Et år i Danmark

One year in Denmark today!  One year in Denmark today!

To note the occasion, we went to our bakery and bought some bread.  Mostly because we needed bread.

But, while there, we decided to get a fastelavnsbolle - a traditional pastry for fastelavn / Carnival / "Scandanavian Halloween" / "The Time You Make Pastries with the Max Number of Calories Possible Because Lent is Coming and We All Know What THAT is About."

There were three choices: hindbær (raspberry), nougat (nougat), and sveske which I initially read as sveNske and therefore thought was some special Swedish type (Swedish = "Svensk").  So we got one of those.

Turns out it actually was a prune pastry?  Still amazing.  Anything is amazing when surrounded by a fist-sized blob of cream with a 38% fat content.

Other fastelavn traditions include:

* Putting a black cat in a barrel with a bunch of oranges and then beating the barrel with sticks till it breaks open and the cat runs away and never stops running until it dies.  Yeah, okay, so they don't use real cats anymore, but there are still barrels with candy and kids with sticks and a picture of a cat involved somewhere in there.

* Ritually flogging your parents with fruit tree branches to wake them up in the morning. (Approved by me, probably since we have no children.)

* Ritually flogging any ol' young woman you meet on the street with a fruit tree branch covered with a bunch of eggshells (Also a defunct tradition, thankfully.)

* Singing the following song with the children:

Carnival is my name
I want (prune?) pastries!
If I don't get any,
I'm going to "seriously mess everything up here in this house I'm not even joking I will break a lot of stuff." (direct translation difficult there)

(Prune?) pastries up!
(Prune?) pastries down!
(Prune?) pastries in my belly!

If I don't get any,
I'm going to "key your car and slash your tires and other destructive things etc."

Thanks for the year here, Denmark.  I can now passably say the words "hedder" and "selvfølgelig" (one looks much easier than it is and the other looks much worse than it is) so let's just chalk this one up as good.

And a Happy Fastelavn to all.