My parents gave me a terrific Danish / English dictionary for Christmas, and in the weeks before my trip I took a highlighter to it, marking certain words or phrases I thought might be useful. On the plane ride to Copenhagen I went through the highlighted words and did my best to memorize a few key phrases... "thank you", "hello", "my name is Dan", etc. I didn't have any illusions of speaking the language, but I thought it would be nice to put forth a little effort. What a waste of time.First of all, nothing is pronounced the way it reads, so all of the words and phrases I memorized came out wrong. Also, English is the language of international business and everyone in Copenhagen speaks it fluently. As a matter of fact, asking a Dane "do you speak English?" is mildly insulting. So, if you are planning a trip to Denmark, don't bother buying a phrasebook unless you plan to take some serious supplemental language lessons.
Luckily that's just what we got after class on Monday. A wonderful DIS instructor, Suzanne da Cunha Bang, gave us a 2-hour crash course in Survival Danish. "Hello my name is Dan / I come from Virginia / Beer / Thank you"... she taught us all we really needed to know while we were in Copenhagen. What's more, at dinner that night she showed us how to give a proper Danish toast. If you add a subtle nuance to the traditional toast, it indicates to those around you that you come from a good family. Lipstick on a pig, but we did it anyway.
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In other news, my UVA project team, X-Sigma, gave its final presentation last Friday and according to our professors we "knocked it out of the park". It was the culmination of a heck of a lot of hard work, and it was the reason I haven't had a chance to post for the past few weeks. I'll write more about my team another day, but let me just say that I've never worked with such a bright and motivated group of guys. As happy as I am that graduation is just a few weeks away, I'll miss the camaraderie that we shared.
