The lady behind the booth began to raise the screen, and along comes a couple...and they just saunter up to the counter like everyone else is invisible. No eye contact, no nothing. So passive aggressively Danish.
However, I won't rant any more on what I expect Danes to do. Instead I'll note that I'm pleasantly surprised by the fact that the second Danish woman, the one that arrived after me, asked me if I'd like to go ahead of her. I said "Nej, Tak* of course. Courtesy like that should be rewarded.
How about food? I managed to fit four cans of tomatillos in our baggage. Last night I decided to make Sopes with a verde sauce. The sopes are basically very thick masa pancakes. The sauce was ground beef, tomatillos, onion, carrots, yellow and green peppers, and garlic along with *salsa* seasoning. We topped them with cheddar cheese, slightly marinated yet still crunchy cabbage (olive oil, salt, and crushed pepper), and taco sauce.
The night before I was able to use one of my Christmas presents - a veggie steamer. (This is better because even though the food from the bamboo one tastes ok, the house got an odd smell from the steaming of the bamboo itself.)
With the cauliflower I decided to try out a recipe that a friend of mine uses on her kids. I steamed the cauliflower, and then mashed it with my food masher, and then mixed that with cheese, butter, and noodles - to make a sort of fake mac-n-cheese. It wasn't Peter's favorite, but he ate it.
The one thing I really want to continue when we move back to the US is our healthy diet. Lots of fruit and veggies, smaller portion sizes, eating non-processed foods, and easy on the junk...No more regular purchases of pop, pop tarts, Cheetos, or *fruit* snacks.
And although I still crave some conveniences from the US (like canned soup), the easy to make meals at the grocery didn't entice me this trip, and I was very aware of where the food was coming from. Like, did you know lots of regular apple juice comes from China??? No thanks, I'll pass on that.
2 comments:
I have wept over queueing experiences with Danes. They come across as being so rude and ill mannered, but I have concluded that they have simply not been taught good manners as far as queueing goes. Maybe I am wrong about that.
An all time low for us being when a multi aged bus 'queue' shoved the children in my care (four under 9 years old including one in a pram and a very small toddler)out of their way to get in front of us in the queue, filling the bus to capacity.
I then stood on the sidewalk plaintively asking for help (with the pram to get it on the bus) and all passengers looked at me grimly from the bus and made no movements to help.
I shouted up to the bus driver if he would help and he refused! In the end, a beautiful young man (about 18) came to my aid. His friends (the young group were all from the same college) jeered at him in a teasing good natured way, but he came to help me on the bus and then also held on to my pram so it wouldn't roll (the brake was broken).
The young man was from the middle east. Again and again with my babies trying to get around Denmark on and off buses, it has been very distinctive: if ANYONE comes to help it will be the 'immigrants', probably because they are more obliged to help women and kids and probably because they know what it is like to get the rough edge of Danes.
I live in hope of experiencing positive queueing with Danes, and if it ever happens I will collate and broadcast the stories on my blog.
We contacted the bus company and the college of the teenagers who pushed us so roughly aside to complain (the older people in the queue we could do nothing about). The college told us it was not their responsibility. The bus company told us that the college children had priority as they make up the bulk of passengers on that route (?!?!!).
My personal feeling is that Danish kids are now brought up by the schools and not the parents, so they are not 'taught' manners by their families as they are not with them that much.
But then, that doesn't explain the old people, perhaps they were just bad tempered and late with their meds....
The "priority" excuse doesn't surprise me.
I think we (USs, etc) catch them (DKs) of guard when we directly confront them. Their flustered response is ususally a pretty BS excuse, or that it was my/your fault anyway.
And, one of my biggerst challenges here is to keep my kid behaving while those around him are not. I don't want to take him back to the US and have him labeled as the "bad/teasing/physical" kid.
I'm constanstly reminding him to worry about himself only, and not everyone else around him. So either he'll be fine, or I'm totally screwing up his brain.
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