Thursday night I stopped by the grocery store in the evening to get supplies for enchiladas. This was exciting, because I haven't gotten around to much cooking lately. Also, my previous attempts at refried beans have been so disastrous that I thought I would actually look up a recipe and find out how one is supposed to make that fetching brown paste.

So the lady rang up my 200 crowns of food, and I was bagging groceries in my bike bag (you bag your own groceries in Denmark, and you buy or bring grocery bags, too), and my Dankort debit card was denied. Invalid card. I had 40 crowns on me, so I ended up having to abandon my purchase, with a long line of people staring at me. It was a lot of fun.

A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Dankort from Privat (just a debit card) to a regular Visa. I kept my old card while waiting for a new card with the Visa symbol to arrive in the mail. The PIN showed up first, so I looked at it and did one of three things. Either I memorized it and threw it out, or I realized that I would be completely incapable of remembering something that way so I created a mnemonic and then threw it out, or I put the piece of paper somewhere. When the new card showed up, I couldn't remember which I'd done, and I couldn't remember the new PIN, so when I called to activate it the lady said that she couldn't even reset the PIN - she'd have to send a new card. It should not suprise you to learn that the next day I found the letter with the PIN.

So what happened is that, when the new card was finally mailed Wednesday, my Dankort was invalidated. I didn't expect this because it hadn't happened the first time a Visa was mailed. After the nice lady at the bank finished the forensic work, she suggested that I get a little cash while waiting for the new card. I got a thousand crowns, and last night I paid cash for enchilada fixings and tonight I will feast on Enchiladas. But first I have to go in search of tofu. The store I tried in Amager closed at 4:30 pm weekdays - hopefully it will at least be open today.

That's a big contradiction in Denmark: it was early in adopting real women's lib and having adult members of both sexes in the workplace, but retains by law the shop schedule that only works when each household has a homemaker. The only things you can reliably buy outside of the window of M-F 10-5, Sat 11-2 are snack foods, restaurant meals, and alcohol.