I would like to regale you with an exchange I had today when waiting for the bus. First, to add tedium and to avoid any intrigue, speculation, or worse, thread derailing queries, I will bore you with the minutiae of the events that led to this moment. I was returning home after a particularly drab lecture in computational linguistics (this in itself is boring enough to warrant another post at a later date) and was stationed at a bus stop in the very centre of town. I can get either the 2A bus or the 18 bus as both will drop me at the same location. I decided on the 18 as it is a longer, more tedious route away from the over-stimulation of main roads, and I find after a morning of parsing and corpora its soothing to take a longer route. I was enjoying a cigarette at the bus stop. Typically I smoke Skjold as they are very cheap, albeit not the best tasting brand. It was at this point a woman approached me and asked in, what I consider to be very fast (but is probably just normal conversational speed), Danish whether she could buy a cigarette from me. Mildly flustered as my spoken Danish is quite bad, I said that she could have it for free and that there was no need to pay me. She asked if I was sure it was okay because I did not have many left (I had five) but I assured her that it was fine. She insisted on paying me 5 kroner (the near equivalent of 50 English pence) for the cigarette, which I felt mildly bad about as thats quite an extortionate price for a single cigarette. This conversation marks the first spoken discourse I have had with a stranger in the two months I have been here, where they havent immediately realised Im English and started speaking to me in English. I nearly apologised to her that they were Skjold but I felt being too apologetic might blow my cover. Shortly after this conversation, my bus arrived and I went home; feeling mildly accomplished.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 11:22:33 +0000
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