American in Spain

I had never really drunk much alcohol before going to Denmark as a naive 20-year-old. There in Scandinavia, I fell in love with the two main lagers available, Tuborg and Carlsberg. Upon returning to my homeland, now of legal drinking age, I sought them out, only to find no sign whatsoever of either brand. Once, shortly thereafter, I was on a business trip in Chicago when I entered a bar that had a neon Carlsberg sign. I rushed up to the bartender and asked if they really had Carlsberg, but he told me that hadn’t had it for a couple years and that the sign was left over from some publicity from ten years earlier. Apparently Carlsberg had stopped exporting to the US just before I’d learned of its existence.
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For my entire life I’ve had to live with a last name that no one pronounces like I do. I’ve lived in four different countries, and practically no one says my name correctly to my ear. There is only one correct way to pronounce “Rasmussen” in American English! Why is it so hard? Because so many Americans don’t understand the pronunciation rules that guide the phonetics of English.
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I bet that, while most people remember details of the day they met their future spouse, most don’t remember the actual date. The only reason that I remember the date is that I was keeping a journal of my time in Denmark at the time. Each week I emailed my journal for the week in MS Word format to my father, who published it on the internet. It really was a web journal, or a web log, or a blog…in 1999! I still have the entire document for my trip. I’ve been considering replaying it, day by day in a modern blog, a task I really should have done this year, being exactly ten years later, but perhaps I will do it next year starting in June. Below is my entry for September 11, 1999.
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