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Launched in 2013, the “How to Live in Denmark” podcast is the longest-running podcast about living in Denmark in English. It covers every aspect of living in Denmark and Danish life, including moving to Denmark, adjusting to life in Denmark, Danish customs, Danish weather, Danish customs, and Danish people, all with gentle humor.

With nearly 150 short episodes, there is plenty to listen to as you pack for your move to Denmark, relax in your Danish summerhouse, or survive the long, dark Danish winter.

What I like about Denmark: More time for kids and less stuff to clean

I got an email a couple of weeks ago from a Danish woman who now lives in Germany. She says that this podcast helps her keep in touch with life back home, but that she doesn’t really like it. She writes: “I have to tell you, that almost every story has a negative ring to it when you portray your thoughts on Denmark and Danes. I cannot shake the feeling, that you really deep down, do not like Danes or Denmark. I find this sad, as you have been living there now over a decade.”

June 29, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Danish summer: The downside of the ‘light times’

We’re coming up on June 21, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

Here in Denmark it starts getting light at 4 in the morning, and the sun doesn’t go down until 10 or so at night, then returns again around at 4 in the morning.

In between it never gets really dark, just like in December it never gets very light.

The light times can be annoying

During the long, Danish winter, I wait and wait for the light times to come. Sometimes I count – only 3 more months until the light times! Only 6 more weeks until the light times!

When the light times do get here, they’re actually kind of annoying. Sure, it’s great to have some sun, and some long, summer evenings to enjoy the rare good weather. Danish nature is at its best in the early summer: the leaves on trees are plentiful and a deep, dark, green; the grass is thick, and every bit of roadside is speckled with white, yellow, or purple wildflowers.

But with all that light, it’s kind of difficult to sleep.

Light pouring in the windows until 11pm can be exhilarating on a Saturday night, but not so great on a Tuesday when you have a 9am meeting the next day.

June 15, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

Danes and Swedes: The world’s worst haircuts are Swedish

I don’t regret many things in life, but I do regret not going to a party I was invited to almost fourteen years ago.

That was in 2000, when I first arrived in Denmark. It was a party to mark the opening of the Øresund Bridge, which connects Denmark and Sweden. There were no cars on the bridge yet, so you could easily walk or bike between these two countries that had been bitter enemies for hundreds of years. At one point, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden – who were both young and unmarried at time – met and shared a hug and kiss in the center of the bridge, right across the national dividing line.

Now, that’s a party.

I won’t be able to walk or bike across the Øresund Bridge any time soon. Half a million cars per month drive over it now, plus a train every twenty minutes, full of commuters.

There are Danes that live in Sweden, and Swedes that work in Denmark.

Personally, I love the Swedes who work in Denmark. Most work in restaurants or are shop assistants, and they have revolutionized customer service in Denmark by being cheerful. They say things like ‘Hello!” and “Can I help you?”

This is in contrast to traditional Danish service personnel, whose default approach is “Are you still here? What do you want?”

June 8, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

Danes and Technology: The CPR is a national menace

I don’t ordinarily get my technology news from the local newspaper sold by the homeless in Denmark, but I did this week. First of all, I learned that you can pay your homeless newspaper seller by text message. If you don’t have loose change, as I often don’t, you can send a text to the newspaper seller’s registration number, along with the amount you want to give him, and the seller gets paid right away.

Secondly, I learned that some homeless people have iPhones. Not my particular seller, but another reader had written a letter to the editor of the newspaper saying he’d tried to buy a paper the previous week and his seller had been too wrapped up in his iPhone to pay attention to a potential customer. The letter writer was asking if it made sense to spend 20 kroner on a newspaper to help a man who had a phone that was worth at least 2000 kroner.

The newspaper had a good response. They said an iPhone was the perfect device for a homeless person. It allowed him to keep all the information he needed in one place – government documents, health records, family photos. And it was a way for him to get phone calls and emails related to housing or jobs. I thought that was a very sensible approach.

Danes have a very sensible approach to IT in general. As I’ve said on other podcasts, the Danes are very practical people, and they use IT for all manner of practical things. For example, there’s a new app you can get from your kommune that allows you to immediately report things that need repairing around town. You know, you come across a park bench that’s broken, and you just hit the app, send the GPS coordinates, and it’s immediately reported to the right person. How long it will take them to fix it is another question – it is the kommune after all – but at least it’s reported.

June 1, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

Don’t mention the flag: What I learned when I studied for the Danish citizenship exam

There was no How to Live in Denmark podcast last week, and I apologize for that. I have been busy studying for my Danish citizenship exam. As some of you may know, Denmark is allowing double citizenship as of next year.

That means you’re are allowed to keep your passport from your home country – in my case, USA – while also becoming a Danish citizen. Personally, I’m a little concerned that this may be overturned if a right wing government takes power next year. Danske Folkeparti, which is now the biggest party in Denmark, is passionately opposed to double citizenship.

May 29, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

The Little Match Girl and the Fur Industry: China and Denmark

One of the many things I do for a living is work as a voiceover, and one of my regular gigs is with a Danish company that makes high-end microphones. Frequently, they present their microphones to visiting customers from around the world, and my role is to be fitted out with six or seven different microphones at once – a headset microphone like Britney Spears wears, a necklace microphone like the ones on reality shows, a lapel microphone like newscasters wear, even an old fashioned tabletop microphone. Then I read a text while the company switches the various microphones on and off, so the customers can hear the difference between the different models.

When the customers are from China, I always choose to read a text from Hans Christian Andersen. Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales are extremely popular in China. Many Chinese read them as children. So, when I’m faced with a room full of Chinese microphone buyers, I usually read The Little Match Girl. The Little Match Girl, if you haven’t heard it lately, is a very sad story about a starving little girl on the streets of Copenhagen in the 19th century. She’s supposed to be selling matches to help support her family, but it’s winter and she’s so cold that she keeps lighting the matches to keep herself warm. In the end, they find her small, frail body frozen to death.

So, when I read this story, strapped into seven different microphones, I find that by the end these highly technical Chinese sound professionals are sniffling and sentimental, transported back to their younger days.

May 28, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

Danes and Norwegians: Bitter envy and brotherly love

Danes and Norwegians were part of the same country for hundreds of years, and they’re still family.

Although I’ve chosen to live in Denmark, I have a personal relationship with Norway. My grandmother’s family comes from Norway, and as my mother was growing up, her mother told her that our family was Norwegian royalty.

Never mind that there was no modern Norwegian royalty until 1905, when the country became independent, and our family came to the U.S. thirty years before that. My mother grew up being told she was a lost Norwegian princess. I think it was something that her grandparents, who were immigrants, did to make their kids feel special.

Fast forward sixty years, and my mother and her sister, who would, of course, also have been a Norwegian princess, got a chance to visit Norway for the first time. My mother, who has a good sense of humor, wore a crown on the plane. She and her sister got crowns at a costume store and wore them on the SAS flight to Norway. She said the stewardesses really loved it. When they got off the plane, they did the royal wave. And they went to the Royal Palace and had their picture taken out front, wearing their crowns.

So, bottom line, I’m not sure the Mellish family is welcome in Norway anymore.

Family envy

Danes and Norwegians were part of the same country for hundreds of years, and they’re still family. Written Danish and written Norwegian are very similar – so similar that I once tried to find a Danish-Norwegian dictionary and was told there was no such thing. The spoken language is a little more different, but Danes and Norwegians can understand what the other is saying.

May 23, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

Summerhouse or dollhouse? What to expect if you’re invited to a Danish summer home

If you live in city or a big town in Denmark, you may notice that the weekends are getting very quiet just about now.

The streets outside my home in Copenhagen are empty. The streetlights just change from red to green and back again, but no cars ever pull up. Nobody comes to cross the street. It’s a little like a scene a movie right after the zombie apocalypse.

May 11, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

Stories of a Salty: On Returning to Denmark After a Vacation

I’ve been away from the podcast for a couple weeks. I’ve been on vacation in the USA. But I’m back now, and it only takes a few minutes after I arrive at Kastrup airport before something happens to destroy the relaxing effect of 2 weeks off and several thousand kroner spent on spas, hotels and tasty dinners.

May 4, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

Podcasts, Stories about life in Denmark

Danish Stereotypes: Copenhagen snobs and ‘peasant butts’ from Jylland

Danes have stereotypes about each other, something that amazed me when I first arrived here. You have five and a half million people, and you’re dividing yourselves into groups!

But Danes themselves imagine a big difference between people from Sjelland, the island with Copenhagen on it, and Jylland, the bigger part of Denmark that is connected to Germany.

As the stereotype goes, people from Jylland are seen as quiet, reliable, trustworthy, and likely to marry young and start families soon after. They have distinctive and sometimes impenetrable accents, particularly the ones from Sonderjylland, near the German border. ‘Jyske’ people love the Royal Family and are much more likely to serve in the army or the police forces.

And people from Jylland are also sometimes seen as stubborn and very tight with money. They want to drive a hard bargain.

I can testify that there is some truth to this. I occasionally sell my daughter’s outgrown clothes and toys on the Den Blå Avis, Denmark’s version of eBay, and I’ve almost stopped selling to buyers in Jylland.

First, they want a discount, then they want me to arrange the cheapest shipping possible in a manner that causes me the greatest amount of bother. When the object arrives, they inevitably find some small flaw and want all their money back.

All this for items that cost less than 100 kroner, often less than 50 kroner. I think the thrill of the getting a better deal matters more than the few kroner they save.

But maybe they’re just responding to the stereotype about people from Copenhagen, which is that they look down on Jylland’s bonderøve – literally, ‘peasant butts’ – and do their best to cheat them out of their hard-earned money.

I don’t know if there are many actual Danish cheaters on the streets of Copenhagen these days – I think pickpocketing and fraud games have been outsourced to poverty-stricken immigrants – but people from Copenhagen are still seen as slick and slightly dishonest.

From the Jyske point of view, Danes from Copenhagen are Københavnersnuder – Copenhagen snouts, who are smart-asses, fast-talkers, and prone to exaggeration. Everything in Copenhagen is, in their eyes, the biggest and the best in Denmark. Kobenhavnersnuder wear odd, overpriced eyeglasses, and the men wear Hugo Boss suits.

Kobenhavnersnuder have jobs that are non-jobs, like Senior Communications Consultant or B-to-B SEO specialist. By comparison, people from Jylland have real jobs – like pig farmer, or Lego designer.

Of course, there are so many people from Jylland living in Copenhagen these days that the stereotypes have started to dissipate a bit.

As Denmark becomes a more international country, maybe that will happen with national stereotypes as well.

Buy Kay’s books about Denmark on Amazon, Saxo, Google Books, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble Nook, or via our webshop.

March 9, 2014 by Kay Xander Mellish

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Kay Xander Mellish is a US-DK dual citizen. She grew up in Wisconsin, USA, but has lived in Denmark for more than a decade. Kay is a popular keynote speaker on Danish working culture and offers practical advice to international professionals navigating Danish work environments.

In addition, she helps Americans and Danes avoid misunderstandings and improve their cross-cultural teamwork.

Kay is the author of "How to Work in Denmark" (2022 and 2018), "How to Live in Denmark" (2017 and 2014), "Top 35 Mistakes Danes Make in English" (2016), "Working with Americans: Tips for Danes" (2019), and "Working with Danes: Tips for Americans" (2020). All of her books are also available in audio format.