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.
4 comments:
Congratulations on the success of your final project! What does the X-Sigma motto mean? Something to do with the mathematics or statistics symbol?
Yes, "Ten Sigma" is a play on the popular "Six Sigma" method for reducing defects. Six Sigma refers to the number of standard deviations away from the mean needed to produce 3.4 defects per million. But Ten Sigma would be way better than that... :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma
Hold up there, Chief. "I've never worked with such a bright and motivated group of guys"? Surely you haven't forgotten the other 2 Studs who co-wrote, directed, and starred in a film with you.
Just to clarify:
1. That was an art-house film about three musicians
2. We were young and we needed the money
3. I had indeed forgotten about it (aka blocked it out)
But the point is a valid one. Move X-Sigma down a notch!
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