Erika: Obviously I got that one wrong! Straight to six, is what I mean. I deliberately skipped our countdown number seven, and not only because of its unlucky meaning in Chinese traditions, which I won’t even read about, but there are other things about the number seven too. Like the seven sins, for example. A funny thing with number seven, though, is the Swedish pronunciation and what that sounds like in Bulgarian. In Swedish, our word for seven is ‘sju’, and in Bulgarian that sounds like something naughty-ish, so I won’t translate it. So let’s skip that one and go straight to day number six!
Sex days left! Whoops, did I do that again? For the last twelve years I’ve been speaking Swedish, Danish and English. Everyday it has been a mix of the three. The last half year has been mostly English though. Even more often than Swedish! And sometimes that’s a bit too much for my brain, so I start mixing the languages. It’s mostly when I’m tired though… Once I heard myself ask Eric “when are we ätering?” To eat in Swedish is ‘att äta’, and then I, somehow, added an ending that makes no sense. Sometimes I put in Swedish words in an English sentence like ‘min’, which means mine. Or when the English word sounds the same as the Swedish word, I can just continue in Swedish. For example: I want to go ut idag. It should say ‘I want to go out today’, but the words go and gå (Swedish for go) are pronounced so similar that, to a tired brain, I all of a sudden think I’m speaking Swedish. Even if Eric is standing in front of me! I do the same if I’m sat reading a Danish newspaper, for example, and I look up to say something to my mum, I start talking in Danish. Very confusing.
To be fair, with the Danish language, a lot of my friends work or have worked for Danish companies, because we live so close to Denmark, and we do all have problems finding the Swedish word for things from time to time. It’s only a short twenty minutes ride on the train to go to Copenhagen, the salary is better and the living costs in Sweden is cheaper.
Anyway… The number six… In Swedish, as you might have guessed, the number six is called ‘sex’, and quite often that’s what I say when I speak English too, which can give me funny looks from time to time. But that’s the beauty of languages, all the different words having different meanings in different countries. More often than not, it brings people to smile when using the wrong words, and that’s not something bad.
The number six, according to Chinese traditions, is a lucky number. More, it means to be lucky in business. Like I wrote about yesterday, in China the numbers are considered lucky or unlucky depending on the similarities in pronunciation of other words. The number six sounds like ‘luck’ or ‘road’ in Chinese, which today makes total sense. It’s less than a week (six days to be precise, if I haven’t mentioned that) before I’m all snuggled up with the man of my dreams, and luckily, that’s better than eight days. At the moment I’m on the road, working, and I’ll be on the road for six more days until our countdown, this time, ends.
