{"id":34723,"date":"2005-08-03T11:15:03","date_gmt":"2005-08-03T11:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2005\/08\/03\/watch-out-there-are-swedes-in-the-hallway\/"},"modified":"2005-08-03T11:15:03","modified_gmt":"2005-08-03T11:15:03","slug":"watch-out-there-are-swedes-in-the-hallway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20050803-03\/?p=34723","title":{"rendered":"Watch out, there are Swedes in the hallway!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever I go to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ikea.com\/webapp\/wcs\/stores\/servlet\/IkeaNearYouView?storeId=12&amp;StoreName=seattle\"> IKEA Seattle<\/a>, I try to speak Swedish with the people who work there, but it never works.<\/p>\n<p> Yesterday, I was heading to a colleague&#8217;s office to drop off <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seattlesymphony.org\/symphony\/buy\/series\/detail.aspx?id=89\"> Symphony tickets<\/a>. (A group of friends wanted tickets together, so the order was placed in my name, and I needed to distribute them to the people in the group.) As I neared his office, I noticed a crowd of people outside and realized that they were speaking Swedish. I tried to follow what they were saying, but of course since they were speaking among themselves, they weren&#8217;t taking very much effort to enunciate clearly enough for a beginner to follow. <\/p>\n<p> The solution, therefore, is to change the subject. <\/p>\n<p> I said hello and told them I had been studying Swedish for two years. One of them asked me a question that I couldn&#8217;t understand, so I apologized for my bad Swedish, but they insisted it was &#8220;j&auml;ttebra&#8221; (great). How they could conclude that from one misunderstood question I&#8217;m not sure. They asked me simpler questions like whether I had ever lived in Sweden (no), and <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/05\/12\/130455.aspx\"> why I started studying it in the first place<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p> After a brief chat, I excused myself to deliver the tickets. Afterwards, I realized that I forgot to ask them whether they were Microsoft employees or whether they were visiting (and if visiting, from what company). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever I go to IKEA Seattle, I try to speak Swedish with the people who work there, but it never works. Yesterday, I was heading to a colleague&#8217;s office to drop off Symphony tickets. (A group of friends wanted tickets together, so the order was placed in my name, and I needed to distribute them [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-34723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Whenever I go to IKEA Seattle, I try to speak Swedish with the people who work there, but it never works. Yesterday, I was heading to a colleague&#8217;s office to drop off Symphony tickets. (A group of friends wanted tickets together, so the order was placed in my name, and I needed to distribute them [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}