The Weekend Rambler

Some of you who’ve kept up with this blog notice that I’ve had one Spanish story a week during the Travel Advent. They have absolutely nothing to do with travel they were homework assignments with my tutor Carlos. You see, I’m one of those folks that wanted to be an overachiever during quarantine and practice their language skills. When the pandemic first started, I started taking Japanese and Korean classes at my local language school. Then a few weeks later, I had to give a presentation to over 100 members of a Mexican blind organization — and that’s when I realized I need to improve my Spanish.

So I scoured the internet for pandemic proof language resources, and lo and behold found an excellent little tutoring service with countless languages called Preply. I found my perfect tutor, and we’ve been meeting once or twice a week since May. I’m an immersion learner, and the only way I’ve been able to keep my Spanish going these past years in Denmark has been from spending lots of time with Argentine around or by taking a trip to Spain now and then. But now that I can’t travel, I had to find a way to travel in my own home.

Carlos has been a godsend. Not only has he made Spanish classes interesting, but he’s pushing me to levels I haven’t experienced in a while. He grades me to groom me for the Spanish comprehension exams, which would be an excellent way to tangibly prove to myself that I benefitted from the lockdown. But learning any language does a lot to transport us from our everyday.

I think languages fundamentally change our brains, and I believe that our personalities are different in other languages. While my Korean and Japanese aren’t too advanced, just the act of learning them and struggling to identify Kanji or sound out Hangeul transports me to a restaurant in Busan or Nagano. If I were to expand these languages, I’m sure my attitude and personality would change. When I was in Japan a few years ago speaking my broken Japanese, I realized how polite and understanding my personality is in Japanese. In English, I like to wander about with big words and meander as if I were hiking through some verdant Welsh hillside.

In Spanish, I like to explore the emotions behind words. It’s such an incredibly emotive language with definitions that don’t fully translate to the moods of English. In that way, for me a lover of melancholy, nostalgia, reflection and magical realism, Spanish is an optimal tool to describe the mind.

In a contrasting way, I’m a lot more matter of fact when I speak Danish. Danish is an upfront language, and in my opinion spoken in a flat impersonal way. There is no word for ‘please’ for example, and the word ‘fine’ means excellent. If someone asks how you are and you say ‘Fine’, it means you’re doing splendidly average — which is a good thing here. In America or the UK and Ireland, ‘fine’ means I don’t want to talk about how I feel. The Danish language can be entirely robotic, until you get to the matters of the indoors. That illusive, unidentifiable and untranslatable ‘hygge’ taking the world by storm is the most human emotion one can find here. It something like the mood and emotions behind coziness, anything from sitting by a fire to having a beer with a friend. This makes sense that Danish would evolve this way, since you spend the whole year inside alone not talking to anyone. You don’t need to say please or express your human emotions, but you do need to invent words to make staying indoors more bearable.

The translated words for every language seem to have their weight to them. It makes sense that my personality would change with each language, because the words I’m using to describe something have an entirely different energy and meaning to them. Just answering the question “How are you” has three different answers. “I’m doing well!” Could mean anything, but English vocabulary was made complicated and given hidden meanings to allow us to answer things indirectly to allow us to keep our masks up. “¿Ando bien, y vos?” has an energy of movement to it. It’s imaginative, it means that “I’m still going” and creates the image of movement and continuation as Spanish is an emotive language of action. “Det går fint, tak” Feels well rounded to me. Danish allows me to be flat and make conclusions. There is no hidden meaning behind my saying “I’m fine,” because I am fine and have nothing else to say about the matter.

So as I look down the barrel of another few months of potential quarantine here in Europe, I’m not too worried. I’ve gotten used to working from home, have enough books to weather an apocalypse, and enough Spanish tutor Duolingo lessons to get through to experience multiple personality disorder before I get my vaccine. What have you been learning this year?

Había un hombre que caminaba llevando su casa como una mochila. Sé que estás pensando — ¿y qué ? no es raro ver un mochilero con su casa a cuestas, — pero no era una mochila con una bolsa de dormir y una carpa —. Esto era una casita, como una casa para muñecas, que llevaba el hombre. El hombre, el cual se llevó su casa a cuestas, estaba caminando fuera de toda la civilización, dentro de un bosque misterioso y oscuro. Estaba caminando, y su barba larga flotando en el aire fresco, caminando encima del musgo esponjoso. ¿Dónde caminaba? no sé. Pero sabemos que el hombre cuya barba estaba flotando alegremente, era libre.

  El hombre caminaba dentro del bosque durante un rato que se sintió más bien como meses. Pero se centro emocionadamente en ser libre, y no se preocupó en las cosas fuera del bosque. Un día, estaba caminando cuando olió el fuego en un hogar. Lejos de él, pudo ver una casa roja con humo escapando de la chimenea. Caminó cerca y golpeó por la puerta vieja, un niño abrió la puerta llevando unos pantalones de cuero y una camisa de franela y un humo de fuego y olor a pan nuevo saliendo de la puerta. 

“¿Quién es usted?” cuestionó el chico. 

“Soy el hombre que camina con su casa a cuestas, el cual puede ver hasta el futuro. Estuve caminando en el bosque por meses y necesito una cama y un baño para refrescarme. ¿Están sus padres aquí adentro?”

“Solo vivo aquí con mi padre y él fue al río para colectar hongos. Pero el va a volver en un ratito y puedo darle una sopa y un té para calentarse.”

“Me parece perfecto comer un poco. A cambio, puedo darle “echar un vistazo” a su futuro.” El chico dio un paso y el hombre con su casa a cuestas entró en la casa. Había un hogar cerca de una mesa muy antigua y encima del hogar había las cornamentas de un ciervo enorme. Todo estaba muy limpio, y el hombre se sacó sus botas para no llevar barro a  la casa. Sacó la casita fuera de su espalda con hombros y brazos fuertes de un hombre el cuál llevaba mucho tiempo diambulando. Esos  hombros que llevaban el futuro de todos… 

El hombre dejó su casita encima de la mesa, y se sentó mientras el chico calentaba la sopa encima de la estufa. Cuando el fuego se encendió y la sopa estaba calentándose, el chico vino con una silla y se sentó cerca del hombre. El hombre miró al chico y dijo, “A ver, qué está pasando en su futuro, amigo.” Con dedos gordos y fuertes, abrió la puerta de la casita y el chico puso su cabeza cerca de la puerta y miró con un ojo cerrado, desde la puerta de la casita. “¿Y qué ves, amigo mío?” 

El chico era bizco, pero después de un momento pudo ver qué estaba pasando en la casita. “¡Vi un hombre, !” dijo el chico. “¿Quién es él…soy yo? No puede ser. El es muy alto y guapo, además llevando traje — y tiene una castaña en su mano. ¿Qué haces con esta castaña, chiquito?” El chico apartó de la casita, y miró que el hombre con su casa a cuestas tuvo una castaña en la palma de su mano.

Coronavirus fucked a lot of shit up. But it’s given me a lot of time to look at my life, and what I could be doing right now.

This time last year, I had two identical offers on the table: be the new Community Manager for Be My Eyes and stay in Denmark, or move to Costa Rica with my friend and be a chef in a hippy yoga commune. I don’t regret taking the first option, even though working an 8-4 is sucking me dry and Denmark is no longer the place I want to live. Rather, it was the perfect opportunity for waiting this whole thing out. I’ve been afforded the ability to work at an interesting company that does legitimate good for the world, while developing my professional skill and saving some money for future adventures.

But there is always the sound in the back of my head, wishing I could be in Costa Rica. My friend is still there, so it’s interesting to see how we always want what we can’t have. I’m currently freezing every day, dying slowly of a vitamin D deficiency in the repulsive Danish winter. My friend is deep in the Costa Rican jungle, living in a shed with her boyfriend picking banana’s and working remotely part time. I wish I could be somewhere warm and work less, she wishes she could be somewhere with a bit more certainty.

If roles were reversed, she could be in Europe working a day job, slowly being drained of life and ambition — while I could be deep in the Costa Rican mountains, weathering the rains and writing nonsense for pocket change. Would either of be happier? Probably not, and we’d both desire the lives of the other for a time. So while it’s easy to wish I were in a banana hut in the Costa Rican mountains rather than freezing my giblets in Denmark, I’m trying to find the positives of this situation.

Yet still, there is that voice that wishes I could leave — wishes I could be in Costa Rica. So why is it so hard to be happy with what we have? Why is it so difficult to enjoy the moment, and be completely in the place we are in the moment?