Jeg snakkede meget på dansk.
Back at Askov, when I was emailing Bo to coordinate when I was going to visit him, I decided to do so in Danish—which is scary! It’s seemed more likely that I would type the wrong day of the week, the wrong time, or even suggest that we drink some snail-flavored milkshake out of celery straws. There’s a level of trust you have in your ability to communicate that isn’t quite the same when you use a foreign language. Nevertheless, he showed up in Hornbæk at the time I expected on the day I expected. Success! But he also spoke a bunch of Danish at me all at once. He was accustomed to communicating in Danish—so off he went, asking if I had had lunch and making plans for the rest of the day—next level.
There’s something about Bo—I don’t know what it is—I do not want to disappoint him, so I just did my best to keep up.We spoke Danish for the first three hours we were together. Sure there were some words I needed him to repeat, some words I needed explained, but for the most part I could follow his train of thought.
Granted, I’m not the best conversationalist in Danish. I talk very slowly—I grind to a dead halt when I stumble into certain conditional phrases—like Anne Katrine and I were going to meet last Monday, but Hugo had a fever. Not only is it conditional, it’s in the past and it didn’t even happen. It’s funny how everything stops as your trying to figure something like that out. And you're far more aware of the time that you’re silent when you’re just talking to a native speaker than you are when you're talking to one of your teachers. Bo was so patient. He just waited for me to work my way through it. Sometimes he’d correct my present tense verbs to past-tense, and sometimes he left them alone.
I did feel limited in my ability to reconnect with him though. I haven’t seen him in a year—there’s so many things that have happened since the last time I was in Denmark—but I didn’t dare tackle my graduation, leaving Los Angeles, or meeting Davia Nelson from The Kitchen Sisters. I have many words and a few short phrases in my little bag of language skills, but what I need to accumulate more phrases—longer and more complex phrases. You realize that you don’t consciously think about every single word you say, but you think in groups of words—common languages phrases—phrases that almost become like words themselves, so you don’t have to waste your energy arranging them over and over in your head.
With my bags still in the trunk of the car, Bo turned left into Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, one of my favorite places in Denmark. There was an exhibit of pieces from the documentary photographer Lauren Greenfield, a scathing critique on the growing obsession with wealth, beauty and status. Many of her photographs centered around Los Angeles, hyper sexualized preteen girls desperate for admiration, older women trying to imitate the preteen girls in an effort to hold on to their youth, ridiculously ornate homes resembling castles, and portraits of wall street criminals who not only escaped anything more than a slap on the wrist for their contributions to the financial crisis but who also are still admired today by those who wish they follow in their footsteps. It was the first time I had worn my UCLA hoodie, since Trump wanted to buy Greenland—and I wished I was wearing something different.
By the time we were at dinner, we finally slipped into some English and of course, talked politics. Bo knew quite a bit about Bernie Sanders, but not so much about Elizabeth Warren. “Bernie Sanders gets a lot of press here, because he often points to us as an example that the United States could aim for—and of course the Danes really like that,” he told me, but he does’t think that Bernie has what it takes. I started telling him about Elizabeth Warren—how she speaks—not like a careful and measured politician, but someone who’s given a lot of thought to the problems in the US. Anyway, he found what I had to say about her interesting and he’s going to look her up later.
Although Bo lets me slip into English when we talk politics or WWII—we talked a lot about war crimes and the events that lead up to war crimes—he still tries to get me to return back to Danish for the simpler talk. He’s almost insistent—which is nice.
Until next time, vi ses.








