Please, Tell Me How to Stop for Blink!

In Copenhagen, the language barrier wasn't too much of a problem in business interactions, since most Danes have a good working grasp of English, for which I was extremely grateful. However, English is most certainly not the quotidian language, and it's been some time since I've traveled to a place where I have less command of the language than a cat on the dinner table. I was left constantly wondering, why is everyone yelling at me?!

I spent my first few days completely befuddled, since Danish looks and sounds completely made up. Like I said the other day, I'm wholly convinced that Danish derives from the language Santa's elves, which was then passed down to baby harp seals in the Peppermint Forest before arriving at its present state. Imagine a language that sounds like someone put a gigantic bite of piping-hot snausages in his mouth and then proceeded to speak, and præstø, you have Danish!

You can buy delicious hand-cranked ice cream just about anywhere on the street, but the Danes are apparently not without a cruel sense of irony, since these signs are abundant:

You'd better believe that ass fodboltroljer is my new favorite insult:

And this, I suppose, what you get for calling someone an ass fodboltroljer:

The Danes are an extremely law-abiding group of citizens. Badning is forbudt, parkering is fobudt, and mystery parkering is really, really forbudt:

There were some signs in English, and when they were imperatives, I worked especially hard to make sure I followed that law, since I was their target law-abiding market. But this one really threw me:

Sadly, I did not get a picture of my favorite sign in English, a plaintive plea over one of the toilets (which, in keeping with Danish love of good design, have dual flush options for whether you will be eliminating #1 or #2): "DANGER: Please do not put so much paper in the toilets."

I declined to rent a bike from this store, since "high" and "rolling" in a section of the city run by lawless hippies would probably detract from my comportment as a professional businesswoman.

Sometimes, they liked to throw me off by sneaking in a sign in French:

And yet, Danes speak the international language of suckers - namely, Dianetics: