A Danish for breakfast, anyone?

Yes, Carol and I are on the road again, thankfully. After two years of not traveling because of putting our house up for sale in California, finally we are settled in Washington state, my old boss at Great Adventures is safely behind bars for the next five years, and it is definitely time to get back seeing new places and making new friends.
Since Carol had never been to Scandinavia and it had been almost 50 years since I’d been here, it seemed like a good place to get the feet moving again. We flew to Copenhagen to begin our trip. We have our customary five weeks and I am sure that it will all pass too quickly and we’ll be home again. I remembered my time here so fondly, I was really curious how I’d see things through my ancient and aged eyes instead of those of the youthful vagabond I was at the time.

Sticker shock: While not the most important change, it certainly was the one that hit me in the face first. Our $60 cab ride of 15 minutes was our introduction to the fact that the dollar is really in the toilet and that things are really expensive in their own right. $12 will buy you a big mac, if anyone would have that desire, $4 will get you a ride on a bus, a small coffee and a pastry is $7, and it will cost you a $55 bridge toll to get to Sweden. All these new realities simply remind us that we’re not in Kansas anymore, which thankfully, we never were.
The biggest fundamental change I’ve seen is the ethnic diversity that now imbues itself to Danish society, with all the benefits and knee jerk reactions that is concomitant with that fact. In 1962 Danish society was made up of the stereotypical blond haired, blue eyed vision we see on television. However, with the open borders of the European Union, floods of peoples have left their homes in Rumania, Poland, Cyprus, and other countries where people have struggled for both the freedom of expression and the hope of a better life for themselves and their children to all the countries of Europe, Denmark notwithstanding. There is also a large Muslim population which has been thrown into the mix. These people have added a cultural mosaic to the society at large. You see national dress from many far flung places, making a distinct mark on the streets.
For all the good that this diversity brings, it inevitably brings out the worst in some of the local inhabitants along the way. When times are good, the problems are minimized, however with the global economy being what it is, people begin to look at the newer arrivals as the reason they individually are losing their jobs and that times are tough. There has been a knee-jerk reaction on the part of Many Danish politicians about the evils and perils of diluting the cultural and racial blood of Denmark. The whole incident with the Danish newspaper cartoon which so enraged the Muslim world had a huge impact on Danes natural tolerance and there is a significant debate going on within Danish society about the benefits and detriments of immigration. It is an issue that will not go away, and one that the Danes like most European countries, not to mention the US, are forced to face.

But even with these changes both superficial for the tourist and deep seeded for Danes, it is still the country which is considered to have happiest people in Europe. You’d never know that from the faces of the people who rarely show their emotions. Danes don’t acknowledge others while walking. Lissbeth, our Servas hosts, says that she has passed the same man almost every morning of the work week for 30 years, and he has never made the slightest hint that she is there. He lives nearby, and she leaves on her bike as he leaves his house walking, and watches him pass stony-faced without a hint that he knows who she is. I asked her about her neighbors, and she said she didn’t have a clue who they were, or what they did. This, she told me, is typical of Danes in general. We joked about the fact that when I held the door opens for Carol in a shop all the Danes would walk through without even the slightest acknowledgement. One of Carol’s books said the Danes don’t even have a word for “please,” and they never say they’re sorry. We asked our hosts about this and they couldn’t come up with examples of the opposite.
Bikes, bikes, and more bikes: Michael, Lissbeth’s husband, told us there were more bikes than people in Copenhagen. The two of them have three for example. There are special bike lanes wide enough for 2-3 bikes and they have their own traffic lights. On one of our trips to city center, we noticed a group of bicyclists who made better progress than the bus. This makes for a very fit population. You rarely see fat Danes. I finally saw an extremely fat couple and thought, “Okay, they are some.” Then she opened her mouth, and it sounded like Iowa or Nebraska to me.
Haight Asbury meets NYC graffiti artist meets Nordic sensibilities: There is an area of Copenhagen called Christiania which proclaims as you enter: “You are now leaving the EU.” And so it seems. An old army base that, was abandoned, was appropriated, ala Alcatraz, by a group of cultural dissidents who pretty much lived by their own rules. A group commune of a sort. Growing their own food, selling crafts and artistic creations, they survive today as a flourishing community within the overall Danish landscape. Naturally, or so it seems to me, along with that freedom came an open drug trade in Marijuana and Hashish. The police didn’t bother them and people openly smoked on the streets of the community with impunity. The police didn’t bother them because they could monitor the trade and knew exactly what was going on. Eventually, politicians objected, somebody wanting to get reelected raised a ruckus, the police raided the place over a period of time, the marijuana trade went underground, scattered, and now the police lost their insight to the illicit trade.
Now, however, there seems to be an understanding that this is its own little world, and, while we were there, canisters of pot and large chunks of hash were openly bought and sold in front of all passers-by.
The area has become the second most popular attraction in Copenhagen, after Tivoli Gardens, and large tour buses pull up in front and hordes of tourists from around the world descend upon the area to gawk, and be both fascinated and disgusted by the graffiti littered area.
We hit the weather perfectly - beautiful skies and an 80 degree temperature. Lissbeth told us that they only get 10 days like that a year. Naturally, the parks were filled with people enjoying the day. The canals were lined with people sitting beside the water eating lunch, having a beer, and generally soaking up the sun.
Although we haven’t hit the real midnight sun quite yet, we already feel the effects. It doesn’t get dark until 11:30 at night, and gets light at 3:30 in the morning. It’s difficult to know when it’s time to start slowing down because we are so accustomed to the amount of light doing that automatically for us.
Danes love to drink beer. There’s no other way to describe it. However, even so, we saw little sign of public drunkenness, unlike Germany, for example, where it is really an all too common sight. Danes are far more concerned about smoking than drinking. National campaigns have cut the rate of tobacco consumption dramatically. You can’t smoke inside any public building, for example.
So now we’re off to Stockholm and a stay with another Servas family. Then we’ll head straight north to the northernmost towns in the world. New things await. We can’t wait.

Stay safe,
Carol and Jim