Seeing My Old Esperanto Musician Friend Kim After 29 Years

Last week I visited Copenhagen, and I posted some pictures of my visit to Tivoli on Facebook (you can see them embedded in this Steemit post). To my suprise, an old friend who lives in Copenhagen reacted to these pictures and suggested to meet up - and he wrote to me in Esperanto!

In case you haven't heard of it: Esperanto was invented in 1887 as a neutral language for global communication. It is a mixture of romanic, germanic and slavic words with a very simple grammar. I learned Esperanto when I was 19 and spent some fun years in the global Esperanto community. I even had a band called La Mondanoj, which can be translated to 'Citizens of the World'.

We played at several Esperanto festivals in Hungary, Poland, Germany and France. There has always been a quite active Esperanto music scene, but I think we were the first band with a typical rock line-up of drums, bass and two guitars. I played rhythm guitar, sang and wrote the songs.

The other well known Esperanto band at that time was Amplifiki with band members from France, Sweden and Denmark. They were not really competitors but became good friends. I remember an awesome concert at Schloss Eringerfeld in Germany where we all shared the stage and played together. It was a blast!

Kim Hendriksen from Copenhagen was the singer, bass and accordeon player of Amplifiki (which can be translated to 'Amplify', but it has a second meaning, just look up fiki in an Esperanto dictionary). We met at several of those Esperanto events and we always had a great time together. Once we even formed a spontaneous jam band at a meetup in Croatia which we called La Varmigiloj ('The Radiators' or 'The Ones that Heat Up').

'La Varmigiloj' at our only gig in Zagreb, Croatia: Kim from Denmark, Balász from Hungary and me 

I gave up speaking Esperanto a long time ago and I haven't seen Kim since our gig in Zagreb. So I was very glad that he contacted me when I was in Copenhagen. We met up in a street food hall on Paper Island, where you can taste food from all around the globe in a funky atmosphere.

We both got less and greyer hair, but we easily recognised each other. Kim, who was raised as an Esperanto speaker by his parents, is still very active in the Esperanto music world. He didn't have much time as he had to catch a plane to Warsaw for a gig, but the hour we spent together was amazing. 

I must admit that my Esperanto has become a bit rusty, so we spoke in English and German. But I feel tempted to take part in an Esperanto event again. It's a nice language in which you can express everything. It's a pity that it has never really gained traction. English is just too widely spread as a world language, so I don't think Esperanto will ever replace it. But you do meet a lot of interesting people through it.

With E-friends from Catalonia, the Netherlands and Denmark in Croatia