I’ve lived in Denmark now for nearly four years, and I’ve changed a lot within this time. I’ve become more fashionable, more cosmopolitan-minded, more ...Danish — if I’m allowed to say that.
But one thing hasn’t changed about me. And that is my inability to cooperate with or understand Danish supermarket culture. As someone who was raised predominantly in the United States, I’ve always been used to grocery stores with a selection of food choices so huge that it’s almost perverted. That and a high level of service. In an American grocery store, one can find a kind of product with a thousand different brandings and types. For example, let’s take the flakes varieties: whole grain frosted flakes, or fat-free frosted flakes. Do I want my cream cheese with low, medium, or full fat? Seedless watermelons or watermelons with seeds? That being said, when I walk into a Danish grocery store I want to burst into tears because I’m so bored with the selection. The variety of cereals consists of Cherrios, Honey-nut Cherrios, and Wheaties. Coco-puffs if I’m lucky. There’re few fruits and vegetables, most rotten. I’m telling you, everything is so boring and plain and demanding of hard kitchen labour that you just wish some American food companies could establish factories here and import some ready made dinners.
I know I should be ashamed of saying this, but I do miss American convenience. In Denmark, making a homemade meal requires at least 30 dollars spent at the grocery store and 2 hours in the kitchen. For instance, at my local grocery store, nothing is allowed to be under 4 dollars. That’s right, it’s called organic and healthy food, free of anything synthetic or “fast”-related. But I do miss synthetic food.
Oh yes, the whole Danish, “do-it-yourself” attitude prevails! Expect to stress while bagging all of your food, as no one will do it for you.
The only way to really understand what I mean is to imagine that if you’ve come from America and you’re used to certain things with service and product selection and then you move here — it truly is different in Denmark. And I’ve lived elsewhere in Europe (Iceland, England, Spain) and I still find the grocery stores much better and with more selection in those countries.
However, how could anyone take me serious when I say, “I miss synthetic food”? That is purely attempting to be sarcastic, and I see that it is wrong and disgusting that American food is pumped up with so much crap. I really appreciate that in Denmark the food is free of everything artificial and it shows on Danes — most of them look healthy and fit here. But once in a while I miss the vastness of an American grocery store!
I want to add that I am Danish, was born in Denmark, lived here for 5 years as a child and then moved to America where I lived most of my life. I moved back here a few years ago and I love the country. I speak Danish. I’m not an immigrant in
Denmark who is unsatisfied with the way of life here and who should move back to
the States. I’m a student and of course it takes 2 hours to make a meal on my own.

Presenter: Today I’m in the old English city of Salisbury and talking with the local
secondary school teacher Jerry Lewis. OK, tell me first a few words about
yourself.
Jerry Lewis: Well, I’m a 44 year old unmarried American who moved to England
over 20 years ago, and I teach English in a local secondary modern school. I own
my own house - a smallish terrace house just outside the centre of the city, with
three bedrooms and a small garden. I've got two younger brothers. One of them,
Julian, also lives in Salisbury. He's a teacher too, but he works in a private language
school teaching English to foreign students.
Presenter: Secondary modern schools like Jerry's take children who have not
passed the entrance examination for a grammar school. They attend the school between
the ages of 11 and 16. Jerry explained that his school day begins at 08:30am
and ends at 4:00pm. How much extra-curricular work do you do?
Jerry Lewis: Quite a lot, actually. There's always marking to be done and evenings
when I meet the parents and so on. And then I take on extra duties, mainly in
the areas of sport and drama. I’m a keen cross country runner myself, and I train
the school cross country team, which means taking groups of children out running
during their lunch breaks, usually a couple of times a week. And then, on the drama
side, I produce the annual school play. We normally have to start preparing this
in the spring term to have it ready by the summer.
Presenter: What plays have your pupils performed?
Jerry Lewis: It varies from year to year. We’ve done an adaptation of Treasure
Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and we’ve done Shakespeare - A Midsummer
Night's Dream. Last year the boys wrote and produced their own play.
Presenter: I can see from Jerry’s house that he takes running very seriously. His
shelves are covered with medals and cups that he won over the years in various
races. Since he is now over 40 he is classified as a ‘veteran’ - a term he doesn’t like
- but he still continues winning. To keep himself fit, he usually runs from forty to fifty
kilometres a week and more if he's training for a race. What else do you enjoy
doing?
Jerry Lewis: As well as running, I love walking. The countryside around Salisbury
is magnificent, and there are some wonderful walks. My idea of a perfect day
is to walk out of town and stop for lunch and a drink at a small village pub - in the
summer you can sit outside, or in the winter by a log fire. Then there's my garden,
and I'm very fond of gardening. Every year I add to my collection of roses, and it's very satisfying to sit outside on a summer’s evening doing my school marking, surrounded
by wonderful colours and scents.
Presenter: Jerry also likes cooking. On a Saturday he goes down to the market early
in the morning to catch the best of the produce, and frequently invites friends and
relatives to dinner in the evening. When not at home he is often to be found at his
local pub, the 14th-century ‘Haunch of Venison’, where he has many friends.
Jerry Lewis: I've been teaching in Salisbury so long that many of my ex-pupils are
now friends that I meet in the pub. It's strange, sometimes to think to myself: I remember
when this chap was just a boy!
Presenter: Occasionally he goes to the cinema, but, he explained, he prefers the
theatre.
Jerry Lewis: I go by myself, with friends, or with groups from school. Last week
we went and saw Noel Coward's Relative Values, I'm not very keen on Coward myself,
but the kids loved it.
Presenter: One last question. Jerry. You've lived and worked in Salisbury for over
20 years. What keeps you here?
Jerry Lewis: That’s a difficult one. My job, I suppose. I often complain, but who
doesn’t. On the whole, though, I’m happy with it. Then most of my friends live
here or nearby. And the city itself, it’s a beautiful place, full of history, surrounded
by amazing countryside and within easy reach of some of my favourite places. No,
I wouldn’t change it.

Today I bought “The Ecological Calendar” that has peculiar formatting on its title. The calendar is apparently available in a few different formats. The one I’ve bought is a weekly planner for 2007, although it starts at the Winter Solstice, so it includes part of December too. It’s partly in the standard Gregorian format, so I don’t have to worry about making mistakes in it that take away from its usefulness. In 1997, I had a weekly planner where the week started with Monday instead of Sunday, as it does in some countries, and that little change caused a lot of havoc in any kind of scheduling that I tried to do.
However, it pairs the usual Gregorian calendar with a lot of information about the astronomical and seasonal changes that are happening at that time of year, so that you get the feeling of being connected to the grand cycles of nature. What the plants and animals are doing, when you can look for meteor showers, that sort of thing; it’s quite detailed.
This calendar concept is the one that is dear to me. It’s part of what I was trying to accomplish when I was working on my own calendar project called “The Book of Days”, which was supposed to give a sense of the passage of time so that each part of the year is meaningful. It would describe the patterns common among all cultures such as the psychological need for relief from the darkest part of winter, and most cultures say that the veil between our world and the other world is thinner at a certain time of the year, even though they don’t all agree on when that is. It would tell about the cycles in nature such as seasons, and any light-hearted contemporary events such as Rabbit Hole Day. It didn’t just list events, it drew connections between them so that you can get a feel for the significance of the current time.
However, “The Book of Days” was a very time-consuming thing to try and work on every day. I’d hoped that it would become a voluntary group project and thus would lessen the load of each contributing individual, but other people seemed to lack interest. I managed it for several months, but it was too much for one person to manage alone. Eventually I had to let them go off it for more important projects. I still want to see something like “The Book of Days”. That’s why I’m so glad to see that someone else has executed a similar project, “The Ecological Calendar”.
I also like the idea of redefining the scope of time that we humans perceive that I have found in “The Clock of The Long Now”, a book I’m in the middle of reading and which has already made a huge impression on me. That book argues that we need to expand our concept of time which looks not only at the present, back into the past and into the future at least a century each, but which also encourages us to learn from the past as well as consider our impact on future generations.
So for 2007, I’ll be completely redefining my perception of time to make it more meaningful, although that’s something I’ve been working on for a while now, since calendars fascinate me.

The White Air Extreme Sports Festival was held in Brighton last year. There were dozens of displays that interested me, but the ones I liked enough to consider trying were made up of weird combinations.
Brush boarding, for example, is surfing on a conventional surf board — but without ever getting wet. They had this high technology bank of brushes (designed by the air force apparently) that exactly simulate wave action. We more or less got the hang of this in a couple of tries but then, we are experienced surfers.
After this there was the roller skiing! This weird combination of ski and bike looks great when the experts do it. James was with us for the morning and he managed to get a nasty cut on his foot when he simultaneously crashed and lost his boots in a freaky collision.
The land yachting was fun to watch — but you need lots of money to get into this. The “yachts” were made of high tech, lightweight metals or carbon fibre. They all have 3 wheels and are constructed so low to the ground that the pilot is almost lying down. The wind that day was a modest 10 knots (5 m/s) but they were achieving amazing bursts of acceleration in all directions around the course.
We all did the Aquathlon early that morning — which was fairly easy to be honest. A 400 metre swim and a 5km run. None of us did that well but we weren’t trying hard — it was just for fun.
But it got us all in the mood that evening to have a try at the most spectacular of the unusual combinations — Kite Surfing. The kites were huge and brightly coloured. Some were 5 metres tall but there were monsters of up to 25 metres. And put simply — the kite powers you along the wave tops on a surf board. But we soon found it was rather more complicated than that! The first problem is that you frequently get dragged into the air. Well — actually that is supposed to happen. Experienced kite surfers do massive “jumps” — tens of meters into the air. We discovered that going up into the air was simple — the tricky part was to land smoothly and carry on surfing. Usually our boards anchored awkwardly, followed by an undignified drag and crashing the kite. It also takes time and a huge amount of energy to get started again after each “crash”.
To be honest after 30 minutes I was approaching exhaustion — and I am pretty fit. We would never have tried Kite Surfing without experienced instructors on hand to teach, advise and keep us safe. But the biggest problem of all was the wind which was blowing off the shore. For inexperienced kite surfers this implied a one way ticket across the channel to France! But again, the experienced riders seemed to be able to achieve anything regardless of wind direction — I don’t know how they do it.

(Man aged about 30): My guest today on The Morning Show is Jennifer Spright who is here to talk about gap years and a few problems that people have had while doing them. Welcome, Jenny.
(Woman aged about 23): Sorry, but I prefer to be called Jennifer. Only my family call me Jenny.
Man: Sorry, Jennifer. Tell me about these problems.
Woman: Well, as you know, a lot of young people nowadays take a gap year be¬tween school and university. Some work, some travel and a lot combine the two by volunteering abroad. The problem is that there are a lot of places which take ad¬vantage of these volunteers. They have official looking websites but almost all the information on them, apart from the country the volunteers will go to, is often false.
Man: Can you give some examples?
Woman: Yes, I can. I did my gap year when I was eighteen. As I was interested in animal conservation and had been accepted by a university to study zoology the following year, I chose a position on what was described as an animal sanctuary in Central America. It turned out to be a zoo. I came home after one month. It was an expensive lesson.
Man: Expensive?
Woman: Yes, I paid two thousand pounds for my six months placement. I didn’t get any of it back, of course. The price included my flights, a place to stay, which was a small, dirty hut with no bathroom, and food.
Man: I guess that wasn’t very tasty!
Woman: Actually, it was. I’m a vegetarian and almost all the food consisted of beans and rice with spicy sauces. I sat and ate on my own and read a lot. There was no-one to talk to. They were all really unfriendly.
Man: So what happened after you returned?
Woman: Well, I had a lot of free time before I started university so I decided to set up a website with advice for volunteers. I didn’t have much time for it while I was at university but I kept it going and, since I left university, it’s been a full time job. 
Man: It must be very useful.
Woman: I hope so. Interestingly, I’ve started noticing older people coming to the site for advice. More and more retired people who are still fit and healthy are doing voluntary work. Also a few well-off, middle-aged people, often married couples whose children have grown-up and left home. Although young people still make up the majority of volunteers, they only account for about fifty percent of the peo¬ple using my site. I think this is because they have access to more advice at school and from people they know whereas older people are on their own.

Presenter: Today in our World Englishes programme we are going to discuss Indian English. Professor Barry Smith is my guest and my first question is: What is the role of English in today’s India?
Professor: In India, where more than 18 different languages coexist, English serves as the connector between people speaking different mother tongues. So the number of Indians who wish to learn and use English is not only continuing but increasing. The number of English newspapers, journals and magazines is on the increase too. In fact, Indian English is a recognized dialect of English, just like British Received Pronunciation or Australian English or Standard American. It has a lot of distinctive pronunciations, some distinctive syntax and quite a bit of lexical variation.
Presenter: What about grammar?
Professor: Linguists observe the following anomalies in the grammar of Indian English. The Indians, for instance, use the progressive tense with stative verbs, which is an influence of traditional Hindi grammar. There’re also variations in noun, number and determiners, preposition use, building tag questions, word order. Another example’s that Indians often use the indefinite article a before words starting with vowels, though it must be mentioned that usually this is just a slip of the tongue.
Presenter: Are these anomalies kind of accidental or can you explain them in some way?
Professor: For those aware of the grammar of Indian tongues, the logic behind the quirks of Indian English is quite transparent and readily explicable. In ddition to what I’ve already mentioned, Indians use the past perfect tense in verbs where International English speakers would use the past simple. There are lexical points as well – like using the words but and only as intensifiers or adding English affixes to local words. There are some funny cases like use of the plural ladies for a single lady or a woman of respect, use of open and close instead of switch on and off. Some idioms and popular phrases include the question “Where are you put up?” instead of “Where do you live?” or the phrase “tell me” instead of “How can I help you?” Strange as it may seem sentences like “Hello, what do you want?” as a beginning of a business conversation aren’t perceived as rough by most Indians.
Presenter: Have local Indian languages contributed to Indian English?
Professor: Internet research shows that Indians frequently inject words from Indian languages. Some of the more common examples are jungle or bungalow; others were introduced via the transmission of Indian culture, examples of which are mantra, karma, avatar and guru. There’re colloquial and slang words used in Indian English as well. Teenagers take an active part in modernizing the language. What younger generations devise may not be used or even understood by older English speakers in India. For example, youngsters use the expression hi-fi for cool or stylish. 
Presenter: Thank you, Professor, for a very interesting talk. What would you like to say in conclusion? What is your – mmm – final diagnosis?
Professor: Indian English is changing and trying to be more universal and simpler. The shifts in modern Indian English are well explained by the famous local proverb “There’s nothing noble in being superior to some other person. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self”.

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Presenter: Today in our studio we have a Brazilian-born actress Alice Jones, who
made her film debut at the age of 18 in the Oscar-nominated «City of God». Good
afternoon, Alice!
Alice Jones: Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Presenter: Your biggest achievements are connected with Hollywood and even
your surname now is English. Do you still have any connections in Brazil?
Alice Jones: Well, my roots certainly remain firmly in Brazil. I own a production
company in São Paolo, the city in which I was raised. Many of my family members
are in the film and television industry, and my aunt and mother are both actresses
there and my sister is a producer.
Presenter: What inspired you to become an actress?
Alice Jones: I can’t say I’ve always been interested in stardom. Once as a teenager
I saw a performance at a theatre, and I loved the play. For me, it changed my
perspective on acting and theater. I was 14, and I was enchanted; I completely fell
in love. Then I finished school in São Paolo and started attending a university for
the performing arts. When I got the invitation to come to an audition, I remember
exactly when they told me who was going to be in the film. These were the same
actors as in that play. I thought it was written in the stars.
Presenter: Are you currently into any project?
Alice Jones: I am. It is based on a novel by a wonderful Spanish writer. I read the
book eight years ago. A really good friend of mine gave me the book, and she said,
“You need to read this book because it’s a beautiful, strong story about this
woman. Maybe she’s a nice character for you to play, so just read it”. Years went
by, and now they want to make a version of it in Spanish, and I was happy when
they called me because I always thought it was such a beautiful character for a
woman to play. When they called me, I couldn’t believe that eight years after I
read the book and fell in love with the character, they came to me. It was very
special.
Presenter: As far as I remember, it’s not the first time you’ve worked on a book
you love.
Alice Jones: So true! One of my films, «Blindness», is also based on one of my
favourite books, so when they invited me, I had the same feeling. For «Queen of
the South», again, my main reason to sign up for it was the character and the book,
because that was a role I really wanted to play. So right after I got cast, I went
straight to the book and made notes, getting all the little details about what people say about her, who she is, what type of woman she is in the world that she’s born
into, how she manages to survive – all that. I was just trying to honor the book and
have a better understanding of it.
Presenter: How do you prepare for your roles?
Alice Jones: I have an acting coach that helps me. He works with me on
preparing – running lines and having ideas and developing different ways of
approaching characters. When it’s a story, based on a book, I basically work off the
book. The book is my main source of material.
Presenter: I think now you’ve worked more in English than in Portuguese. Is it
still difficult for you to work in another language that’s not Portuguese?
Alice Jones: Even now, it’s still a challenge. Because I’m so close to my family
and friends and I always speak Portuguese, my heart and mind go to Portuguese.
Once I’m on the set, after three or four months doing the series working hard every
day and only speaking English, it becomes easier. Your mindset is there and you’re
dreaming in English. But it is hard; in a way you keep translating from one
language to another.
Presenter: Thank you, Alice.