Fun Fact!

I keep thinking there's random, patchy snow on the ground, but it's not. It's salt.

All of these cute little trucks drive around, all over the city, sprinkling the bike paths with salt to keep them from getting icy, so that people with bikes without snow tires (don't look at me...everyone keeps saying my bike is so impractical for weather, but I've been fine so far *spits on finger twice*) don't slip and slide and eat shit all over the place.

Fun fact: The bike lanes (more like semi-elevated bike freeways along every street), still used by most throughout the winter, have priority over lanes for cars. When it gets below freezing or snows, the city sends out a fleet of salt trucks to blaze a trail for all of us bikers before they clear a path for cars.

At least this is what I hear. It hasn't snowed that hard yet.

I guess that's less of a fact, and more hearsay.

Digital Sticky Note

Note to self:

People change, situations change... memories don't.

And sometimes, that's the pits.

Cryptic enough?

Perhaps inappropriate for the bloggosphere, but I wanted to remember this and couldn't find a piece of paper to jot this down on fast enough, and I would have misplaced that piece of paper anyway.

Perfectly Logical

Well, this makes sense...

I just got a letter in the mail. It is, of course, in Danish. I type it into google translate, curious as to what it's about (could you imagine getting important mail you can't understand?? Maddening!), only to find that it's a letter telling me that, since I have a Danish Residence Permit, I'm entitled to start taking Danish lessons, free for up to 3 years.

I think I'd need all 3 years of Danish lessons just to understand this letter without fair, trusty Google translate (which has quickly become my most-visited website). Someone maybe needs to go back and rethink this one.

Homebody

It's incredible how much different my life is this month than the last.

November and December were spent socializing, going out, travelling, filling all spare time with fun and late nights. Not a single Friday or Saturday night was spent at home.

Then came January. I crave home. I crave my bed. I crave alone time. I go to bed early (I start thinking about it at around 9 some nights), work on my creative pursuits, read (I can't recall the last period of time I regularly read for pleasure), get up at 6 to exercise before work. I'm trying to treat myself well and make the most of each day, without staying out all night, and sleeping through anything that resembles daylight (unbelievably depressing!).

I have to say, it feels pretty nice. Balanced with a weekly meal at a friends place, or having a dinner party at my place, this isn't a bad way to live. But I do feel like I'll never have the energy or desire to go out and meet new people, go out to a bar, dance my booty off, or stay out far too late ever again.

My friend Daniel said that everyone gets this way in January, as he pushed some Vitamin D on me.

Snow Pancakes

Today it snowed.

And I mean it really snowed. It snowed once before, for about 5 minutes. But it was a pansy snow. Tiny little fluttering flakes.

Today it snowed pancakes. Giant clusters of snow the size of pancakes. Maybe it was sleet? Honestly, I don't trust myself to know the difference.

And as I biked in the snow for the first time, I realized just what I'm in for...

Ice cakes to the face.

Cool.

And I wondered, how am I to improve my visibility mid-bike-ride?

Do they make eye-shield wipers for the snow biker?

Pass Me the Vitamin D

Humans are adaptable.

Give us any situation, and we will find a way to cope.

The hardest hurdle is finding or developing the tools that aid adaptation. Mental or physical. And certainly, the will power to motivate the process.

In these dark, cold months, where does that motivation come from?

Then again, what option is there but to adapt?

Unintelligible Words of Encouragement

I used to dream of being a polyglot.

I once had a Hebrew school teacher who could speak 14 languages fluently, and I wanted to be just like her. I used to think that if I lived in different locations all over the world, I could pick up as many languages as places I'd lived.

I had a list of languages I wanted to learn fluently.

Spanish, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Thai, Yiddish, Arabic.

I think there's a reason Danish never made the list.

I'd never even heard Danish before coming to Denmark (for a reason. No one speaks it, except for Danes), but I figured I would learn it anyway. Shoot, if I'm living somewhere for 6 months to a year, I'll certainly pick up a good amount of the native tongue...

Not.

I went to one Danish class. One, before I quit. The government offers free Danish lessons to anyone with a CPR number (registered taxpayer), which is something I fully intended to take advantage of.

It was an intense time commitment -6 hours a week plus homework -and while I'm working full time, working on my portfolio, playing music, working on my fitness (to be discussed shortly), that kind of time commitment just didn't manage to yield positive results after a close cost-benefit analysis. Cost: so much time and head-scratching devoted to learning a language that sounds a bit like vomiting, that I can't seem to pronounce (I can't even correctly pronounce the name of the street I live on) no matter how hard I try, and that no one speaks outside of this country. Benefit: Maybe maaaaaaybe learning enough to bring a few novelty phrases back home to show off with. And let's get real, I've already picked up enough novelty phrases to cross that off the to-do list. Class dropped.

And still, this morning I found myself somewhat regretting my decision to quit. I've started going to spinning classes 3 times a week, accompanied by the occasional yoga and pilates class, and I'm hopefully starting crossfit training this week. Getting back into shape (or maybe even the best shape of my life) really helps me feel alive, even when everything outside my window is dead, cold and dark. On Mondays and Wednesdays I get up at 6am to spin before work, and my productivity level nearly doubles, at least until I crash at about 2 pm.

But the problem is this...

The great thing about group training fitness classes is that an instructor shouts deeply motivating words at you to keep you going. Push! Harder! You've got this! Only one more minute! etc...

Well, a whole lotta good that does me if I don't understand a damn word of it. All of the classes are taught in Danish. Ugh! So I'm forced to rely on visual cues to know what is going on, and the occasional translation from my good friend and work-out buddy Clara (a native Dane). But she's often too out of breath (like the rest of us) to really fill me in word-for-word.

It's a fun guessing game, unless the instructor is impossible to follow, and the music played is less-than motivating.

After already waking up somewhat groggy and putting on my grumpy pants, today's instructor succeeded in motivating me only insofar as he really freaking irritated me. By the end of the class, I was pushing harder than usual, just to have an outlet to let out my frustration at the guy leading the class. He kept counting down at absurdly short intervals to... what? I kept thinking he was counting down to have us turn up our resistance every 15 seconds, only to realize that I was the only one struggling after about a minute. Oh. Clara later told me that he kept having us turn up and down the resistance.

And he just wouldn't shut up. He kept going on and on (apparently about anatomy?) and the music he chose was just awfully wrong. I've come to rely on the music to motivate me the most. I pedal in time to the music (think cycle-dancing. Oh yeah. Soon I'll start toting a stationary bike out to clubs with me), and most instructors are really good about picking tunes that are the right pace to climb to (slow) and the right pace to sprint to (fast). This guy? Consistently chose music that was good for neither. Right in the middle. Absolutely useless. I was losing it, it being my temper.

By the end of the class I would have given anything to know Danish. I silently hated every single person in that class, just for their ability to comprehend.

But then I just channeled it all and pushed myself to the point of excruciating pain, scrunched my face into what I'm sure was among the most hideous of faces I can make, and sweat out my aggression.

Thank you, Mr. Chatty-impossible-to-follow-bad-DJ-spinning-master. You really motivated me today.