mothwing | Hvide Sande (Reply)

Our journey was really relaxed and pleasant. We packed our car, drove to Hamburg to pick up our tent and were welcomed with a great breakfast my mother had prepared. We spent some time there, then left for Denmark.

And arrived in Hvide Sande that evening. The camp site was alright, and the highlight of the trip were the gigantic moths which always came to the kitchen and bathrooms during the night, most notably the garden tigers (see the last two pictures under the cut).

Also, I'm marvelling at what the Danes think of the infestation of my country(wo)men every summer. There are more Germans than Danes on the campsite we are on, and most natives we've run into had a frightfully good command of both English and German. Of course, German must be easy to learn for speakers of Germanic languages as close to ours as Danish, but my Danish is not even good enough to get me through a casual chat at the supermarket, so I can't help but be very impressed, and feel a slight Fremdscham or some of my more noisy and impolite compatriots.

Tonight at a tiny seaside restaurant the German family next to us, confident in the knowledge that we wouldn't understand their language, talked about us and then pointed out our meals and commented on it to each other. They did stop after a pointed look (and after we started a German conversation), but even without us being German, given the language expertise of the natives and basic human decency, I wonder what got into them.