More than a decade after moving to Denmark, I am pretty well integrated into Danish society.
I’ve learned to speak Danish, I pay my taxes, I bike everywhere, I send my daughter to a Danish school. I enjoy a nice slice of dark rye rugbrød – even when I’m on my own and don’t have to impress anyone with how healthy I’m eating.
But there are a few ways I simply refuse to integrate. I will not do things the Danish way.
In general, Danes are not gossips, particularly about the sex lives of people they know.
It’s partly the Danish fetish for privacy, partly the basic acceptance of all things sexual, partly the lack of naughty excitement about all things sexual.
Danish politicians, for example, don’t have sex scandals. French politicians have sex scandals. American politicians have sex scandals. Danish politicians have tax scandals.
They could be bedding down every night with a chimpanzee and the Danish media wouldn’t touch it.
There’s a postcard you can buy at souvenir shops called The Perfect European. You’ve probably seen it somewhere. Last time I went through Kastrup airport, there was a poster version in the customs area.
The postcard has been around since the 1980s, and it has several small cartoons, illustrating each nationality within the 1980s EU, and making a sarcastic remark about what it does best. It says: The Perfect European is as humorous as a German. The Perfect European drives like the French. The Perfect European is as humble as a Spaniard, as organized as a Greek, as calm as an Italian, and serves traditional British food.
And, according to the postcard, The Perfect European is as discreet as a Dane. A little cartoon in the lower-right-hand corner shows a blond Danish man opening his coat to show off pictures of naked ladies.
Denmark was the first country in the world to legalize pornography, in 1969. And for awhile, it was the world’s leading exporter of pornography.
Last week, political posters went up all over Copenhagen, on streetlights, on bridges, and on train platforms.
The posters are for the local elections this month, and even though the candidates are supposed to take them down afterwards, they usually don’t.
So, the candidates will keep smiling and making promises through Christmas, and through the winter snow and ice. Come spring, you’ll see a faded, battered photo of somebody who failed to win anything at all hanging from a light pole near you.
The ‘left’ party is not leftist
I like Danish politics, and I follow it, even though I don’t follow Danish sports or entertainment. I like Danish politics because it involves a lot of intelligent women running things, with men standing in the background to help them out.
I have a daughter, and a couple of years ago, she buried her mobile phone in the sandbox at school.
She buried her mobile phone deep in the sand, too deep to hear it ring, and then she couldn’t find it. She dug and dug, and then she panicked, and she blamed another girl. She said the other girl had buried the phone in the sandbox.
Pretty soon lie piled on top of lie, so we ended up with a Richard Nixon/Bill Clinton type situation, where the lies were far worse than the original crime. When we finally unraveled it all, I had to apologize to the other girl’s mother.
And I punished my daughter, who was old enough to know better. I took her screens away – her online games and her YouTube access – for a month.
I am an adult bully
The Danish parents around me were horrified.
The idea of punishment, in Danish eyes, is old-fashioned and maybe a bit criminal in itself. From the Danish point of view, almost all problems can be solved by talking about them.
When I first visited Denmark, back in my Eurail pass days, I didn’t like it much. Copenhagen was very different in those days: less prosperous, less open, less social.
There were few cafés then, and I had a lot of trouble finding something to eat. I walked and walked and ended up in the coffee shop at the SAS Radisson Hotel, a big 1970s concrete block on Amager.
Anyway, I took only one picture that day, and it was of a toilet at the hotel. It was the most beautifully designed toilet I had ever seen. All round, streamlined corners. It looked like a cross between an egg and a spaceship. I was really impressed. I took a picture.
I didn’t know it then, but I’d just seen my first example of local Danish design.
Before I moved to Denmark, I didn’t know what a thatcher was.
Of course, I had heard of Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister. But a thatcher – as a job like a carpenter, or a massage therapist – this was something I was not familiar with.
A thatcher, I now know, is a person who makes a thatched roof. A straw roof, basically. There are thousands of thatched roofs in Denmark, and they’re actually very practical for the climate, very environmentally friendly. They keep the heat in and the rain out.
If you want to live in a house with a thatched roof in Denmark, you probably can. A lot of them are vacant, because they tend to be located on farms in the countryside.
You, on the other hand, will probably want to live in a city somewhere – Copenhagen, or Aarhus, or Bilund if you work for Lego.
Beautiful but uncomfortable chairs
The bigger the city, the harder it will be for you to find a place to live. Or at least, a reasonably-priced place to live.
Danes like to buy their homes, because they can deduct the mortgage interest from their taxes.
But if you want to rent, there are two options.
I can’t remember exactly what the social occasion was, but when I was fairly new to Copenhagen I met a man who was a refugee from a country in Sub-Saharan Africa. He had escaped his homeland – I also can’t quite remember which country that was – by way of Cairo, Egypt, and ended up in Denmark.
What I do remember is his account of what it was like to come to Copenhagen after living in busy, colorful city like Cairo. He asked another refugee, a guy who’d been here longer, to show him downtown Copenhagen.
The guy drove him to, I don’t know, Gammel Strand on a Tuesday night in February, and there was no one there. All the Danes were home enjoying their hygge, and the streets were dark and empty. My friend got very angry at the other refugee. Said he’d tricked him. Where is the city! This is not the city! he said. But it was.
The same grey sweater
Anyway, I also remember this African refugee’s comments about Danish fashion. He said he had trouble shopping here, because Danish clothes all look alike. He said, Every store you go to, it’s got same grey sweater.
Now, that’s not entirely true. You could also find a navy blue sweater. I’ve even seen green sweaters.