Why, if your name just happens to be Lara Croft, you may get a tad disappointed in a Danish church...

So I should have known better really - we learned all about 'false friends' at school when I was having various modern, and not so modern, languages rammed down my throat. You remember those classes where you would attempt to say something in French or German and would essentially string together a clumsy sentence containing approximately 50% English words said with a French or German accent depending, in the hope that somewhere in all that, you'd manage to make a bit of sense? Well, these occasions always called for a quick reminder by the teacher that 'false friends' can be a real Russian roulette when it comes to this method of blagging it. (One of my favourite's being the English couple who suddenly couldn't remember the French word for jam when asked what they would like on their breakfast toast in a French hotel. They decided that the English word 'preserve' sounded pretty French all in all and hedged their bets and Frenchify it by asking for, yup you've guessed it, 'préservatif' much to the amusement of the locals).

Anyway, 'where's all this going?' I hear you cry. Quite, let's get to the point.

So a few days ago, my mother's group all decided to meet up for a sort of sing-a-long session for babies that is organised by the church. I turned up in good time, waited around a bit, until a couple of phone calls and quite a bit later revealed that I was in fact waiting outside the wrong church (oddly enough, the church I was waiting outside also had a similar baby singing session at exactly the same time) so I hurried along to the church where I should have turned up to originally. This is a bit of a funny church in as much as you step into a pretty industrial looking lift from the street and you are then faced with 3 choices: Level 1 - Kirke (Church); Level 0 - Gade (Street) and Level -1 - Krypt (Crypt). So I spent a while wandering around the empty Church level wondering where everyone was before deciding that I had faffed about with this so much that it probably wasn't worth it anymore so I should just head home for some much needed coffee. Having texted one of the mums to say as much (was already out of the door and on my way down the road at this point), I was told not to be so silly and that I would be met outside the church by said mum. Said mum duly met me and proceeded to lead me to the Crypt.

Now, I don't know about you - but a crypt to me does not immediately scream out 'cosy place for singing songs with babies'. In fact, as far as I am concerned, crypts are dark, gloomy places. They are full of dust and dead people and you don't wander around one unless you are Lara Croft or in a Dan Brown novel. As I consider myself neither, it hadn't occurred to me to go down into the crypt on my hunt for the apparently mythical baby singing group. Further investigation with a couple of native Danish speakers revealed that the word 'Krypt' in Danish simply means a room under the ground level and under a church. I didn't see a single tomb, in fact it was all rather light and, yes, cosy.

So there you go, false friends and all that. Still, part of me wonders how many confused Danish tourists are currently wandering around British crypts thinking that British ecclesiastical interior design could perhaps do with a bit of perking up.