Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Midsummer Lovin'

June 23rd is the day that Denmark celebrates Midsummer's Eve -- or Sankt Hans aften (St. John's Eve.)

Varde, the small town we are living in now, had a bit of a party down by the river. The center of the event is a massive bonfire that was once believed to chase away evil spirits that were active in this time of receding daylight. Had I been a medicine man a few hundred years back, I would have spent the night harvesting my eleven potent healing herbs and spices to make my extra-special crispy chicken.

In the 16th century, the bonfire also became a convenient place to burn the witches that were more common in that time. In the 1920s, they started putting fake witches on the fire just for fun. Unfortunately, Varde didn't have a fake witch so the fire was just a fire. I found this rather disappointing. Sorry, witches of today.

The Lions Club (yes, it's here, too) was selling some beers and sodas and a pølse (sausage) man was on hand to sell hot dogs and buns. See, contrary to our inside-the-box view of the hot dog, in Denmark and elsewhere, it is common to get a hot dog delivered to you as a weiner and a bun -- two seperate entities. You pick up either with your fingers, dip into mustard and such, and eat. The meat never enters the bun. Even more bizarre to you Yankees: Some people order the bun and NO MEAT. I even saw one young lad eating two buns with mustard, mmm hmmm (slingblade) -- NO MEAT.

There was some music and a speech by the mayor. No idea what it was about but apparently he explained why they didn't have a witch. I doubt his reason would make sense to me. Once the speech concluded, townsfolk in wetsuits floated up the river with torches in hand. These torches then lit the fire.

I liked it -- people got together, had some fun, dranks some beers, ate some weiners, and watched the show. An easy-going, comfortable evening with friends and family -- a good night in Denmark.

Skål!







“My mother says I must not pass,
Too near that glass;
She is afraid that I will see,
A little witch that looks like me;
With a red mouth to whisper low,
The very thing I should not know”

-Sarah Morgan Bryant Piatt (American poet 1836-1919)

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

And It's Not Carlsberg

I think I am having some withdrawel from the great beer options I had in England. There were so many choices -- and almost all of them were reasonably priced. I developed a liking for the heavy, stronger-flavors of some of the real ales (unfiltered, unpasteurized). Even worse, I started drinking my dark beers right out of the pantry. That's right: warm beer. Then we moved to Denmark where most everything I have tried so far is a lighter, crisper lager. Not necessarily a bad thing but a bit of an adjustment from England.


In Denmark, the prominent beers are Carlsberg and Tuborg. These two beers seem to mimic some of the marketshare rivalry of Bud and Miller in the USA -- with the notable difference that both Carlsberg and Tuborg come from the same brewery. Huh. Carlsberg bought Tuborg in 1970. After some reading, I found that some of the rivlary's roots are forgotten: Carlsberg supported the arts and Tuborg supported scientific research. Artsy types drank Carlsberg, and men of science drank Tuborg. Therefore, I shall now drink Tuborg.

Beer is a huge industry in Denmark with exports of something around 100 million gallons of beer per year. It's also important culturally and drinking beer is widely accepted at just about any time of day (or so I read -- I haven't seen anybody tipping one back at breakfast but I eat breakfast alone in this small apartment and Boo doesn't drink beer...) There is even a holiday of sorts that I am soooo looking forward to. It is the day they release the Christmas beers and is known as J-Day (after Juleøl meaning Christmas Beer.) It normally is the first Friday in November. I've read stories of Christmas-decorated wagons rolling through town with Santa-capped staff giving out free samples of the new, typically potent, Christmas brew. Just wonderful.

Anyway -- In the last post I mentioned we stumbled on the Ribe Bryghus, a small brewery right in the heart of Ribe, Denmark. I've tried three of their beers now and I am becoming a fan. These beers are much more like what I knew in England. We sampled the Black at the brewery -- a flavorful stout with sweet coffee overtone. Back home, we tried the Blond (a lighter, citrusy Belgian style golden ale).


They don't sell the brew here in Varde, but there is one place in Esbjerg to get it. We haven't figured out where we will live yet so maybe that was the final straw.

Skål!








"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools."
-For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemmingway

Monday, June 22, 2009

It Didn't Look That Old

This past Saturday we took the short day trip to Ribe, a town south of Varde, that is known above all else for being the oldest town in Denmark. The first documented evidence of the town shows up in the year 854 -- but archeological evidence puts it back to at least 710 AD. They are planning on celebrating their 1300th anniversary next year.

View Danmark in a larger map

We just barely scratched the surface here -- we didn't go in the old cathedral, nor one of the two Viking museums, and nope, not the other museum either. This is definitely a spot to hit with visitors (hint hint) so we saved a few things til then. The town is a great place to stroll with quiet cobblestone streets and not nearly as many tourists as we expected.

We did manage to discover the Ribe Bryghus (brewhouse) right before it closed and purchased a few bottles of my new favorite beer. We did have a good lunch at the Hotel Dagmar next to the Cathedral. It was a meal of (I think) typical Danish food -- again it followed our current opinion that, to us anyway, Danish food is 'weird but good.' The less adventurous, I'm afraid, will think it is just weird.




Skål!

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Hunka Hunka Burning Love

Howdy. Today we are going to talk about another selection from the freezer aisle at your local Danish grocer. With my limited Danish skills I knew I was getting some potatoes, probably mashed, with a meat topping of some sort. Back home, I took the time to look at the easy-to-translate ingredients and found I was about to cook up some bacon and fried onion covered mashed potatoes. You may remember the same fried onions cropped up on my less-than-delicious Cowboy Toast.

Easy as pie, just prick the plastic film and bake for 25 minutes. The result wasn't bad -- mostly very creamy potatoes but all in all it had good flavor.



With a bit more work on the Google Translate tool, I found that "brændende kærlighed" literally translates to "Burning Love" and is a classic Danish dish. That led to finding a recipe for the dish at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the website for the Danish Consulate in New York. The website has a good starter course in Danish food. Burning Love is not a difficult dish:

Burning Love - Brændende kærlighed
2-2½ lb (1 kg) floury potatoes
1½-2 oz (40-50 g) butter
About ½ pint (3dl) cream
8-10 thick rashers of fat bacon
3 onions
Salt
White pepper
Pinch of nutmeg

Peel and cut up the potatoes. Cook until tender in unsalted water, drain and mash. Whip in the butter gradually, and finally the cream, until the mashed potato is light and airy. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Cut the rashers and onions into small cubes and fry until crisp in a little of the bacon fat. Pile the mashed potatoes into a dish. Scoop out a hollow in the middle, pour in the fat and sprinkle with onion and bacon cubes. Serve with slices of rye bread and pickled beets.

Next time I will skip the frozen variety and make my own heart-clogging version.







“That would be cool if you could eat a good food with a bad food and the good food would cover for the bad food when it got to your stomach. Like you could eat a carrot with an onion ring and they would travel down to your stomach, then they would get there, and the carrot would say, It's cool, he's with me.” -- Mitch Hedburg (one of my favorite Comedians 1968 - 2005)

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Flashback to Spain

I was cleaning up my photos and found these I have never posted...

Monday, June 15, 2009

Are You Drunk? No, I Have A Cold...


This past Friday night in Denmark, we went to the summer party for my wife's office. A good time was had by all!

We have learned a few new party activities to bring back home with us. A new favorite is a seemingly dangerous game to combine with drinking. It involved a large, solid tree stump, giant 8 inch nails, and multiple hammers. Depending on the number of people playing in the current match -- and depending on how many hammers you have on hand -- it's either a game of precision where you take turns round-robin hitting your nail, trying to knock it in flush with as few hits as possible OR it's a throw-safety-to-the-wind ordeal where each person with a hammer in hand swings as fast and wildly as possible at their nail in a race to the finish.

Maybe a little harder to bring home with us was the 'hole-in-one' machine that was a mini-golf style contraption that rewarded a well-placed shot by automatically filling a shot glass full of whatever bottle of liquor is strapped in to the machine -- and here that meant shots of Ga-Jol Blå (means 'blue' -- pronounced 'blaw'), a vodka infused with salty licorice and menthol. It tasted very much like cough syrup and when I asked a Dane about it, she said that they have medicine here that tastes the same, too. I always did like cough syrup, though.

Dinner was served at the party: a whole roast pig! Creamy potato salad (more dairy and less egg, I think), a coleslaw with apples and raisin (again, more cream less mayo), and pasta salad. Nothing too different than a good American BBQ. Great food -- but more than they could deal with. We ended up with two giant bags of roast pig to take home when we finally wandered out of the party in the wee hours. Boo comes running every time we open the fridge now.

We found that most of the liquor for the event was
bought in Germany -- even though we were drinking Danish brands. You can buy Danish beer across the border in Germany for less than half of what you would pay in Denmark. The rule is tha
t the beverages are supposed to be for personal consumption and a few folks at the party told stories they had heard about Danish authorities following them home from the German border and making them pay duties and fines on their purchases. A flip-side to that story is one I read about the European Union (EU) cracking down on Denmark for their policies that attempted to control the free movement of goods from other EU countries. As a member of the EU, Denmark is supposed to be bound by its cornerstone Four Freedoms, one of which is the free movement of goods. Denmark lost the battle in EU court and I think the limits on the quantities of products you can import from the EU have been adjusted to match the EU guidelines which aren't very limiting (110 liters of beer?) as long as it is for personal use.

By the end of the night, I had been lucky enough to have long conversations with many folks about our experiences so far and ahead of us in Denmark. Many showed a true interest in our situation and offered help and advice as we try to navigate things like buying a house. We also found many that spoke highly of the USA, including one huge fan of Nike Town in Chicago. I had to appreciate that in many cases, an entire group would switch from Danish to English when I was joining in the conversation.

Best yet, there was ample opportunities to say 'cheers!' in Danish: Skål! (pronouned 'skowl')





"Licorice is the liver of candy."
— Michael O'Donoghue

Monday, June 8, 2009

Ice Cream With The Safety Off

The missus and I took a field trip yesterday to a nice little vacation area called Henne Strand, about 20 minutes drive north and west of Varde. Unless I am over-simplifying the translation, Henne Strand translates as something like 'near the beach' or 'along the beach'.



I think most of the housing in Henne Strand is what is classified as a sommerhus or "Summer Home". The biggest difference I know between these houses and a regular house is that, by law, we can't buy one. Even to buy a 'normal' house, we need special permission to do so. This is all because our visas expire in three years, making us temporary residents. These laws, I have read, have a lot to do with keeping folks from a certain nearby country from coming in with their more abundant cash (due to lower taxes) and turning these areas into German resorts.

Henne Strand has a small main street, with lots of shopping that was open even on Sunday. In Varde, almost nothing is open after 1 o'clock Saturday until Monday morning. I've been told that this is due to a law the excludes businesses from government-enforced non-working hours if they are within view of the coast.

Ice cream is the big item on the Henne Strand strip, and almost every ice cream dealer featured a concoction called "The Mexican". I broke out the Danish phrasebook and with some guesswork, figured out that the Mexican is comprised of a giant waffle cone filled with many scoops of different flavored ice cream, then a few swirls of soft serve ice cream (mostly vanilla and jordbær), then whipped cream (fløde?) and then jam to top it all off. How or why this came to be called, "The Mexican" is beyond me to understand.

When we were making our way back to the car, I noticed a sign on the sidewalk depicting something that just had to be an image of 'The Mexican.'


Huh. Is it supposed to look like a Mexican -- with a little whipped cream sombrero? Is this something you would get in Mexico? I never saw anything like this in all the time I spent there. Time will tell what the truth behind this thing is -- but I have already heard and seen some other evidence, both here in Denmark and in the UK (someone tell Domino's Pizza that 'peri peri' sauce isn't Mexican), that the Mexican culture is completely misunderstood in this part of the world. How else can you explain the lack of a good burrito place in an entire country? If only they knew what they were missing.

Skål!






“You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.” - Frank Deford, author (born 1938)

Friday, June 5, 2009

Peanut Butta Jelly Time

I'm not quite sure what to do with the food here in Denmark. I go to the store and after staring at a package for a few minutes, sometimes referencing my pocket Danish guide, about half the time I can figure out what exactly I am looking at. I buy a bunch of stuff that has no rhyme or reason -- and even this chaos takes 10 times longer than any trip to the store in the USA.

I get home and try to make the purchased food into something I am used to -- often that means some perversion of a taco or a pizza. Sometimes Rachel will offer some advice from what she has seen the people at work eat -- I will get into the phenomenon of smørrebrød (open-face Danish sandwiches) later -- but for the most part we are just guessing.


But then... I was walking alone through the grocery, a new one, my first time there. I was in the frozen food section near the frozen kartofler and across from the meals of frikadeller. Something stood out -- illuminated as if by divine fate. It was magical. How could something called "Cowboy Toast" not end up in my shopping basket?


In just 10 minutes under a hot grill, these little plastic-wrapped, frost-encrusted sandwiches go from rock-hard and pale white to sprøde and golden-brown... but still frozen in the middle. Five more impatient minutes later, you get this:


The result is a simple toasted sandwich, stuffed with what is apparently a low-grade meat patty that is covered with onions (I think) and what might be cheese or perhaps a Special Sauce. What shocked me though, was the amazing similarity to a big, square, over-toasted White Castle burger. I'll let you decide if that is a good thing or not.

Skål!







EPILOGUE: I spent some time using the Google translation tool to decipher the back of the box from the Cowboy Toast. The dish is comprised of four components: the toasted bread (43%), beef patty (30%), fried onions (16%), and dressing (ah ha -- it is special sauce!) That beef patty is some seriously compromised meat, with added wheat derivatives, beef fat, and various starches and extracts. Each sandwich has about 20 grams of fat and 400 calories. Mmmmm.... tasty!

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Jeffrey. Love me.

I've only been in Denmark on and off for about a month -- so this post is just a starting point into some random thoughts and discussions.

Denmark was just ranked as the happiest society in the world and there are lots of opinions why -- some of the opinions are very critical of Danish culture, others applaud their expansive safety-net social system that removes many of the day to day worries of life. Some people, though, think that happiness here is "enforced" by an invisible set of laws that keep everyone at the same level, removing the disparity between facets of society.

In 1933, a man name Aksel Sandemose wrote a book called En flyktning krysser sitt spor, or "A Refuge Crosses His Tracks." The book portrays a fictional small town in Denmark -- a town where everybody knows your name (Norm!) Admittedly, I haven't read the book but I'll get to it. In the book, the town is named Jante and the town has a set of unwritten laws:
 The Jante Law

1. Thou shalt not presume that thou art anyone important.
2. Thou shalt not presume that thou art as good as us.
3. Thou shalt not presume that thou art any wiser than us.
4. Thou shalt never indulge in the conceit of imagining that thou art
better than us.
5. Thou shalt not presume that thou art more knowledgeable than us.
6. Thou shalt not presume that thou art more than us in any way.
7. Thou shalt not presume that that thou art going to amount to
anything.
8. Thou art not entitled to laugh at us.
9. Thou shalt never imagine that anyone cares about thee.
10. Thou shalt not suppose that thou can teach us anything.

These laws are referenced frequently in discussions of Scandinavian (not just Danish) culture. Every book we have on Denmark at least discusses the concepts. Often they are summed up into a single statement,


"Don't think you are special or that you are better than us."


In the book, violating the Jante law led to increased hostility from those around you and started you down the path to becoming an outcast.

Many believe that Jante's Laws are a real part of society here. For Americans, this is a problem. We believe in "a better life" as motivation for what we do. To be rewarded at work or at school for a "job well done" is a good thing, to get a raise, to finally get that new car you've wanted. It is common to be singled out with "employee of the month", to celebrate success with your family and friends. Our entire adventure overseas could be seen as a severe transgression of Jante's Laws: We've left our society behind and we tell stories about our experiences abroad -- and simply having this opportunity displays a level of success and accomplishment that is hard to keep concealed. We believe that we worked hard and paid a price to get here -- but have we hurt our society by doing so?

The problem many see with Jante's Laws is that they are written in an expressly negative way but have the good intention of promoting equality and fairness. I have seen re-writes of the laws, changing all of the negatives to positives and switching the focus from an outward criticism to a personal mantra. These revised laws come across as much less harsh. There is a good example in the comments here. Here, one line of anti-Jante:

"I am as good as those around me."

Now, that is a bit easier to swallow. It's like Al Franken as Stuart Smalley, "I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!"

Skål!