Originally posted to Posterous on 19 May 2011
A week ago we sailed overnight by ferry from Oslo to Frederikshavn in northern Jylland (the bit of Denmark that is attached to Germany). This was a more basic ferry, but still very comfortable, with heaps of duty free shopping (cheap booze, cigarettes and ginormous Toblerones that could be used in a pinch as a serious weapon), plus another great buffet dinner. We shared dinner with a very excited group of Norwegians with intellectual disabilities, a group of school kids returning to Denmark, plus assorted truck drivers, travellers and tourists like us. Once in Frederikshavn, we caught the train north to Skagen and wandered through the still very quiet main street to our holiday rental apartment.
The holiday rental company was closed, but a man inside opened up and gave us our keys. The holiday rental apartment was small, but very nice inside, with a lounge, dining table, bathroom, small kitchen with stove top and oven, and an outside patio area. Even though the lounge area doubled as a bedroom and faced right onto the street, it was very quiet and peaceful - a really good break from staying in cities. It was absolutely delightful to have our own kitchen too and be able to shop in the supermarket and cook like normal people again. But the absolute best part was that we had a bakery a few doors down in both directions outside our front door. This meant that each morning, we could venture out to buy fresh rolls for breakfast as the bakeries opened at 6:30am.
Unfortunately, the holiday rental apartment had a couple of downsides - the sofa bed turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable, we had no in-house internet and TV was somewhat limited. Skagen is very pretty, but the weather was a little bit cold and wet, and without a car or public transport, TV took on increased importance. We had four Danish channels, three Norwegian, two or three Swedish, two French and several German channels. The German and French dub everything into their own languages, so even a nice, respectable episode of "Law and Order" is not terribly watchable. However, German TV did allow us to come to the conclusion that Arnold Schwarzenegger is only slightly less intelligible in German than he is in his fractured English. This left the Scandinavian channels - and it was Eurovision song contest time. East European drag queens singing simultaneously on three channels.
The Scandinavians have also not escaped the scourge of reality TV either, and not unsurprisingly, some of the formats are so well-worn and hackneyed, that even without speaking the relevant language, we could understand what was happening. "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" in Norwegian is still people selecting answers to questions, with inordinately long pauses and a host trying to draw out the tension. "Four Weddings" in Swedish is still four women being bitchy about each others' tastes and style. "Wife Swap" in Swedish - "Mamma Byter Bo" - follows the same format as its UK and American namesakes, i.e. it's an incomprehensibly strange exercise in voyeurism without any clear motivation for participants, but the episode we saw lacked the element of class difference, which normally provides the sting in English speaking versions. So maybe reality TV is not the same in every language.
But it's the ads that really get me. OK ... there's one ad for god-knows-what that has a naked woman sitting at a desk playing pick up sticks. I think it's a mobile phone ad. The same company has an ad with a middle-aged naked man and woman cooking in a caravan. The man flambés something in a frying pan, prompting another (naked) man to cover everything and everyone in foam from a fire extinguisher. The ad ends with the woman bemoaning the fact that her laptop has been ruined by the foam. I think it's an ad for mobile broadband plans. It is hard to determine the connection between realistic, middle-aged (but nevertheless perky) naked breasts and telecommunications products, but presumably a better command of Danish would make this clearer.
In the end, we decided that the best options were the Swedish TV test pattern for its soothing music, and the Danish kids channel, which shows people sleeping after 9pm (in the manner of "The Truman Show"), with a countdown until it's time to wake up.