Two critical incidents

I experienced two critical incidents in the space of two hours today, one positive and one negative. Let’s start with the bad news. I was at the checkout in the supermarket when the checkout operator became aware of a smell. Looking around I discovered that the lid of a jar of tandoori paste I had bought had come loose and was starting to leak. The smell was vinegary and then spicy. ‘You’d better have a new one,’ she said as she took it off me. ‘Oh it does stink doesn’t it?’ she said as she took hold of it. Then she was on the phone to a colleague, ‘ It’s … well I can’t even say it, you’d better come over and take a look!’ she continued. She served another customer while I waited for a new jar to be brought over. And the final straw, after I’d taken delivery of the new securely sealed jar, ‘oh my hands stink!’ and off she went to wash her hands. Well that’ll teach me not to go to the ‘exotic corner’ again. We’ve noticed that Danes don’t like spicy food and even something labelled curry flavoured and hot can be hard to detect as curry if you taste it blind, so that probably explains the over-reaction at the supermarket.

And so to the good news! After greeting my dentist he complimented me on my flawless Danish! That was downgraded to ‘pretty good Danish’ after I began speaking in sentences involving more than three words but I was still pretty pleased as I need to write some short articles in Danish and after spending a few months working at home was beginning to think that my Danish must have suffered.