Day 224 - Smukfest

Today marks the end of the first week of Emily's adventure in the US as well as the beginning of Smukfest 2013, a five day music festival in Skanderborg, a small town in the north of Jylland. Folks go and camp for five days and enjoy all sorts of "older" Danish bands and a handful of big American bands. Smuk means, essentially, beautiful in Danish.

Tonight's headliner is Prince. This affords me the opportunity to post perhaps my two favorite Prince clips ever.






That's George Harrison's son on the acoustic guitar. I love how happy he looks watching Prince shred.

The festival doesn't have a ton of money to pay performers, but rumor is that Prince loves playing here and as such, waived most of his fee. Prince's bass player is from Denmark, so that probably doesn't hurt either.

Other American performers include Alabama Shakes, Kings of Leon, and MC Hammer. Yes. MC Hammer will be shutting things down.

Anyway, my colleagues Anders (pronounced Ahn-ahs) and Charlotte (pronounced Char-lot-ah) made their way out to the festival today. Apparently one can earn free admission to the festival by "working" at various tasks. Anders will be charged with assisting concessions / etc for a 24-hour period. It doesn't sound very fun, but it saved him 2000 crowns and he assured me that it's super easy. He will spend most of that time sitting on a couch. Drinking beer. He hopes to take an extended bathroom break to check out Alabama Shakes.

There is an additional 16-hour option which involves toilet duty. I think Anders chose well. Best wishes Smukfesters!

WotD #24 - Muslinger

I always thought that muslinger meant mussels. In the way that I use the word mussels. This delicious sort.

In reality the word means most shellfish that grow in, get ready for it, a shell. Our mussel is really the blå musling. We totally talked about this before! Scallops are called kammuslinger and clams are hjertemuslinger. No worries Roy, oysters are special enough that they get their own name. Østers. As in, Roy og Collin kan spise mange østers.

Our Danish teacher Andreas tried to explain kammuslinger to us, but both Emily and I failed to understand what he was talking about. Later in the lesson we asked how to say scallops, as in, jeg kan godt lide scallops. After a bit of fussing around we realized that he already taught us the word for scallops. We are smart.

Quick Danish lessson. Most - and I say this loosely - Danish words can be pluralized by adding an -er at the end. Musling. Muslinger. Confusing fact. Most Danish present tense verbs end in -er. Fun times.

This follows in what I've learned about Danish and English while I've been studying Danish. We have so many words in English. So many. Too many words! Danish, eh, not so much. I don't know what this tells me about the Danes and the English / Americans / Canadians / everyone else in the world that speaks English.