chance, so i'm making a conscious effort to savor it.

the difference in culture between denmark and spain is quite striking as well and was another jarring transition. we noticed it already on the plane, leaving copenhagen. it was a spanair flight and full of spaniards. a bunch of them evidentally knew one another and they were talking loudly across the aisles to one another. they spent long stretches of the flight, standing up talking to their friends, sometimes several rows behind them. speaking quickly and loudly. it was strange for the danes onboard, who never speak in public unless they have to or are together with close friends who they've known since birth. it was really interesting that the cultural differences were so evident already there.

when you travel, at least when you travel for pleasure, you open yourself to the differences. i go into observation mode and try to take note of such things...like the rhythms of the language and the body language of the people. even there, already on the plane, it was evident that the entire rhythm of barcelona was going to be different than copenhagen. the pulse and the beat on the streets was more lively and immediate somehow. less reserved. part of it is simply that there are so many more people, but it must also have to do with language and the actual music of the language itself. people simply express themselves completely differently.

we noticed that there were danes everywhere we went in barcelona. and they seemed to be caught up in the pulse and the liveliness as well, as they too were more animated. they were talking louder and using their arms more as they spoke. so something in the spanish culture was catching. or maybe it was just the sunshine and the warmth.

and now, i transition back to the cooler northern climes as big flakes of snow fall outside and the fire crackles beside me. transitions aren't all bad.