How to Live in Denmark E-Book

Kay Xander Mellish

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 139

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Life in one of the world's most homogenous countries can be tough on foreigners. Why do Danish adults wear elf hats to parties? Should you wear one too? Why are Danish adults so kind and gentle around their friends, yet so vicious to strangers in bicycle lanes? Why is it OK in Denmark to talk openly about sex, but embarrassing to admit to ambition? 'How to Live in Denmark' is based on the podcast by Kay Xander Mellish, who has lived in Denmark since 2000. It answers these questions and many more about daily life as a non-Dane in 'the happiest country in the world'.

Leseprobe

To my parents, who never questioned my decision tomove to Denmark, and to Georgia, who was born here

Table of Contents

✚ Preface: So why did you move to Denmark?

✚ Danish Summer

Why You Should Run Outside Right Now

✚ Naked but Private

Why Your Danish Neighbors Don't Talk to You

✚ Danish Sports

Big Handballs and Lonely Ping-Pong Players

✚ Painful Hugs and Poison Gifts

When the Same Words Mean DifferentThings in Danish and English

✚ Danish, Dutch, Deutschland

Why People Confuse Denmark with its Neighbors

✚ No Food, Only Stuff to Make Food

Eating in Denmark

✚ Danes and Cycling

Two-wheeled Vikings and Why I Own Three Bikes

✚ Danish Fashion

All the Colours of the Danish Landscape

✚ A Thatched Roof Over Your Head

Finding a Place to Live in Denmark

✚ Danish Design

From Teeny-Weeny Fancy Glasses toThieves that Steal Chairs

✚ No Planned Hangovers

14 Years After Moving to Denmark,Here Are Some Ways I Won't Fit In

✚ Crime and Punishment in Denmark

Just Buy More Insurance

✚ The Deeper Meaning of Pigs

Denmark's Favourite Food

✚ Holiday Drinking Starts Now

The Two Months of Christmas

✚ 'Left' is Not Left

Danish Political Parties, andOther Tips for Voting In Denmark

✚ Øresund. Ørestad, Ørsteds

Why I Still Get Lost in Denmark

✚ Danish Christmas Part 2

The Cultural Importance of the Adult Elf Hat

✚ Sex and Denmark

Oh, We Shouldn't Be Doing This – But We Are!

✚ Gossip and Scandal in Denmark

And Why Danish Politicians Don't Have Sex Scandals

✚ Danes and Work

My Vacation Flight Was CancelledBecause the Pilot Was On Vacation

✚ Danish Vikings

Or, How to Find Vikings in Today's Denmark

✚ More Snow Tomorrow

Surviving Winter as a Foreigner in Denmark

✚ Dating Danish Women

A Guide for the Foreign Man

✚ Dating Danish Men

A Guide for the Foreign Woman

✚ Finding a Job in Denmark

Some Tips from My Experience

✚ Danish Names

Why Bent is not Bent, and Why It's Bad to be Brian

✚ The Little Mermaid is a Disappointment

Better Ideas for Tourists and Other Visitors

✚ Summerhouse or Doll House?What to Expect if You're

Invited to a Danish Summer Home

✚ Danish Stereotypes

Superficial Americans and Danish 'Peasant Butts'

✚ Danes and Technology

The Homeless Man has an iPhone

✚ Danes and Norwegians

Bitter Envy and Brotherly Love

✚ Danes and Swedes

The World's Worst Haircuts are Swedish

✚ Stories of a Salty

On Returning to Denmark After a Vacation

About the author

Preface

So, what are you doing in Denmark?

When I went to my first business meeting in Denmark, I looked around and realized everyone at the table but me had blue eyes.

Denmark is a monoculture, even now, when between 5% and 10% of its residents are not of Danish ethnic origin. People born in Denmark enter state-financed day care institutions when they are about a year old, which is the start of a lifetime controlled chain of events.

Their personalities are formed by universal day care, common-curriculum schools and publicly-funded after-school clubs, by community beliefs and unspoken expectations about how people should behave and what they should value.

For foreigners, even Danish-looking foreigners, living in Denmark can be like playing a game where everyone knows the rules except you.

Danes generally cut foreigners a lot of slack. They know foreigners are different, not part of the Danish tribe, although on some level they suspect that their non-Danish customs are a bit mærkelig – weird – and in some ways backward and wrong. For all their outward humility, most Danes are inwardly convinced that they have the best, most compassionate, most sensible, and most advanced society in the world.

✚ A society based on trust

Last winter, at around 7 o’clock on a dark evening in Copenhagen, I went to my local train stop on my way to pick up my daughter from a party. Outside the station, I found a little boy crying. Not so little, actually – he was about ten years old, with a crisp new haircut in his light blond hair.

The boy, who said his name was Mike, told me he’d just come back from a friend’s house and discovered he couldn’t find his way home in the dark. He knew his address, though, and asked if I would walk him home. Apparently his mother had told him that if he ever got lost, he should just ‘ask a lady’ to help him out.

So Mike and I walked home, through the urban darkness. He didn’t really know his address after all – he just had a general idea of where he lived – so we went up streets and around corners for a while and, having been a New Yorker, I briefly wondered if I was being lead into a trap. But then Mike found his front door and cheerfully bounced through it without really saying goodbye. He was happily and safely home again, having been taught he could trust any random lady he met, even an American on a train platform.

Denmark is a society based on trust, and this is one of the great barriers for newcomers in ‘fitting in’ here. Danes don’t know if they can trust you. They don’t know if you will follow the rules they have silently agreed on.

Getting to know the Danes takes time, and to people they do not know, Danes can be closed and sometimes rude. Danes talk to their friends; they don’t talk to strangers. Once you do get to know them, Danes are kind, gentle and loyal.

✚ Why are you here?

Having lived here since 2000, I’ve been lucky enough to make some wonderful friends, and integrate to the extent a foreigner can in Danish society; my daughter was born here in 2004 and attends a Danish school. Still, I am asked at every Danish dinner party, ‘How did you come to Denmark? Why did you come to Denmark? What type of culture shock did you experience once you got here?’

I don’t mind answering these questions – particularly if the alternative is to discuss people’s home renovations and travel plans, which are the other things that get talked about at Danish dinner parties.

But I didn’t really have a lot of culture shock.

First of all, I grew up in Wisconsin, one of the most Scandinavian parts of the United States. Wisconsin is a state with about five and a half million people, the same as Denmark, mostly rural, like Denmark, and with two main cities – an academic one, Madison, the size of Aarhus, and a commercial one, Milwaukee, almost exactly the size of Copenhagen. And it saw massive German, Polish, and Scandinavian immigration about 100 to 150 years ago. You still see a lot of remnants of those European cultures in Wisconsin. People don’t change that quickly.

I left Wisconsin when I was 18 to attend New York University, where I had the advantage of living in downtown Manhattan for four years and meeting a lot of fun, creative people who are still friends today. After graduating, I couldn’t find a job with my journalism degree, so I took a German class in Berlin and stayed there to work as a stringer for various foreign publications. Later, I moved to Hong Kong and worked for the South China Morning Post for a couple of years; returning to Manhattan, I was on the staff of Dow Jones’ old wire services supplying the Wall Street Journal.

By 1999, I was tired of the frenetic pace of New York City and ready to live someplace else. I came to Copenhagen on vacation in 1999 and liked it. After returning to New York, I used the Internet – a relatively new innovation at the time – to find a job in Denmark. When I found one and announced my intention to move, I was met with derision. “You’re running away from your problems,” said my doctor. “You’ll be back within the year,” said a guy I was dating at the time.

Fourteen years later, I’m still here, although not without some bumps and bruises. The company that brought me over – furniture and all – collapsed shortly after I arrived, and while I managed to find another job at a similar digital agency, it also went bankrupt as the first internet bubble collapsed. After nearly a year of unemployment, during which I ate a lot of spaghetti, I found a communications job with Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest financial institution.

Danske Bank hasn’t gone bankrupt, although it came pretty close during the financial crisis that began in 2008. I left the bank during the crisis and spent a couple of years working for Carlsberg, Denmark’s famous beer exporter, before starting my own communications company KXMGroup. It helps Danish companies communicate in English, offering communications coaching, copywriting, translation and English-language video voiceovers.

I like Denmark; I have no plans to live anywhere else.

✚ The How To Live in Denmark podcast

In the summer of 2013, I started the How To Live in Denmark podcast, partly to practice my pronunciation and sound techniques, since I record my own video voiceovers. But the podcast has also become a form of service, a way to share what I’ve learned with other new arrivals. There are a lot of newcomers at the moment, with Southern Europe’s economies in disarray, and a constant inflow of bright people from China, India, Pakistan and the Middle East.

Those of you who have followed the How To Live in Denmark podcast may notice a few of the podcasts missing from the book. There was some judicious editing involved to eliminate repetition – for example, I found I had produced three podcasts about the miseries of the long Danish winter. Some of the podcasts were in direct response to reader questions, so I’ve decided to publish those in a separate eBook, Ask Kay: Questions about How to Live in Denmark, to be issued later.

When I arrived in Denmark, there were several books I found useful, including the multi-author The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Danes, Morten Strange’s Culture Shock Denmark (although Morten Strange, a Dane, ultimately left the country for Singapore) and Monica Redlich’s Danish Delight, first issued in 1939. Each book was a creature of its time, as is this book, which I’m sure will seem outdated within a few years. Denmark is changing quickly.

Nevertheless, I hope it is as helpful to you as these other writers were to me.

Kay Xander MellishCopenhagen, February 2015

Danish Summer

Why You Should Run Outside Right Now

When I first arrived in Denmark during the summer – summer 2000, for those who are counting – one of the things I immediately liked about it was that there was no air conditioning. I had spent the past ten years working in tower blocks in Manhattan, where you are hit by an ice blast of air as you enter on a sunny June day, and again with an oven-like blanket when you exit.

In Copenhagen, the summer air is the same inside as it is outside, except perhaps a bit stuffier, what with Danish ventilation technology being somewhat less advanced than Danish heating technology.

That summer of 2000 was a good education in Danish summers, since the sunny weather never actually turned up. In June, it was rainy and cold, and people told me it would probably get better in July. In July, the weather was also poor, but the Danes told me you could generally count on August. August came, grey and drizzling, and people started extolling the general glory of September. And so on. I believe there was some sunshine around Christmas of that year.

Despite the unreliability of summer, there are some well-known Danish summer signifiers. One of them is sommersild, which translates to ‘summer herring.’ There is indeed a lunchtime casserole called summer herring, but that’s not what I’m talking about now.

'Summer herring' is a Danish media term for a feature in which attractive young women on the beach or in a local park are photographed wearing not very much clothing as part of a news story.

The news story is generally pretty thin: this year, I have seen summer herring presented with the shocking news that ice cream bars cost more in corner stores than in supermarkets. This was illustrated by some close-up photos of the ice cream bars and girls in bikini tops enjoying them.

You could certainly get angry about this objectification of women. Alternately, you could spare some sympathy for Danish men, whose observation of the female form is limited to parka and sweater-watching for eleven months of every year. (In 2000, all 12 months of the year).

✚ Beach lions

There is also a male version of ‘summer herring.’ It’s called strandløver, or ‘beach lions’. Beach lions don’t appear in the media quite as much, and they don’t test out ice cream bars, except maybe in publications directed at an all-male audience.

Anyway, even if the weather is bad during the summer, I still always enjoy a trip to Tivoli, the 150-year-old amusement park in downtown Copenhagen.

Tivoli has it all – roller coasters, rock bands, pretty gardens and, most of all, great people-watching. If I’m still in Denmark as an old lady, I plan to get a season pass and watch the awkward teenaged lovers, panicked single dads, joyful Muslim families, and pretty blond children with their parents’ telephone numbers written on their arms in case they wander off. The restaurants in Tivoli are wildly overpriced, but you can bring your own food and picnic.

The fruit in Denmark is very good during the summer – fresh red strawberries in June, cherries in July, and wild blackberries in August. Even in downtown Copenhagen, you can still sometimes pick blackberries off the bushes by the subway tracks. Eat them with crème fraiche, or as a companion to koldskål, the curious buttermilk dish that appears next to the milk cartons in Danish supermarkets each the summer.

And, as always with Danish summers, I suggest you run outside as soon as you see the sun shining. You never know how long it’s going to last. There’s always the chance you might not see it until next year – or, in the case of the summer before 2000, not even then.

Naked but Private

Why Your Danish Neighbors Won’t Talk To You

Shortly before I arrived in Denmark in 2000, one of the famous guards outside the queen’s palace at Amalienborg was fired. You’ve seen these Royal Life Guards on postcards: they’re dressed like the British palace guards, only with dark blue coats instead of red. They have the same tall, black, bearskin hats. It’s no big secret that being in the Royal Life Guards is an excellent path to a powerful future in corporate Denmark.

Anyway, the guard that was fired was special. She was the first woman to guard the Royal Palace at Amalienborg. There was a lot written about it in the newspapers at the time. Unfortunately, this young lady also had a part-time job. She was a prostitute. She would guard the palace by day and run her business out of the royal barracks in the evening. She found customers via escort ads in the local newspapers.

So the young lady was fired. But she was not fired because she was a prostitute. She was fired because she’d been ordered by her commander to stop moonlighting, and she did not stop. In fact, she’d been asking her soldier colleagues to drive her to her various nighttime appointments. She was fired for not following orders.

The Danes I talked to didn’t find this case particularly shocking.

“It’s her private time, when she’s not at work,” they told me. “She can do whatever she wants in her free time.”

That was my introduction to the Danish passion for privacy and protecting their private life.