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My Life is So Full
Apr. 14th, 2024 07:05 pmHello from Malmö. I'm here for about 10 days because my PhD student is defending her dissertation on Friday and colleagues are coming in on Wednesday and Thursday for research talks. It's not worth it to come to Europe for less than a week, so I left the US on Friday to arrive Saturday and will be returning on Sunday next, making this a 10 day trip.
While I am here, I like to do things that I cannot do easily in Maryland. Today that included going to see a film at a local theatre that was mostly in Danish, but also in Swedish and English and was subtitled in Swedish. The longer I live outside of Sweden, the less opportunity I have to listen to and use Swedish, and even while I lived here, my Swedish conversation skills were never very high. So this is a great way to practice listening to Swedish (or reading Swedish) and working on my comprehension skills with immediate feedback.
The film I just saw is called Möte in Rom in Swedish, which translates into something like "Meeting in Rome". It followed a Danish couple traveling to Rome to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. This was a romantic comedy+drama, so it included ridiculous elements like the husband having stomach issues that led to him being arrested after taking a dump in the Trevi fountain as a result of eating a steak and drinking red wine while his wife slept with her old Swedish flame who had been her art teacher more than 40 years prior.
On a linguistic level, it was fun to hear both Danish and Swedish and to read the subtitles to see what I got and also to hear the differences between Danish and Swedish. Since it was based in Italy, there was also a lot of Switching to English when the non-Italian speaking Danish character needed to do something. This also allowed me to read the Swedish translation of the English.
Some things I observed:
1. I would say I understood 75-80% of the Swedish subtitles. This meant I understood the film and got a lot of the jokes.
2. There was a language joke where the Danish wife/lead female character was making a joke about some Italian soccer players based on how the plural was formed in Italian. I don't know Italian, but I studied Latin in high school and the formation of the plural matched.
3. May age and my soon to be 17 year marriage to my husband made me sob at the toast the husband gave to his wife in a mixture of English and Danish.
4. My soon to be 51 years on this earth (as of Tuesday) made me feel very sentimental about the love the husband held for his wife even after she cheated on him with her old Swedish flame (her former art instructor by whom she had gotten pregnant and had an abortion leading to lifelong infertility) in Rome.
5. There were a lot of digs at Swedes since this was coming from the Danish perspective. It's kind of an in-joke thing and I enjoyed that I understood some of this. It's a little like how Minnesotans and Iowans regularly take the piss out of each other but to people not from Iowa or Minnesota, this can seem weird and obscure because seriously, what's the difference between Minnesota and Iowa (LOL!).
6. There were a lot of touching things about this film even though it concerned infidelity and deceit and love and a lot of absurdity. I laughed along with the everyone else there which meant I was following the main points. But when I looked around at the audience, I saw not a single young person. There were a lot of people who I would consider older than me who came with a friend or partner and had mobility issues or who just looked older - like the main characters of the film. This story was not about young love. It was about older love and the tragedy and comedy (from a European angle) that underlies these relationship. The older people who watched and laughed is the demographic I belong to now. I may be on the younger range of the spectrum, but this story is about people like me.
7. The perspective of the story that dealt with a woman going back to a place she had lived in and studied at in her youth made me think of the richness of my past and the places that I have been. I have been so fortunate. I am still fortunate. I wish more people could have or could have had this experience wherever in the world it might take them.
8. This made me think of my undergraduate years and my study and work abroad apportunities in Berlin, Paris and London when I was between the ages of 19-22. I do not want to go back to meet with old lovers from that time (there was really only one) and I have had the chance to visit all those cities much later. What a gift.
My life has been so very full.
While I am here, I like to do things that I cannot do easily in Maryland. Today that included going to see a film at a local theatre that was mostly in Danish, but also in Swedish and English and was subtitled in Swedish. The longer I live outside of Sweden, the less opportunity I have to listen to and use Swedish, and even while I lived here, my Swedish conversation skills were never very high. So this is a great way to practice listening to Swedish (or reading Swedish) and working on my comprehension skills with immediate feedback.
The film I just saw is called Möte in Rom in Swedish, which translates into something like "Meeting in Rome". It followed a Danish couple traveling to Rome to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. This was a romantic comedy+drama, so it included ridiculous elements like the husband having stomach issues that led to him being arrested after taking a dump in the Trevi fountain as a result of eating a steak and drinking red wine while his wife slept with her old Swedish flame who had been her art teacher more than 40 years prior.
On a linguistic level, it was fun to hear both Danish and Swedish and to read the subtitles to see what I got and also to hear the differences between Danish and Swedish. Since it was based in Italy, there was also a lot of Switching to English when the non-Italian speaking Danish character needed to do something. This also allowed me to read the Swedish translation of the English.
Some things I observed:
1. I would say I understood 75-80% of the Swedish subtitles. This meant I understood the film and got a lot of the jokes.
2. There was a language joke where the Danish wife/lead female character was making a joke about some Italian soccer players based on how the plural was formed in Italian. I don't know Italian, but I studied Latin in high school and the formation of the plural matched.
3. May age and my soon to be 17 year marriage to my husband made me sob at the toast the husband gave to his wife in a mixture of English and Danish.
4. My soon to be 51 years on this earth (as of Tuesday) made me feel very sentimental about the love the husband held for his wife even after she cheated on him with her old Swedish flame (her former art instructor by whom she had gotten pregnant and had an abortion leading to lifelong infertility) in Rome.
5. There were a lot of digs at Swedes since this was coming from the Danish perspective. It's kind of an in-joke thing and I enjoyed that I understood some of this. It's a little like how Minnesotans and Iowans regularly take the piss out of each other but to people not from Iowa or Minnesota, this can seem weird and obscure because seriously, what's the difference between Minnesota and Iowa (LOL!).
6. There were a lot of touching things about this film even though it concerned infidelity and deceit and love and a lot of absurdity. I laughed along with the everyone else there which meant I was following the main points. But when I looked around at the audience, I saw not a single young person. There were a lot of people who I would consider older than me who came with a friend or partner and had mobility issues or who just looked older - like the main characters of the film. This story was not about young love. It was about older love and the tragedy and comedy (from a European angle) that underlies these relationship. The older people who watched and laughed is the demographic I belong to now. I may be on the younger range of the spectrum, but this story is about people like me.
7. The perspective of the story that dealt with a woman going back to a place she had lived in and studied at in her youth made me think of the richness of my past and the places that I have been. I have been so fortunate. I am still fortunate. I wish more people could have or could have had this experience wherever in the world it might take them.
8. This made me think of my undergraduate years and my study and work abroad apportunities in Berlin, Paris and London when I was between the ages of 19-22. I do not want to go back to meet with old lovers from that time (there was really only one) and I have had the chance to visit all those cities much later. What a gift.
My life has been so very full.
