Free Translation Danish – English.

The TV2 Zulu channel as a Danish stand up comic program.  It is really dire.

Usually I can’t watch it, it’s bad comedy, thinks itself clever and the audience are clapping in that peculiar slow clap that Danes do.  It’s all very disconcerting.

Plus, it’s not my imagination,  I only ever flick past that program and watch a 2 minute segment every time before moving on in disgust,  and each and every time I have left thinking:  “We are not wrong about the Danish culture.”

There are a lot of racist jokes.  They are not even funny racist jokes.  I can sort of understand a crass or non politically correct joke IF it is funny.  But these wetly weak fart of a Danish jokes about muslims?  So so sad and embarrassing.  I guess they are doing them to ‘let off steam’ and well, the audience, taking a look at it, packed to the rafters with 99% ‘whiteys’.  I don’t like to use the word ‘white’ in a derogatory sense,  but it was that or ‘Danish’ and I don’t like to say that being Danish is about being white.

Tonight there was a young ‘comedian’ up on the stage. She looked like an overgrown slightly melted version of Nicole Kidman,   like Nicole Kidman if she’d been pumped up to blistering point and then soaked in a barrel of rice pudding for a day.  Bloated is the word.  Anyway,  my translation is not perfect, but here is the segment of her well honed ‘act’ I had the misfortune to witness:

“People are fascinated with my freckles,  they are always trying to rub them off…..I went to Cairo,  Egypt and I went into a mosque, and there was this ugly disgusting old toothless man who came up to me and started caressing my arm and looking at my freckles and he said…“

(this bit she did in English..)

“ooooh you are so  BEAUTIFUL!!!  What are you eating in Denmark that makes you so BEAUTIFUL???”  so I said “BACON”  “PIG!”  “OINK OINK!!!”  “

 

erm, yeah, babe, like that is funny.   But the audience went WILD,  ha fucking ha.  I am not sure they weren’t laughing because she actually looked like a pig though.

Then she went on to say something like:

“But I am not racist, I think it is important to show the world I am not racist and that I have respect for other cultures, and that is why I have a bumper sticker showing a picture of the Prophet Muhammad on the back of my car!  ….Nah,  I was only joking, of course I don’t have a picture of the Prophet on the back of my car…that would be SUICIDAL.  Actually, it’s just some mud that has splattered up from the road that looks like the Prophet Muhammad.”

Crowd went crazy again. Uh.  Now, this isn’t funny on any level, not even in a ‘o wow she is so irreverent and zany’ sort of way. It just isn’t funny.  It just isn’t even useful for anything.  It’s plain nasty humor, like my comment about her LOOOKING LIKE A FAT PIG.  I mean, sure, if we look at it a certain way, she did look like a real mean ugly pig.  And when her mouth moved it did look like an ugly pig chewing something that she found stuck to the bottom of her shoe, but really!  What kind of a person makes an UNFUNNY cruel joke?

Then it just isn’t funny.  I try to avoid watching Danes get entertained, I have seen it more than a few times and lost my faith in human nature.  I mean, if we can stoop THAT low, any of us, what hope is there?

And that fecking slow clap they do!  And the way they throw beer at concerts!  And film every event through the lens of their mobile.

Anyway, other news I will translate for you today:

‘The use of the contraceptive pill in Denmark amongst girls under the age of sexual consent is violently increasing (numbers from ‘Lægemiddelstyrelsen’ show). In 1999,   3.086 girls under 15 were prescribed the contraceptive pill – last year the number had climbed to 6.570 girls between 11-14 years young.’

Now it is quite obvious what is going on here.  It is all the ‘invandrer’ girls, they come here and they are just taking all our western medicines and infecting our sweet young daughters.  As soon as we get rid of the immigrants this problem will be solved.  OR it is the worldwide habit of stifling natural processes and treating menstruation as an ailment needing to be ‘cured’.  The pill, like the hysterectomy, like anti-depressants…these are all magical god-doctor cures for many ailments.

Here is another one for you:

‘Every third Danish hospital patient gets a bedsore.’

Obviously all those immigrants again,  mouldering away in OUR LAND.  And taking up valuable hospital beds that could be used for DANISH.

Anyone who has had to take care of someone with a bedsore knows pure and simple, these breakdowns of the body are caused by pure neglect.  Standards in Danish hospitals are at an all time low.  I can tell you for an inside fact, that if you or anyone you know has had contact with the Danish hospital system and come out whole and well and not negatively affected or butchered and carved up….this was NOT due to medical expertise or high standards…it was due to LUCK.

If you feel you have had a great experience in a Danish hospital then I promise you, it is because of your low standards or your inattention to detail or because you are basically glad you aren’t dead so just getting up in the morning is a constant recurring miracle.  Or because you don’t know any better.  Or because you were LUCKY.

This may be the time, if any of you Danish hospital damaged people out there need to outpour what you have often told me in private emails or talks (i.e: what horrific experiences you have had in contact with the Danish doctors/nurses/midwives) then you can outpour in the comments, and leave it as anon.

That’s enough translating for one day.  Although I can sort of bear to read Danish,  it is easier on the eye than on the ear.

 

 

DANISH WINTER SURVIVAL GUIDE.

I know I shouldn’t laugh, but I am hearing increasingly desperate versions of what people are doing to ‘stay positive’ and get through that barren wasteland that is Denmark in the Winter.

If you’ve only done 1-3 Danish winters here (and by Danish winters I mean November-April) you won’t quite be aware of what it means to do a Danish winter.  The harrowing nature of the Danish Winter only comes into true effect when you have layered a few full winters one on top of the other year after year.

Fewer still will know what life is like to do a Danish winter without little cheer-up excursions out of Denmark.  A lot of people claim to know what Danish Winter is but cheat by leaving it every couple of weeks.

But that is one of the ways to survive (i.e: not really integrate with) Danish Winters. Here are some others that I confess I have tried myself in the past or have some understanding of others trying even if I wouldn’t/couldn’t do it myself….

WAYS FOR THOSE FROM OTHER BACKGROUNDS THAN DANISH TO SURVIVE THE DANISH WINTER:

• start drinking Christmas beer.  The Danish alcoholics and stereotyped Greenlanders drink this potency all year around,  but now you can drink it and not be called a lowlife,  which you are of course, for drinking the stuff that tastes of sick and makes your brain shrink and your liver expand.
• have regular manicures.
• lose touch with reality.
• buy a new wooly hat.
• throw yourself into ‘danish hygge’:  tune in, sell out, gain weight.
• buy a pet you can put all your spare energy into
• eat marzipan
• drink christmas beer like it was soda
• leave the kids in daycare longer
• leave the television on 24/7
• make things out of raffia and felt, show the finished creations off in your home
• beg people from overseas to come and visit you.  Lure them with promises of a Scandinavian Christmas,  pretend that Denmark is like a fairytale and everything is encrusted with elven diamonds and silverlattice worked tendrils.
• dye your hair an alarming colour (I am doing this tomorrow)
• have an affair (studies show that infidelity peaks during the winter in Denmark)
• use tanning booths (with apologies to a mate, I have also done this)
• rise above everything, rise above death, famine,  disease,  inequality,  exploitation,  crappy neighbours, awful language, war and small pox. Rise above it all, hold yourself erect, whistle a happy tune.
• count your blessings.  After all, it could be worse,  you could be living in Afghanistan or Milton Keynes or Birmingham Alabammy.  Or working at Disney Florida.
• Get into christmas, I mean really into it, that is what it is there for.
• Drink more christmas beer until you wake up with the taste of rancid arse in your mouth and then switch to akkavit.
• Book little freshen-up trips out of Denmark to span the entire winter.  Go to places of culture and personality and warmth and interest.  Return to Denmark feeling refreshed and able to cope with the next three weeks.  Then preach to others who can’t afford said trips out that they should really be more positive about Wonderful Denmark.
• Make a bubble of happiness and live in it and do not let the outside world encroach. (I do this and it works very well for me)
• Put your fingers in your ears when you hear people speaking Danish and go ‘LA LA LA!!’ (My own personal fave).
• Learn a new language over the dark months, I suggest Norwegian or Welsh.
• Try hard drugs,  research shows they are healthier than christmas beer.
• Join a club.  Swinging clubs are huge in Denmark, mind you, statistics show I probably don’t need to tell YOU that.
• Buy a house,  throw everything you’ve got into ‘being’ here so it feels like you have a reason to get up every morning.
• Start a course of anti depressants.
• Start a course of heavy duty painkillers.
• Start a course of sedatives.
• Book yourself into mental hospital where the drugs and therapy is free and you get to chainsmoke and watch tv all day.
• Listen to upbeat music.  Make a special little selection for yourself.
• Send your email contacts sentimental little chainletters about how much you value friendship.
• Have a mantra:  for example:  “This is what I chose, I love to suck it up!”  “I love him, really I do,  it’s okay he can’t live anywhere else but Denmark!” or the oft celebrated:  “I love Denmark and everything about it. Especially the magical stardust sprinkled Winters with all the magic unicorns skipping past and the crisp white snowdrifts and all the magic magic lovely fantastikness of it!”
• Take dance classes,  break out a new you who dances through winter.
• Have a baby,  or adopt one,  or babysit a neighbours unruly kids every weekend for a month so you feel blessed not to have a baby adopted or otherwise.
• Chant:  ‘The Grass is always Greener’.
• Eat more vegetables, become healthy, exercise, take care of yourself,  your body is a temple.
• Plan next years trips out of Denmark.
• Eat foreign food.
• Watch lots of feel good movies.
• Light a lot of candles, every single night you idiot.
• Pretend to be a Viking.  Or pretend to be the Santa’s little helper.  Or any other pretend friend.
• Leave Denmark for the entirety of Winter (only good for those who are on welfare or screwing the system in some way or filthy rich).
• Laugh, a lot,  over matters you find amusing.

So there you go.  I hope you found that list helpful and/or insulting.  Either way, it’s not my problem.

You made your bed, now make it a bed of roses or leave.  After all, if you are not happy here, then why don’t you just leave?  Eh?  Eh?  Eh?

And. If you have any other real or unreal suggestions as to how people with another cultural background than Danski can survive the dark blearily drunk end of the Danish year then do so write in your little suggestions in the comment box.