How to Live in Denmark (Kay Xander Mellish)

I was on Danish morning TV recently, which isn’t really something to boast about.  In a country of 5 million, 10 guests a show, 365 days a year – you do the math.  Just about everyone gets on TV sooner or later.   Some of my friends and colleagues mentioned that they had seen me, stumbling through with my imperfect Danish, trying to promote my book, How to Live in Denmark.  But just SOME of my friends and colleagues, not all.  Specifically, it was my friends and colleagues who work in trendy creative industries - advertising, app designers, actors.

That’s because I was on TV at 8:45 in the morning, when people in those industries are just getting out of bed in preparation to roll into the office around 10.  

My friends who have more conventional office jobs, like working in a bank, have to be their desk at 9am, so some of them had seen teasers – you know, coming up next, someone who doesn’t speak Danish properly, trying to promote a book – but they hadn’t seen the show itself. 

And my friends who do real, physical work had no idea I was on TV at all. Airport tarmac staff, postal carriers, builders. They start work at 7am. Or even earlier, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had your deep sleep interrupted by a Danish builder banging on something outside your house at, say, 5:30 in the morning.  My personal Danish builder wake-up record is 4:45 in the morning, during the light summer months. They were driving a motorized crane past my fifth floor window.

While there’s no official class system in Denmark, there is when it comes to working hours.  And working clothing – people who work with their hands often wear blue jumpsuits to and from work, or painters pants, or bright fluorescent vests if they work outside in the dark.  While people in the creative industries wear aggressively ugly eyeglasses, and unusual shoes, and the men have chic little Hugo Boss scarves around their necks.

Different clothes, different starting times, that’s not big news, but recently other forms of inequality have been increasing in Denmark.

In fact, according to the Denmark's Statistics, the GINI coefficient, which measures inequality, has been rising faster in Denmark than in any other country in Europe.  It's now 27.9, compared with 22 at the turn of the century. 

There’s no reason to spend a lot on what you wear to work in Denmark. Danes, by nature, are not flashy dressers.

In most Danish business environments, you’ll be perfectly well dressed in a fitted pair of business trousers, dark shoes, and a solid-color sweater or dress shirt. Male or female, you’ll never go wrong with quiet colors like burgundy, dark blue, dark green, black or - for the adventurous - beige. 

Subtle good taste is the preferred style. Obvious designer labels are considered tacky, but quality cut and fabric are appreciated.

“Is there politeness in Denmark?” 

That was the question I was recently invited on a national TV show to discuss.

The implication was that I was supposed to say that Danes were not at all polite, because effusive praise and cheerful agreement make for a rather dull TV show.

But Danes are not impolite. They have their own version of courteous behaviour, which is based on reinforcing aspects of their culture that they care about.

Getting to Sweden from Copenhagen is easy: you take a quick trip across the Øresund Bridge in your car or on the train. Getting to Norway from Copenhagen isn’t too hard: there’s a ferry that runs every day from Nordhavn.

Getting to Germany from Copenhagen, on the other hand, is a headache. But in 2029, a new direct tunnel will open between Denmark and Germany. The Danes are building it with very little help from the Germans, who originally weren't too interested in a tunnel that went through an obscure and neglected part of their country. 

Thousands of construction workers will be required to build this tunnel to Germany, and many of them will be internationals. But what will this influx and money and people mean to the southern Danish island of Lolland, which is currently one of the poorest parts of Denmark?

Fastelavn is one of the Danes’ favorite holidays. It takes place in February, when the light is finally beginning to come back after a long season of winter darkness. "Hitting the cat in the barrel" - which used to involve a real cat, but no longer does - and eating messy fastelavn buns full of custard are part of the holiday.

What's no longer really part of the holiday is its religious background, the idea that this is a party that takes place before the long lockdown of Lent. 

Kept the party, dumped the religion

The Danes have kept the party while stripping away its source, much like the non-firmations some Danes choose over confirmations, or the "namegiving ceremonies" that have replaced baptisms in some circles. 

I once read that the safer a society is, the less likely it is to be religious. The more comfortable and secure people are, the less likely they are to turn to a higher power to sort things out. 

That’s certainly true in Denmark.

They find religious faith strange

The majority of Danes find religious faith strange, and perhaps a sign of ignorance or moral weakness. I have had Danes tell me that believing in God is like believing in Santa Claus. 

They’ll go to church on Christmas Eve, or for a wedding, or maybe a funeral.

But if you tell Danes that you go to church on a regular basis because you like it, they will suddenly become very suspicious, and maybe a little angry. 

They may assume you have backward views, that you don’t like gay people, perhaps that you believe that women should be subservient.

Or maybe that you don’t drink alcohol, which is a serious charge in Denmark.

Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com

Being alone for Christmas in Denmark can be tough – one of the downsides of Danish "hygge" is that people who are not inside the "hygge" circle can feel shut out and very alone.

Here are our tips for having a good holiday anyway.

As the long Danish winter finally draws to an end, it’s time for Danes to start planting their gardens. 

Now, in early April, it’s rhubarb, parsnips, cabbage. After the risk of frost is gone, in late April, you can put down some beets, and chives, and parsley – all good traditional Danish food. 

By May, you can try with the tomatoes, which may or may not ripen depending on whether you get a warm, sunny summer, always a roll of the dice in Denmark. One year we ended up with hard, green tomatoes in September. 

Short growing season

The growing season in Denmark is short. If you miss the planting deadlines, you’re probably out of luck. 

And even if you are in luck, the amount you spend at the garden center will far outstrip the amount it would take you to buy the same foods at the corner market.

But Danes love to garden, they love to touch the Earth. Denmark industrialized fairly late compared to the rest of Europe – really not until the late 19th century – and even then it focused on cooperative agriculture for export. Denmark is still known around the world for its butter and bacon.

The "gaard" is the family farm

Many Danes still carry the name of their family farm in the name they use today. 

The Danish word for farm is “gaard”, so the names of jewelry designer Ole Lynggaard, or golfer Nicolai Højgaard, or politician Pia Kjærsgaard, all reference what was once the family farm, the “gaard”.

This love for nature why weather is always an appropriate topic of conversation among Danes. They’re also very good at historical weather. They’ll tell you that the rains this April are just like the rains of April 2014, or that we haven’t seen this type of wind since the summer of 2006.

Colony gardens

If you live in Denmark with a house in the suburbs with – parcel houses, they’re often called – you have lots of room for gardening. But people who live in apartments often have what is called “colony gardens.”

Colony gardens are a little patch of land set aside in the cities, or near them, for urban residents to have a garden. They usually build a little house on the plot as well, although you’re only allowed to live there during the summer. The electricity and the water usually get switched off during the winter. 

The houses are generally wooden, small, cramped, and a little thrown-together. There are often chipped plates and glasses, old chairs with cushions in a grandmotherly fabric, a few board games ready for rainy days. A flag pole and a big Danish flag to put up for holidays. And always, always, they are surrounded by a hedge for privacy. 

The colony gardens are run by an association, so you’re supposed to be friends with your neighbors, but keep them at a distance. Good fences make good neighbors and all that. 

Getting a colony garden requires either buying one or getting on a long, long list to get one, which means that very few of the 15% non-ethnic Danish residents of Denmark have colony gardens. As I mentioned in an earlier podcast, the list of residents tends to look like the 1957 Copenhagen phone book. 

The Unity Garden

In my Copenhagen neighborhood, which is extremely diverse, there was initiative to change this a few years ago. A little bit of land freed up by the railroad tracks, and the idea was to create a Unity Garden. Half of the land was set off for people who were not born in Denmark, and half was set off for people who were. 

The idea was to meet up, work together, exchange knowledge, have summer picnics, meet across cultures. 

Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com

In an anti-authoritarian country like Denmark, being a boss is a precarious (social) position. Danish bosses don’t like to flaunt their authority.

In fact, when you enter a room of Danes, it is often difficult to tell which one is the boss. The social cues that point to a big cheese in other cultures – the flashy watch, the oversize office, the glamorous yet servile executive assistant – are considered poor taste in egalitarian Denmark.

So are the booming, take-charge personalities many foreigners may expect from a boss.

Denmark is a flat country. It is flat geographically, you are expected to keep a flat temperament and vocal tone, and (as they love to tell you) Danish companies have a relatively flat management structure.

This means fewer layers of people to keep an eye on you, which can be a refreshing thing, but also fewer people around to help if you’re going off the rails entirely.

Anyone who has spent time living in Denmark knows that it’s one of the most expensive countries around. That’s true when it comes to food shopping, too.

One Dane who had lived in the US explained it this way: “In Denmark, every supermarket is priced like Whole Foods.”

For those of you who haven’t visited the States, Whole Foods is a high-end grocery chain nicknamed “Whole Wallet” or “Whole Paycheck.”

But there are a few creative ways to save money on food in Denmark.

Danes hate food waste, so the prices of some food in grocery stores actually drops near the end of the day or right before the item's expiration date. 

You can visit farmer's markets, or if you live near the border, go shopping in Sweden or Germany to save cash.

When visiting Denmark, you’ll be offered Danish food, and expressing enthusiasm for it will go a long way towards generating harmony with your Danish friends.

The good news is, Danish cuisine offers something for everyone. 

If you’re a carnivore, don’t miss the Danish pork dishes, particularly "flæskesteg". That’s a crispy, fatty fried pork that’s the official national food.

For people who prefer fish, there’s a great selection in this country surrounded by water. Curried herring and fried plaice are popular, and so are many types of salmon.

Vegans can enjoy a wide choice of root vegetables, wonderful fresh Danish berries, or the sweet elderflower juice that is sometimes blended with vodka or champagne.

Hello, and welcome to the How To Live in Denmark podcast.  I’m Kay Xander Mellish.

I don’t regret many things in life, but I do regret not going to a party I was invited to almost 14 years ago.

That was in 2000, when I first arrived in Denmark.  It was a party to mark the opening of the Ørseund 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.  A half million cars per month drive over it now, plus a train every 20 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.  A lot of them are in service positions – restaurants, 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?” 

And then, of course, there are the Danes living in Sweden.  At the height of the housing boom, living in Sweden was much cheaper.  People could buy a house in Sweden they never could have afforded in Denmark.  

The prices have leveled out a bit since, so there are two groups of Danes who live in Sweden.  One is people who have new foreign romantic partners – gay or straight – who cannot be admitted to Denmark under the restrictive Danish immigration laws.  That basically means anyone from outside the EU, so American, African, Australian, Bolivian.  The couple lives in Sweden for a couple of years, gets Swedish residency, and then they can move to Denmark.

The other group of Danes living in Sweden is people who love cars.  Denmark, as you know, is bicycle country.  Denmark has never had a car industry, which is one of the reason the tax on a new car in Denmark is 180% and more and more streets in Copenhagen are being closed off to cars entirely.

Sweden had a car industry.  There’s not much of it left with Saab bankrupt, and Volvo sold to the Chinese, but you can see the influence of that car industry that as soon as you go over the bridge to Malmo.  The streets are much wider, even in the newer parts of downtown.  Swedish streets are built for cars.

When a young Danish man moves to Sweden, often the very first thing he does is buy a car he never could have afforded in Denmark.

The truth is, there are some ways that the bridge has brought Denmark and Sweden closer together. Danes buy vacation homes in Southern Sweden. Swedes come to attend university in Denmark.  Danes go shopping in Sweden, because almost everything is cheaper there. As a matter of fact, the only thing cheaper in Denmark than in Sweden is alcohol.

So, may be closer, but still, Swedes and Danes are very different peoples.  Danes still eat rye bread, Swedes eat flatbread.  Danes eat Sausages, Swedes eat meatballs.

And Danes, as cold as they may seem to outsiders, are still more outgoing than the Swedes.  Among Scandinavians, Danes are sometimes called the Latins of the North.  They know how to sit down, open a bottle of wine, and enjoy life.

Swedes, on the other hand, are known as the Prussians of the North.  They’re tall.  They stand up straight.  They follow rules.  And the men have terrible haircuts.

Do you know the hairstyle known as the mullet in the United States?  It’s that terrible two-level haircut so many men had in the 1990s – the Ziggy Stardust. Short in the front, long in the back.  Or, as it’s sometimes said, business in front, party in the back.  The mullet, in Denmark, is known as Swedish hair.

To Denmark, Sweden is a big brother with a terrible haircut.  He’s regimented, he’s boring, he’s stiff.  He can’t dance.  There’s a famous saying that inside every Swede is a little policeman trying to get out.

That’s only half the famous saying.  Here’s the whole thing.  Inside every Swede is a little policeman trying to get out – and inside every Dane, there’s a little criminal trying to get out.

And that’s the How To Live in Denmark podcast for this week.   We’re always looking for sponsors for the podcast – we get several thousand listeners every week – so you know an ethical business that would like to have its message here, get in touch.  We’re on Facebook at How To Live in Denmark, you can reach us at How To Live in Denmark.com, or you can Tweet us at How2LiveinDK – the 2 is a number.  See you next week!

It’s almost Week 1, in the weekly numbering system that’s widely used in Northern Europe, where the year starts with week 1 and runs through to Week 52 or 53, depending on the calendar. It’s very efficient for planning, so you don’t have to say something messy like “What about that week that starts Monday June 3…”

Week 1 starts on January 1, and everything follows that in perfect order.

But before January 1 we have New Year’s Eve, a day that fills me with trepidation to be honest, because in Denmark, New Year’s Eve is all about amateur fireworks.

Cannonballs, Roman Candles, Ding Dongs, Triple Extremes, these are the fireworks you can purchase and set off yourself in a local parking lot, terrifying any nearby dogs and cats. 

Having a family member in the hospital business, I can’t help but think that today, December 26, there are a few amateur fireworks fans who have perfectly well-functioning eyes and fingers right now who won’t have them on January 2.

The Queen's Speech

New Year’s Eve celebrations start at 6pm, when the Queen Margrethe gives her annual speech, live. 

To the uninitiated, this looks like a woman sitting at her desk reading from a pile of papers – she refuses to use a TelePrompter – but it’s all been intricately planned, from the clothes to the jewelry to the flowers to the text itself to reflect the themes and priorities of the year gone by. There’s even a website that gives odds on what words and themes will appear. 

The Queen now keeps her pile of papers together with a paper clip. In past years, she left them loose, and on one particular occasion they got out of order and she had to desperately search through them on air to find her place.

The comedian Ulf Pilgaard, a large man who dressed up as a colorful burlesque imitation of the Queen, used to make this incident part of his act, throwing papers up in the air like Harpo Marx.

Just as an aside, when this comedian who imitated the Queen retired last year, the Queen herself showed up at his final performance and shook his hand. Having such a good sense of humor about herself is why Queen is so beloved, even by people who do not really like the monarchy. 

Some Danes even stand up to watch the Queen’s speech on TV. It always ends with “Gud Bevare Danmark”, God Protect Denmark.

"Wreath cake" 

After the speech, it’s dinner time, followed by a very sweet cake called kransekage – which translates to “wreath cake.” It’s made of a lot of rings delicately placed on top of each other, in a little tower. There’s lot of marzipan involved in this cake. I’m not a marzipan fan myself, but if you are, you’ll like this cake.

 Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com

Every country changes, and so does Denmark. When I hold How to Live in Denmark events, people often ask me how Denmark is changing, or has changed since I got here fifteen years ago. I could name a hundred things, but the first one that always comes to mind is food and drink.

Shotglasses are out, snaps and Gammel Dansk is out, fine wine (almost always bought on sale at the supermarket) is in.

The small food stores that used to be on every corner in Denmark – the ‘pålæg’ or sausage shop, the fish shop, the dairy shop – are out. There used to be an odd type of Danish store called a kolonial, which sold canned goods and dry goods, basically stuff from the old Danish colonies in Africa, India and the Caribbean.

That’s out too. Supermarkets are in.

I’m looking out the window as I record, and it’s snowing again. It’s pretty, but it’s not a novelty any more. It’s been like this for the past couple of weeks, Danish winter weather. Nearly every day there’s fresh snow and ice.

When I wake up on winter mornings, it’s still dark, and cold, and I can hear the wind whistling outside my window.  Every day I think, ahhhh, I don’t want to get up.  But I do.

Of course everyone in Denmark suffers a little bit during the winter.  But I feel particularly bad for people I can see come from warmer climates, and are experiencing one of their first winters here. 

It’s hard to be a teenager no matter who you are or where you live, but spare a thought for the two teenagers of the Danish Royal Family. 16-year-old Christian - the future King Christian XI - and 15-year-old Isabella have to deal with family photo calls and media events, leaked Tik Tok videos, and a TV documentary this week accusing their boarding school of being a toxic environment.

Planning your summer vacation in Denmark is like playing the lottery. You could hit it lucky, with golden days and long, warm evenings, when you can sit with friends in the soft light and drink hyldeblomst cocktails.

Or you could get grey day after grey day, interspersed with a little rain whenever it is least convenient. The weather could be chilly, leaving your cute new summer clothes to sit disappointed in your closet while you wear your boring long trousers again and again.

I find that locals tend to base their decision about whether to stay in Denmark for the summer on the previous year’s weather. Last year’s summer was great for anyone who is not a farmer: it was unusually hot and dry.

This year, so far, the weather has been very good for farmers with crops that need a lot of rain, and not so great for anybody else.

If you really want to get a Dane all hot and bothered, start talking about some thing that is beautifully designed.

In Denmark, beauty is usually found in something practical that has been very well designed. Housewares, particularly kitchenwares, are a Danish design favorite.

They don’t have to be from expensive materials, but they have to be simple, streamlined, and work flawlessly. The beauty is in the usefulness.

Motivating Danish employees is very different than motivating other groups of people because there are two big factors missing – hierarchy and fear. 

We don’t like to talk about the fear part in our various countries of origin, but the fact is true that in the US, UK, China, India, and in parts of Europe, someone who loses their job can be in a lot of trouble. They may have trouble paying their bills, might lose their house, might not have access to health care, might not be able to send their kids to university.

That’s not the case in Denmark. Everybody pays for those services through their taxes, so losing your job doesn’t mean you lose access to these things the way it might mean elsewhere in the world.

And that means that employees aren’t slightly afraid of their boss the way they might be elsewhere in the world - and they’re much more willing to speak up.

They’re not going to do what you say just because you’re the boss. Hierarchy exists in Denmark, despite what the Danes sometimes want to believe, but you don’t always get a lot of respect from being at the top of the hierarchy.

In this society where egalitarianism is a deep and cherished value, the person standing on a pedestal is kind of assumed to be a buffoon. You’ve heard of the famous "Janteloven" that informally governs Danish culture – and one of its rules is "don’t think you’re better than us".

In a Danish environment, you’re going to have to convince your employees that what you suggest is the right course of action. They’re not just going to do it because you’re the boss.

It’s spring in Denmark, and spring is by far my favorite season here. The wonderful white Scandinavian sunlight is back after the dark days of the winter, the flowers are coming out on the trees, and everybody’s in a good mood. The outdoor cafés are full of people again – sometimes draped in blankets to keep warm, but outside all the same.

April and May are often the best months for weather in Denmark, along with September. Summers can be rainy. And April is when Tivoli opens in Copenhagen. (Side note: when you see a man in Denmark with his trousers accidentally unzipped, you say “Tivoli is open!”)

Tivoli is one of the world’s great non-disappointing tourist attractions – it’s constantly updated, with new shops, new rides, fresh flowers and fresh restaurants. And in the spring, it’s not as crowded as it is in the summer. You can hang out all day, have a picnic, ride the rollercoaster, even hear some bands play.

Did you know that Copenhagen has its own color? It’s called Copenhagen Green, and it’s a dark emerald green, mixed with a fair amount of black. A little like the dark green we see on the leaves of trees here late in August. Pantone 3435C, for you designer types. 

You’ll notice that all Copenhagen benches are this color, an you will see Copenhagen Green on many wooden doors and window frames in the old city, as well as lamp posts, railings, even small bridges in the beautiful Ørestedsparken.

This was a conscious decision by city leaders in the early 1900s. They felt the combination of green and black blended well with both natural and urban settings, and that using it widely would create a sense of harmony.

Plus almost everybody likes green. 

Learn more about the design quirks of Copenhagen in this podcast, and find out how to take my self-guided audio tour of Danish Design in Copenhagen at voicemap.me/DanishDesign.

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I get a lot of mail at the How To Live in Denmark podcast, and some of it is from people who want to move to Denmark, but they’re not sure what to do to make money once they get here.  But, I do speak English, they say.  Can I make money in Denmark just off of just speaking English?

Generally, no.  No you can’t.  I mean, I do, but I was an experienced journalist before I got here. But English is not a rare commodity in Denmark. 

Danish children start learning English when they’re six years old.  And because British and American TV shows and movies and are not dubbed, children are constantly hearing English even earlier.  Danish adults often read novels in English, and by the time you get to university, pretty much all the high-level textbooks are in English.  There’s just no economic case for translating textbooks into a language that only 5.6 million people speak.

So, English is everywhere in Denmark.  And Danes love English.  When you come to Denmark, you’ll find that shops and youth programs and rock bands have English names because the Danes think it sounds cool.  Danes also like to tuck bits of English into their Danish speech, like ‘Du fik et nyt job!  Nice” or ‘Er det her den billigste togbillet til Roskilde?  I don’t know.”

For some Danes, particularly younger Danes, the Danish language is seen as provincial, old-fashioned, kind of like those dusty little porcelain knick-knacks your grandparents keep around the house. 

So another question I get a lot is, if you already speak English, is it worth learning Danish at all? Yes, it is. Parties are more fun if you can speak Danish. There's nothing worse than everyone laughing uproariously at some very funny joke, and you having to wait there like a piece of furniture until someone takes the time to explain it to you.

A country like Denmark, with so much coastline and water, needs a lot of bridges - and there have been 5 new colorful, stylish bridges built in Copenhagen alone in the past decade.

And because this is Denmark, and people love design, each bridge has its own special look. You can’t just put up a few bridge supports and a deck on top for traffic. You need style, and you need a colorful name.

Consider, for example, the multicolored Kissing Bridge in Copenhagen. It’s not named that because you’re supposed to kiss on the bridge, although you can if you like. It’s named that because it breaks in half on a regular basis to let ships through, and then it’s supposed to come together again like a kiss.

The Kissing Bridge has needed to visit a relationship counselor, however, because there have been constant problems getting it to kiss. It wasn’t quite aligned the way it was supposed to be.

It seems to work now, although it’s rather steep and a difficult ride for bicyclists, which is rather a shame, because it is a bicycle and pedestrian bridge only. There are no cars on it.

The Bicycle Snake and the Brewing Bridge a little further down the harbor are also just for cyclists and walkers, and so is the Little Langebro bridge.

Have you ever seen the movie The Wizard of Oz?  It's a classic.  When Dorothy arrives in the land of Oz, the first thing she's asked is - are you a good witch, or a bad witch?

I was having lunch with a friend this week, and, over club sandwiches she said, its a shame there's only one word for foreigner in Danish, when actually there's two types of foreigner here.

I got her point, even though I think there's only one word for foreigner in most languages.  But what she's was really saying is, there's no single way in Danish to say,  Are you a good foreigner, or a bad foreigner?

If you've been to Danish dinner parties, often later on in the evening, whenever a fair amount of wine has been consumed, you'll hear a Danish person complaining about foreigners in Denmark.  They come here just to take advantage of the our system.  All they want is free education, free health care and welfare payments.  They don't contribute to Danish society at all. And then, at some point, someone will turn to you and say, Oh, but we don't mean your kind of foreigner.

You know, a good foreigner.  The kind who works or studies.  The kind who is an trained carpenter, or engineer, or a doctor.  The kind who open restaurants with unfamiliar but unchallenging food.  Smiling, young, healthy, industrious, good foreigners.

Good foreigners are highly sought after at the moment.  This week, for example, one of the big business groups said that Denmark should aim for at least 150,000 new immigrants in the next 20 years.  The Danish population is aging, so the country needs younger workers to drive Denmark's economy.  The business group held a conference on ways to attract them, and make them feel welcome. Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schimidt came by to offer more international schools.  She promised less red tape.  These are things we can do to attract good foreigners.

On the other hand, in just the past couple of months, more than 20,000 Syrian refugees have arrived in Denmark. But no one's too worried about how to attract more refugees or make them feel more welcome.  In fact, some Danish political  parties are trying to change the asylum conditions and send as many of these people as possible back home to the battlefield.

It reminds me sometimes of an old fashioned faucet, with the hot and cold knobs.  Denmark is trying to turn one knob on, and the other one off.

Denmark has several amusement parks, including the original Legoland, but the ones I know best are the ones in Copenhagen - Tivoli Gardens and Bakken.

Tivoli and Bakken show two different sides of the Danish character.  

Tivoli is the sleek, confident, high-end image that Denmark likes to present to the world: it has exquisite flower gardens, fancy shops and restaurants, and a theater that hosts world-class performers. Bakken is more homey, more quirky, a little shabby, and a bit more hyggelig, under my own definition of hygge as “unambitious enjoyment”. 

The differences between the two parks also illustrates the class differences in Denmark – even though Danes like to pretend there are no class differences in egalitarian Denmark.

The relaxed approach to nudity in Denmark can be a surprise for many newcomers.

It’s something they’re often confronted with at the local swimming hall, where a very large and strong attendant insists that they take off their entire swimsuit and shower thoroughly before going into the pool.

Stripping off in front of strangers is new for a lot of internationals, and some try to place it a larger context of Danish morality.

It hasn’t been entirely forgotten that Denmark was the first country in the world to legalize pornography in 1967. Some people still think of Denmark as a place where there is easy sex available and a generous display of naked boobs and butts.

If you are a romance novelist, the Danish man is not your dream man. He will not write poetry and pursue his beloved to the ends of the Earth. He won't send flowers, he won't buy chocolates. He won't even help carry packages. 

That said, if you’re a feminist, a Danish man IS your dream man. He will cook and help with the housework, and spend time with the kids.  He'll respect your opinion, and he won't force himself on you. In fact, you may have to force yourself on him.  But if you do, he’ll usually be really grateful.

I often give presentations to job hunters in Denmark, and I tell them there are two words you can add to your cover letter that will virtually guarantee that it will be carefully read.

What are those two words?

The name of someone you know who already works at the company.

Of course, you should only use a current employee’s name with his or her permission, and ask each time you use it. There’s always the chance that your contact and this particular hiring manager may be bitter enemies, or that a company is so vast (say, Novo Nordisk) that a recommendation from a scientist won’t have much impact on the hiring of an accountant.

When you’ve been an international in Denmark for a while, as I have, you sometimes forget what it was like to arrive here for the first time and know nothing.

I remember arriving just about this time of year and being astonished by all the public holidays in spring. I’d arrived to work, but the office kept shutting down.

Now one of my various gigs is cultural training for newcomers, paid for by the big corporations that bring them here. The questions they ask bring me back to the time when I first arrived.

One of the most popular questions is pretty basic: How do I send a letter in Denmark? What does a postbox look like? Where do I buy a stamp?

I also get a lot of questions about Danish bicycle culture, which the Danish government promotes so heavily in its tourist campaigns.

A nice man newly-arrived from Russia asked me: Will it be possible for me to get a bicycle in Denmark? I said yes, it would.

But hey, there are no dumb questions. (Would it be possible for me, Kay, to get a bicycle in Moscow? I have no idea.)

Bicycle culture is often exaggerated in Denmark – the truth is, the number of kilometers cycled each year keeps falling, and the number of cars keeps increasing, even thought it is very expensive.

You can still get by with only a bike in Copenhagen and Aarhus, but in the less urban parts of Denmark, life will be uncomfortable without a car.

This is the 122th episode of the "How to Live in Denmark podcast", and originally ran in 2023.

Get all of Kay Xander Mellish's books about Denmark at http://books.howtoliveindenmark.com. Book Kay for a talk to your group or organization at http://events.howtoliveindenmark.com.

Many people who visit Denmark are fans of the Vikings, the colloquial name for Scandinavians before the medieval era, although technically speaking the Viking raiders were at their peak in the years 800-1100. 

There are plenty of opportunities, especially now during tourist season, to see modern-day Danes dressed up as Vikings, building wooden ships, cooking over open fires, and fighting with swords and shields. Exhibitions like this are very popular with visitors from overseas. 

What they might not know is that you can see actual Vikings in Denmark, or what’s left of their bodies. It was common in the Viking era and before to toss sacrificial items and people into peat bogs, which, it turns, out preserves bodies and clothing and hair very well.

So there are several places in Denmark where you can see actual humans from the Viking age, more than a thousand years old, and sometimes their clothes and hairstyles, sometimes even the last food they ate, reclaimed from their stomachs. 

Some bodies are so well-preserved that they still have fingerprints. 

The top spot for this is near Aarhus, the Moesgaard Museum. It’s a huge museum that’s interactive, immersive, almost overpowering. 

You will see hundreds of Viking objects and and weapons and skeletons, amid multimedia exhibits. For example, there’s a room that lets you experience of what it was like to be in the middle of a Viking battle, with armed warriors shouting and screaming and running at you from all directions. 

It’s overwhelming, because the people it celebrates lived such brutal lives. Sacrificing people, sacrificing animals, killing each other with clubs and daggers and axes to the head in violent raids. 

It’s a lot. After a while I found myself cowering in the gift shop.

(Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com)

This is the 124th episode of the "How to Live in Denmark podcast", and originally ran in 2023.

Get all of Kay Xander Mellish's books about Denmark at http://books.howtoliveindenmark.com. Book Kay for a talk to your group or organization at http://events.howtoliveindenmark.com.

In general, Denmark is not a fearful country.  You could argue, what is there to be afraid of in Denmark?  It seems like a safe little corner of the world.  Tax-funded social programs make it unlikely you’ll go hungry or homeless, as long as you have that little yellow social service card that shows you're here legally. Your medical care and education is paid for by taxes – yours or somebody else’s.  Even if you lose your job – and it’s very easy in Denmark for companies to get rid of workers they don’t want – there is the social safety net to catch you.

I’ve often thought that the social safety net is one of the reasons has so little interest in religion.  When there’s so little to worry about, there’s not much to pray for. 

Denmark also has is little of the open competition that can make life so stressful in competitive nations like China or India or the United States. Danish culture prizes consensus, not competition, and Danish children don’t get any formal grades in school until they’re in their teens.  Any type of non-sports competition is discouraged. 

So that fear that kids live with in many parts of the world – of not being the best in class, not being able to get into a good secondary school or college – of being crossed off the list at a very young age, is largely absent in Denmark. 

As an American in Denmark, I get to experience Danish stereotypes about Americans on a regular basis: we are superficial, too outspoken and direct, and are apparently controlled by a small cabal of right-wing nutcases. 

But the Danes have stereotypes about other nationalities as well.  Spaniards and Italians are seen as fun and sexy and romantic, but unlikely to arrive on time. Eastern Europeans work too hard, at wages that are much too low, at least by Danish standards. Asian immigrants are seen as OK because they work hard at things Danes aren’t interested in, like high-level engineering degrees.

Danes also have stereotypes about other Nordic people. Norwegians are seen as happy, friendly people with a humorous language.  Everything sounds funny in Norwegian because everything sounds like singing.  Swedes are seen as kind of stiff, humorless types who can’t dance, and can’t hold their liquour.  Finns are silent, angry drunks that carry knives. Oddly, given their history, Danes really like Germans.  Really, really like the Germans.  Many Danes will say that Berlin is their favorite town.

Danes also have stereotypes about each other, something that amazed me when I first arrived here.  You have 5 million people, and you’re dividing yourselves into groups!  But Danes themselves see 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. They are also sometimes seen as stubborn, and very tight with money. They want to drive a hard bargain. People from Copenhagen are seen as slick. Smart-ass, fast-talking, prone to exaggeration- everything’s the biggest and the best.  The men wear expensive business suits, and everyone wears overpriced eyeglasses. They have jobs that are non-jobs, like Senior Communications Consultant or SEO specialist.  People from Jylland have real jobs, like pig farmer, or Lego designer. 

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 home country passport  - 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 it.

So like supermarket prices, this offer may be for a limited time only.  So, I decided to get my Danish citizenship at the first opportunity.

To become a Danish citizen, you have to take a Danish language test and a citizenship test that's tests your knowledge of Denmark and Danish culture.   That's the test I will take on Tuesday.  It's only given twice a year, and it costs 700 crowns to take, so you might as well get it right the first time.

So I have been studying hard.  Actually, I started out by studying the wrong thing.  There were several quizzes online that tested your knowledge of Danish history - like Harold Bluetooth.  Did you know your Bluetooth headset was named after 10th century Danish King?  I did not.   Bluetooth was the guy who brought Christianity to Denmark.  Whether or not he actually had blue teeth, which suggests pretty bad dentistry, remains unknown.

So I took the online practice quizzes, and I learned a lot of other things.  I learned about King Christian the Fourth, who build the round tower in Copenhagen. And I learned about King Christian the Seventh, who was crazy and ended up in a movie being portrayed in a movie that also starred Mads Mikkelsen.  

There have been very few international singing stars from Denmark, and that’s a surprise, because Danish people love to sing.

Joining choirs is very popular, and Danish schoolchildren often start the week with a song – in my daughter’s school, all the grades get together and sing something from the school’s common songbook. 

There’s actually a kind of common songbook for all the children of Denmark, called ‘Det Små Synger’, where you can find classics like ‘Se Min Kjole’  (See my dress), Lille Peter Edderkop (Little Peter Spider) orOles Nye Autobil, Ole’s new car.  Ole’s new car is actually a toy car that he uses to run into things, like his sister’s dollhouse.

In general, the Small Songs are a throwback to an older Denmark, a quieter Denmark where most people lived in the countryside.  Many of the songs refer to green hilltops, or forests, or baby pigs or horses, or happy frogs that live in a swamp.  And of course, all the humans in the Small Songs are entirely Danish – or ‘Pear Danish,’ as the local expression goes. One out of five children born in Denmark today is not an ethnic Dane, but there’s no such thing as or ‘Little Muhammend Spider’ or ‘Fatima’s New Toy Car.’

Still, everyone who grows up in Denmark learns these songs. And other songs that are just part of the Danish canon. Back when I was looking around for a school for my daughter, I went to a parent introduction meeting where the principal asked everyone to start by singing The Autumn song.  All the Danish parents got up, there were probably 200 of them there, all smiling, brought back to their school days, and happily singing the song. They all knew the words. I had no idea what was going on.  I just stood up and hummed along.

 But Danish singing is not just for children.  Danish teenagers and young adults, who tend to drink a lot, love Danish drinking songs.  Snaps songs are made to be sung right before drinking a shot of snaps, they’re an important part of Danish student culture.  One you’ll probably hear is ‘Sail up the river.’   The lyrics are easy to learn: ‘Sail up the river, sail down again. That was a great song, let’s sing it again.’  And then, of course, you sing it again.  Many times.  My neighbors were doing that last weekend.

If you live in Denmark or follow the Danish media, you’ll know there’s been a lot of talk of gangsters over the past week. One Danish gang is trying to expand at the expense of another gang, and this summer there have been about 25 shootings in Copenhagen, generally in the northern neighborhoods – my neighbourhood.

Somebody was shot outside my supermarket, somebody else was shot outside the school near my house, and a couple of people have been shot just walking down the street.

Most of the victims are other gangsters, but a few have been unlucky civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. All have been young men, and the Copenhagen police went so far as to suggest that young men stop wearing knit hats. Knit hats can be a gang sign. I should point out that this summer in Denmark has been so cold that wearing a knit hat in August can actually seem like a good idea.

Denmark has had two female prime ministers and about forty percent of the people elected to the Folketing, the Danish Parliament, are women. 

But when it comes to private industry, Danish women have one of the lowest participation rates in management in Europe. According to the OECD, only 26.5% of managers in Denmark are female, compared to 39.8% in the US.

It’s not unusual to see a senior management team made up entirely of Danish males, with perhaps a Swedish or German male thrown in for diversity. 

That said, the majority of adult Danish women hold paying jobs. The Danish tax system makes it very difficult for a couple to survive on one income, even a hefty one. 

Alcohol has a long history in Denmark. The Vikings brewed four types of beverages: ale, mead, fruit wine, and syra, a fermented milk – and for many centuries Danish babies have eaten øllebrød, which is a mix of old bread scraps and beer.

Fast forward a few centuries, and alcohol is still part of almost every Danish gathering.

Early in 2020, the EU Commission reported that Denmark placed an unhappy first in Europe in binge drinking and that it was one of the reasons Danes have the shortest expected lifespan in Western Europe.

According to the report, 37% of adult Danes said they had “regular major alcohol usage,” which was nearly double the EU average of 20%.

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.

This is because all the Danish people have gone to their summerhouses.

On Friday afternoons, Danish people like to pack up their cars, drive out to the countryside, and spend the weekend in conditions that are sometimes quite primitive.  Every summerhouse is different, but most of them seem to have questionable plumbing, odd sleeping arrangements, and chipped dishes and glassware.

The Danish summerhouse is an old tradition – 400 years ago, the government started offering small plots of land to the industrial workers who lived in crowded, sooty slums.  The idea was that they could get away into the clean, fresh air on weekends, and grow healthy vegetables.

Fast forward to now, and very few people grow vegetables on their plots these days.  Instead, these small summerhouse plots have become little kingdoms, with neatly clipped hedges all around and lots of lawn chairs and flowerbeds and bird feeders.  In the center is a tiny, tiny house – usually not more than 50 square meters, or 400 square feet – where the entire family spends the summer.

This little doll house is almost always lovingly care of.  Freshly painted, nice roof, clean windows, flowery curtains. I’ve also seen elaborate ones. One near my house has a copper roof.  When I was looking at real estate ads for this story, I saw another one that had been fitted with big white columns like the mansion house in Gone With the Wind.

But as fancy as they are, they are small.  There’s usually room for one double bed, or a fold-out couch, and then maybe there’s a loft where a couple more people can sleep, maybe a porch for one or two more.  I would guess that Danish maximum-security prisoners get more sleeping space than ordinary Danes in their summer houses.

When you first arrive in Denmark to work or look for work, the last thing you need is another monthly expense. So many foreigners “save money” by not joining a union.

And I was one of them. To be honest, joining a union never even occurred to me.

In the US, unions are either for hands-on workers – steelworkers, hotel maids – or for civil servants, like schoolteachers and cops. Knowledge workers and creative types are almost never unionized.

But that’s not true in Denmark, where engineers, doctors, lawyers, bankers, managers, and writers regularly join unions.

Unions can arguably be even more important for foreign employees than they are for Danes.

I've just arrived back in Denmark after a couple of weeks in the US and the night I got back, my cat bit me. This was not just a little affectionate peck - Fluffy used her sharp teeth, her fangs, to create four bleeding puncture wounds in my leg. I suppose it was partly my fault – I put a call on speakerphone. Fluffy doesn't like speakerphone, because she can hear a person, but she can’t see one, so she assumes I’m some evil magician who has put a person inside a little glowing box, and she bites me.

So I was bleeding, and I did what I did the last time she bit me....which was a couple of months ago, the last time I used speakerphone: I called 1813, the Danish government's non-emergency line for off-hour medical situations.

No matter how they feel about the institution of royalty, almost everyone likes Denmark’s Queen Margrethe, who is celebrating 50 years on the throne this week.

Every New Year’s Eve, the streets of Denmark go quiet as the Queen makes her annual televised speech to her subjects. I find the speeches pretty much the same every year, they’re about being kind to each other, taking care of the environment, and such.

The real entertainment is in the Queen’s wardrobe - she designs her own clothes, and often chooses rather un-Danishly bright colors -  and whether she’ll get her carefully written note cards mixed up. 

Every year she thanks the Danish military for its work, and every year she makes sure to shout out to the Faroe Islands and Greenland, the farthest flung parts of her kingdom. And she ends every annual speech with “GUD BEVARE DANMARK” – God Save Denmark. 

The Queen is the head of the Danish state church, and the Danish state – she still signs all the laws, including the specific law that made me a citizen.  But the Queen is also an artist. She paints, and draws, and has designed stage sets for the Royal Ballet. 

Networking in Denmark is tough, even for Danes. This is a culture where it’s considered bad manners to talk to someone you don’t know, unless you’re drunk, in which case all bets are off.

That said, most jobs in Denmark are found via networks. Somebody mentions on their LinkedIn profile that they’re looking for a new team member and the cv’s from friends of friends and old classmates start flowing in. And since “fitting in” is such an important part of the Danish work culture, someone from the network is more likely to seem like a known quantity when it comes to being a “good fit.”

“Flexicurity” means you can be laid off at any time
So what does this mean to you as a foreigner? It means you’re going to have to figure out how to network in Denmark. And you can’t stop once you already have a job.

The famous “flexicurity” economic system in Denmark means it’s very easy for an employer to get rid of you, and then you’ll be back in the job market again.

I play a little game sometime when I look at Danish people. I imagine them as Vikings. It’s easy now that big beards are in fashion on young men. Sometimes on the metro I’ll look up at the hipster guy playing with his iPhone next to me and imagine him wearing a big fur cloak. Maybe a rope belt, with a sword dangling from it. I imagine him stepping off the boat in Newfoundland in the year 1000, freaking out the local American Indians.

If you’ve seen it, you know the Little Mermaid is only about four feet tall – that’s 1.25 meters.  You probably own pillows that are bigger than the Little Mermaid.  At any rate, all the Copenhagen tourist boat trips go right by it, so your tourists can get  the photos they need for their Instagram or Facebook feeds.  If they want, they can climb out of the boat and onto the slippery rock where the mermaid sits for a photo. 

There are plenty of other things to do in Denmark.  In this podcast, I outline ways to eat Danish pastry, trips to historial centers, picnics in the park, the best museums and what to do after dark.

I was in London this week, and did a little fall wardrobe shopping.   I got tired after walking for awhile, and it was lunchtime, so I sat down in a pub.  I had a beer and a fish and chips and a British guy next to me was also having a beer and fish and chips and so we just chatted through lunch.  We talked about politics, the weather, the job market.  After lunch, we waved goodbye and I went back to shopping.  It was a fun lunch, but I never found out his name.

The reason I mention this is that it never could have happened in Denmark.  Danes don’t talk to strangers.  They talk to their friends.  The idea of a casual lunch with someone you will never see again makes no sense to them.

Foreigners often say it’s hard to make friends in Denmark.  This is because Danes take friendship very seriously.  A friendship is a commitment, often a lifetime commitment.  You will often meet adult Danes who have friends they met in kindergarten.  As a matter of fact, this is why I chose to put my daughter in a Danish school, instead of an international one – I wanted her to have those deep friendships.  In some international schools, your friends are moving in and out all the time as Mom and Dad get transferred around the world.

But for you, as a foreigner, making new freinds can be tough. Danes don’t really have the idea of ‘an acquaintance’  - they have the word, en bekendte, but it isn’t used very often.  If you were in some other countries, an acquaintance might invite you, maybe your partner, over for dinner and then, three months later, you’d invite the acquaintance and her partner and maybe it would continue and maybe it wouldn’t.

That light, no-obligation friendship – Danes don’t do that. In Denmark, friendship is an obligation, and a trust. Friends don’t let each other down.  So, when a Dane meets you, he may think ahhhh he’s a great guy, but I really don’t have room for another friend. I have no time to see the friends I have.  Meaning, the people he’s known since he was three years old.

It’s a funny kind of summer this year in Copenhagen, quieter than usual, and more like a family event than a cosmopolitan city.

Coronavirus came early to Denmark, the borders were shut down early, but they’re mostly open now to other Europeans.

But the change came too late for many people to make summer vacation plans, so many of the usual tourist attractions are slightly forlorn. 

There are a few Europeans around the Little Mermaid and the Royal Palaces, but not many. And there are no huge cruise ships full of Americans docking at Langelinie, or the busloads of Chinese tourists stopping to take pictures with the statue of Hans Christian Andersen.

Copenhagen has become less of an international city than it was a year ago.

Meanwhile, many Danes are spending their own summer vacations in Denmark, which has one major drawback - the Danish summer weather.

Finding a job anywhere is a headache, and Denmark is no different.  And let's be frank, if the employer has a choice between a foreigner and a Dane, they're probably going to hire the Danish person.  The Danish person knows the language, the Danish person knows the culture, the Danish person knows what type of cheese to bring for the Friday morning shared breakfast.  Nevertheless, it is possible for a foreigner to find work in Denmark. Here are my tips for a successful job search in Denmark. 

Denmark has a thriving second-hand economy, in part because people generally don't look down on second-hand goods here.

The Danes are practical people – why should something be thrown out when it can be used again? And their passion for sustainability means it’s cool to reuse something that already exists instead of manufacturing something new.

There is a network of “genbrug” (recycling) stations all over all over the country, where people can leave stuff they don’t want and other people can take it for free.

And there's a thriving market for second-hand furniture in the classic Danish design style. 

It’s springtime, and the cherry trees are about to bloom in Copenhagen Northwest, which is usually the only time people who live outside Northwest bother to go there.

Northwest is a working class neighborhood, so much so that the streets are named after working-class occupations.

While other Copenhagen neighborhoods have streets named after kings and queens and generals, Northwest has brick-maker street, and book-binder street, and rope-maker street, and a barrel-maker street.  

But there are other things to see in Northwest besides the cherry trees, which have become a bit of a crowd scene since they were reported on by a national news network.

A story I’ve heard over and over again when I talk to internationals working in Denmark is this: They thought they were going to get fired.

They’d been working for a year or so at professional-level job in Denmark, often one they’d been recruited for, but they’d never heard any positive comments from their manager.

They started to worry. They were doing their best, but maybe it just wasn’t good enough.

Were they going to lose the job? Were they going to have to go back home, humiliated, and explain the whole thing to their friends and family?

Expecting bad news

This was what was on their mind when they went into their annual employee review. They were expecting some pretty bad news.

Instead, they got a promotion. And a raise. Their manager thought they were doing great. But the Danish approach to employee feedback is generally – “No news is good news”.

You have a job, you’re doing that job, we’ll let you know if there are any problems.

Positive feedback is uncommon in Denmark, because Danes themselves are often uncomfortable receiving compliments.

The façade of equality

Compliments run smack-dab into the Jante Law, which says specifically that “Don’t think that you’re better than us.”

When you give someone a compliment, you lift them above you, if only for a moment, and that disturbs the equality, or at least the façade of equality, which is so important in Denmark.

So compliments are not a natural thing in Denmark, either on the job or in your personal life.

Read more at www.howtoliveindenmark.com

If you’re coming from abroad to work in Denmark, you may be bringing along your spouse. That can be great – it’s nice to have someone to shiver through the Danish summer with.

But unhappy spouses are one of the main reasons that people who come to work in Denmark end up leaving.

Denmark is not an easy place to make friends, given that Danish culture tends toward “respecting your privacy” by not striking up conversations with strangers.

It can also be tough for spouses to get jobs in Denmark, particularly well-educated spouses seeking jobs at their level of expertise.

Denmark is a rich country, but does it have rich people? It does, but Denmark’s wealthy tend to keep a low profile, due to the informal Jante Law in Denmark that prohibits too much showing off. 

That said, spring and summer is great time to see Danish rich people in their natural habitat. That’s when they put the roof down on their expensive German cars and drive through the medieval old towns, drink rosé chilled in silver buckets at fancy outdoor cafés, or sail through the harbor on their personal boats of various sizes. In the summer, Denmark’s rich come out to play. 

There are two types of wealth in Denmark, old wealth and new wealth. Old wealth is the leftovers of Denmark’s nobility, Dukes and Counts and Barons, even though noble privileges were officially abolished in 1849. Many of these families still own their old castles and country houses, some of which have been turned into hotels or fancy restaurants. You can stay there for a weekend with your sweetheart, very romantic.

And then there’s new wealth. Denmark’s richest man owns Bestseller, a fast fashion chain that owns names like Vero Moda and Jack & Jones. The heirs to LEGO, which is less than 100 years old, are also quite well off, and so are the heirs to the Ecco shoe fortune.

Finance types and entrepreneurs also figure on the list of richest people in Denmark. Every year, one of the local newspapers publishes a list of Denmark’s top taxpayers – the people and companies who have paid the most taxes. In 2020, the top individual was a successful hedge fund guy who somehow ended up paying more taxes than Danske Bank, Denmark's largest bank.  In 2021, the list featured a man who got rich selling COVID quick tests. 

While there are small wealthy neighborhoods in Odense and Aarhus, most of Denmark’s rich live in the Whisky Belt, which is the area along the coast north of Copenhagen. It’s called the whisky belt because back in the day, whisky was the most expensive alcoholic drink. Poor people drank beer and schnapps.

This is the 122th episode of the "How to Live in Denmark podcast", and originally ran in 2023.

Get all of Kay Xander Mellish's books about Denmark at http://books.howtoliveindenmark.com. Book Kay for a talk to your group or organization at http://events.howtoliveindenmark.com.

Many countries have a fictional character who represents them. Uncle Sam for the USA, Marianne in France, Mother India. Others have a legendary figure, who was real at one point but is now shrouded in myth, like King Arthur in England.

For Denmark, Holger Danske is both. He was probably real, although he didn’t live in Denmark.

He was a Danish knight living in France in 8^th century, serving Charlemagne and he appears in several of the epic poems of the time as Ogier the Dane. When those poems were translated into Old Norsk, he became Oddgeir danski, which gradually morphed into Holger Danske.

He has been a hero for centuries. And he is a sleeping hero.

The legend is that when Denmark is in trouble, Holger Danske will rise from his slumber and come to its defense. This is why during World War II, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, one of the largest resistance groups called itself Holger Danske.

If you’re not Danish, you may have experienced Holger Danske in the form of consumer products.

There is a Holger Danske moving company with trucks all over Denmark, a Holger Danske beer, Holger Danske Aquavit liquor, Holger Danske tobacco. There’s a Holger Danske bar. Holger Danske has appeared on the Danish national football shirt. 

And, very famously, there’s a statue of Holger Danske in the basement of Kronborg Castle, often known as Hamlet’s Castle, in Helsingør, Denmark – which Shakespeare referred to as Elsinore.

I go by the castle in my new audio tour of Helsingør for VoiceMap. Check it out at voicemap.me/hamlet. 

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Ordinarily don’t 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.  (pause).  Not my particular seller, but another reader had written a letter to the editor of the newspaper saying he’d try to buy a paper the previous week, but 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 crowns on a newspaper to help a man….who had a phone worth at least 2000 crowns.

The newspaper had a good response.  They said an iPhone was a 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.  

The CPR number is a national menace.

That said, I have a great fear that more cybercrime and identity theft is on the way to Denmark.  As those of you who live here know, the country’s IT systems are all based around something called the CPR – the central person register. Everyone has a CPR number, and you use it for everything – for banking, for the doctor, for school, for taking books out of the library.  My daughter used hers last week to sign up for a Bhangra Dance course during summer vacation. 

So, lots of people have your CPR, and if they don’t, it’s pretty easy to guess. Your CPR number is your birthday, plus the century your card was issued in, plus 2 random numbers, plus your gender.  Did you know that – men have uneven CPR numbers, and women have even numbers?  I did not, until I looked it up. 

Anyway, the CPR was probably high tech in 1968 when it was first introduced.  But now I think it’s a national menace.  Anyone who has your CPR can impersonate you.  So far it’s been mostly minimal damage. People give your CPR number when they get caught riding the S-train without a ticket.  Or people take out SMS loans using your CPR number.  But the potential for trouble is certainly large if the number that controls basically your entire life in Denmark is somehow hacked.  

There’s a new mosque opening down the street from me this spring, a big one.  It will be the first mosque with minarets in Denmark, although the minarets are legally prohibited from calling to prayer. 

The people behind the mosque are doing everything they can to blend in with the local neighborhood – they even went to observe at a local church service a couple of Sundays ago.  They were probably the only ones there.

There are a lot of Muslims in Denmark, about 250,000 out of a population of 5-and-a-half million, most of who have arrived here in the past 40 years, or their descendants. 

And contrary to what the Danish right-wing parties might say, they’ve brought a a lot of good things to Denmark, and not just Shwarma shops.

 A lot of the mail I get at howtoliveindenmark.com get is from men, wanting to know how they can meet women in Denmark.

I can understand this.  Danish women are very beautiful.  And I can tell you now, most of them will not immediately exclude you because you have a different skin color.  I know of several babies of mixed heritage here in Denmark.

 That said, dating in Denmark is hard, even for the Danes, and it will probably be hard for you too.   

That’s because the process that works in much of the rest of the Western world doesn’t work in Denmark.  In most parts of the world, a man will see a woman he likes, and he’ll approach her.  He’ll try to start a conversation.  Maybe he’ll ask if he can buy her a coffee, or some other type of drink.  If they’re in a nightclub, he might ask her if she’d like to dance, or maybe go outside and get some fresh air.

These tactics will get you nowhere in Denmark.  

One of Denmark’s cheapest and most colorful vacations is a few hours riding back and forth on Copenhagen’s big yellow Harbor Bus, or “Havnebussen”, a commuter ferry designed to transport ordinary citizens between downtown and the urban islands of Christianshavn and Amager.

For visitors to Copenhagen - or residents who need an inexpensive adventure -  the harbor bus can take you from tourist trap to high culture to party culture, from shabby little wood shacks to neighborhoods of chic glass apartment houses with their own private beach.

All for as little as 14 kroner, 2 dollars, or 2 euro.

Enjoy this audio tour of 7 of the "Harbor Bus" stops - if you like, you can take it along and listen as you ride the waves.

On-the-job benefits in Denmark come in three categories: the kind every Danish worker gets, the kind everyone at your company gets, and the kind everyone at a certain level in your company gets.

 When you talk with a future employer, you can negotiate your salary, but there’s not all that much room for negotiation on benefits.

In most cases, as American kindergarteners say, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” Fortunately, the benefits tend to be generous.

This is a chapter from my upcoming book, "How to Work in Denmark."

If you are an international who lives in Denmark, or someone who wants to, you have to learn the Danish way of dealing with conflict. This might be with a colleague, or your upstairs neighbors, or the authorities at the commune.

In these cases, it’s very important not to lose your temper or raise your voice. And this can be tricky if the culture you come from, your culture of origin, is a passionate culture.

Denmark is not a passionate culture. If you hear someone talking about their passion here, it's almost always some sort of hobby, or the summer home they have been fixing up for years. Their passion is almost never a person or a cause. And they generally use the English or French word passion, not lidenskab, which is the rather clumsy Danish translation.

So, the keywords to handling conflict here are not strength and passion, they are humor and equality.

You have to take the approach that you and the person you disagree with are equals. Your counterparty isn’t someone you can push around, but they’re also not someone better than you that you have to bow down to.

One of Danes’ favorite expressions is øjenhøjde, or eye level. They love that concept. When Prince Christian, the future king of Denmark, recently turned 18, several of his birthday greetings from the public said, Remember to always stay at eye level with your people.

The person you disagree with is your human equal, even if they’re a teacher or a manager or someone who works for the government.

The other best strategy getting a conflict resolved in Denmark is to find the humor in it. If you can make the other person laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, you’re halfway there.

Keep it as light as you possibly can, assume good faith, and assume that the other person really would like to solve the problem, and assume that it is solvable, which isn’t always true, but it’s a good first assumption.

Humorously acknowledge your contribution to the problem, whatever it might have been, and own your mistakes. Danes really like people that admit they’ve made a mistake and have a sense of humor about it.

Be as practical as possible. Danes are practical to a fault. Focus on something that can really get accomplished, not big noble concepts of truth and justice.

I have seen internationals in Denmark make disagreements much worse than they have to be by raising their voices, telling the other person they are racist or sexist, threatening to call in somebody’s boss or threatening to expose them online, which is illegal, by the way.

Denmark has very strict privacy laws – if you catch someone stealing your bike and you post a photo of them online, you’re the one who will hear from the police first.

Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com

I like to drive. I like to be on the open road, like in the American Southwest - Arizona, Nevada, Utah. Put your pedal to the metal, no one in front of you, no one in the rear view mirror. Just you and the road.

You will not get that experience much in Denmark, a small country with a lot of people packed into a small area. There’s not a lot of open land here, not much living off the grid. Which doesn’t mean drivers don’t long for it. You’ll see those open roads in Arizona and Nevada in a lot of Danish TV advertisements.

It’s frequently said about Denmark that it’s not a car country. You hear a lot of well-meaning internationals say that in Denmark you don’t need a car that you can bicycle everywhere you want to go. 

That is true in the big cities - I don’t own a car myself. But most of my Copenhagen neighbors do. And cars are pretty much a necessity in the countryside. There are now 2.5 million cars in use in Denmark, roughly one for every other resident over age 18. 

Denmark is a small country, and Danish people tend to think small things are good. Small cars. Small homes. Small ambitions when it comes to international team sports. But one thing in Denmark is never small – a baby carriage.

Danes seem to believe that a carriage (or pram) for a new baby should be roughly the size of a hotel room on wheels.

Inside, baby will be wrapped up warm with a fat feather blanket – even in the summer. There will also be room for pillows, books, toys, snacks, diapers and extra clothes in the giant baby carriage.

Danish babies are like rolling royalty. Everything they need is at their tiny fingertips.

One of the most important words in the Danish language is "ligestilling"  – equality. The belief that all (Danish) people are basically equal permeates every relationship and every interaction.

Fancy job titles do not fit into that passion for equality. They suggest you think you’re better than someone else. Which you might actually be, if you’ve worked your way to the top of your field, but that admission is slightly embarrassing.

If you do have an impressive job title, it's considered bad taste to show it off.

Office doors in Denmark, for example, usually have just the name of the person inside, not their title. When you introduce yourself, whether to one person or an audience of 500, you give just your name, preferably just your first name.

And it's considered laughable to strut about in a way that shows everyone you're the boss.

In fact, when you enter a room of Danish businesspeople, it is almost impossible to tell who the boss is. Everyone’s dressed the same, everyone acts pretty much the same, and nobody shows any particular deference to the boss.

This can be a problem when you’re a job hunter or salesperson and have to figure out who in the room has the power to make a decision.

Drinking, and drinking heavily, is common in Denmark at holiday time. Whether it's the traditional "gløgg" - hot spiced wine with nuts, orange peel and a little brandy - or the specially-made (and specially-strong) Christmas beers, you'll be offered a great deal of alcohol at almost every seasonal social event.

But what if you're a nondrinker, or a light drinker? In this episode we'll tell you how to enjoy Christmas in Denmark while avoiding alcohol. 

If you’re one of the bottom 80% of Danish earners, you’ll probably spend most of your dark January evenings and weekends at home, hoping your bank account can recover from Christmas excesses. Restaurants have a lot of empty tables this time of year. Shops mostly process the return of unwanted Christmas presents.

Now, this can and often is packaged as hygge. Candles, TV, sweaters, warm slippers, hot tea. But it’s often just being broke and not being able to go anywhere.

Yet if you’re part of the top 20% of earners in Denmark, however, maybe even the top 10%, you go skiing. Not in Denmark, which doesn’t have any mountains for downhill skiing, or enough snow for cross-country skiing.

You go to Sweden for cheap skiing, Norway for slightly more expensive skiing, or to France or Switzerland for luxury skiing where you can show off your Rolex Explorer wristwatch on the slopes.

Two different types of Januaries

The two different types of Januaries illustrate how the gap between the rich and poor in Denmark has widened in recent decades. 

Denmark is still, culturally, an egalitarian culture, and it’s still considered bad taste to show off your Rolex watch here in Denmark, but there’s no debating that as the country has become prosperous over the past 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened.

Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com. 

When you think you’re talking to the authorities in Denmark, you’re often not talking to the authorities. If it comes to bus service, train service, unemployment compensation, homeless shelters, construction, even fire protection and ambulance services – you will be talking to a private company hired by the authorities.

At any rate, some things are still run directly by the government, like the immigration service and local affairs.  So there are some times when you do need to speak to civil servants in Denmark. There is a way to do this.

Put at least a half an hour aside, since you may have to wait in a telephone queue.  When it’s your turn, the first thing you do is identify yourself by name.  ‘Hi, this is Kay Xander Mellish.”  And then state your question. “Somebody has drawn graffiti of a giant penis on the city-owned wall right outside my living room window.  Could you send someone to remove it?”  That’s an actual case, by the way.

When you speak to the Danish civil servant, tone is really important.  Danes respond very badly to anger or conflict. You want to take the angle that we’re equals all we want to do is get this problem solved together. You want to go in there with a positive, we can do it together! spirit.

Most state workers in Denmark are pretty competent.  Working for the state is paid well, and they never ask for bribes.  Like most Danes, they want to do their job well, and they feel that they do.  Danish civil servants take pride in their work. 

That said, it still took six months to get that giant penis graffiti removed.

Denmark, as Danes like to tell you, is a little country. But it used to be a much bigger country, a bit of an empire. Norway was once part of Denmark. Iceland was once part of Denmark. The southern half of Sweden and a bit of northern Germany used to be part of Denmark. What is now called the US Virgin Islands used to be part of Denmark.

And Denmark had colonies in Africa and India, which is why when you’ll go into many Danish supermarkets – even online supermarkets – you’ll see a section called Kolonial, or Colonial.

It features long-life products, like spices and nuts, that used to come from trading posts in the faraway Danish colonies.

Over time, through war losses and independence movements, the Danish Empire shrank…and today we’re going to talk about how it might shrink further.

The US has made clear that it wants Greenland to be part of its own territory. Are they serious about this? And what do the Danes think?

People visiting Denmark can’t help but notice that the Danish flag is everywhere.

Christmas trees here are decorated with little Danish flags. Cucumbers in the supermarket have Danish flags on them to show they’re grown in Denmark. Whenever a member of the Danish royal family has a birthday, two little Danish flags are stuck on the front of every Copenhagen bus.

The Danish flag is closely associated with Danish birthdays. If you have a birthday when you’re working in a Danish office, one of your colleagues is likely to put a Danish flag on your desk. It means – happy birthday!  You may see a birthday cake with tiny Danish flags stuck into it, or the Danish flag recreated in red frosting.

The Danish flag is not really a statement of nationalism. It’s a statement of joy. 

So it was a bit of a shock a couple of weeks ago when the FDF, a kind of a Danish boy scouts or girl scouts organization, said they wanted to remove the Danish flag from their logo. 

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 still Danes and Norwegians can understand what the other is saying.  

Danes and Norwegians like each other.  They care about each other.  They even sometimes cheer for each other’s football teams.

But like any family, there’s envy involved. Envy.

For example, there’s envy of each other’s geographical pleasures.  Norway has beautiful mountains, great for skiing.  Denmark has windswept beaches, which the Norwegians seem to love. Lots of summer holidays in Denmark.  

The real envy, of course, is about money. Norway has money, because of North Sea oil. 

There is a feeling among some Danes that some of that oil should have been Danish oil. During a meeting to divide up the waters between the two countries in 1963, the Danish negotiator, Per Haakerup was photographed with a glass of whisky in his hand.

The rumor is he was drunk during the meeting, and gave up the Ekofisk oilfield to Norway, which has earned billions of dollars from it. 

January, February, and March are some of the dreariest months in Denmark – it’s dark, with no Christmas lights to pep it up – and many people are dealing with a heavy load of year-end debt from traveling, parties, dining out, and gifts.

Along with religion, personal finance is a topic that is rarely discussed in Denmark. But the country has one of the highest rates of household debt in the world. 

And once you get into debt in Denmark, it can be very difficult to get out.

On your first day at work in Denmark, you may find a pretty bouquet of flowers on your desk to welcome you.

(This terrified a Chinese acquaintance of mine, who was accustomed to receiving flowers on her *last* day at work. She thought she’d been fired before she ever sat down.)

In Denmark, the bouquet is just a way to say “welcome” and to add some sunshine to an arduous day that is sure to include many handshakes and computer passwords.

Someone will probably be appointed as your “mentor” on the first day of the job, and that person will take you around to meet the people you’ll be working with, as well as showing you practical parts of the office like the printer room and the toilets.

Shake hands with everyone you meet and try to remember their first names – although you’ll probably get a lot of duplicates. (Depending on the size of the company, you can expect to meet at least two or three people named Mette, Søren, Pia, Magnus, or Lars.)

Last names aren’t important, at least until you have to find these people in an e-mail list. “Mr.” and “Ms.”, or their Danish equivalents “Herr” and “Fru”, are almost never used in Denmark.

Don’t act overly impressed when you meet the top bosses: this will embarrass them. The people you really need to be deferential to are the administrative staff.

If you come from a country with a large population and a great deal of unemployment, you may be accustomed to a large administrative staff that helps you with filling out forms, tracking expenses, setting up meetings, and other small tasks.

Such helpful people are rare in Denmark, where most professionals are expected to do these things themselves using online tools.

Many Danes meet their future spouses at work. Yet there are also strict laws in Denmark against sexual harassment.

Where do you draw a line between harassment and two adults developing tender feelings for each other?

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Given the Danes’ fondness for alcohol, many inter-office romances start at the annual Christmas party. Ms. X and Mr. Y drink a bottle of wine or two, wiggle suggestively together on the dance floor, and depart to one or the other’s home in a taxi to complete the evening. The next morning, they discuss whether they are interested in a future romantic relationship.

If that doesn’t sound like your style, or if Christmas is too far away, there are other ways to handle the matter.

Among the many cultural questions I ask audiences during my How to Live in Denmark Game Show is “Which animal represents Denmark best?”?

There never seems to be an obvious or generally agreed-upon answer. Sure, the bear represents Russia, the elephant Thailand, and the bald eagle the United States. But what about Denmark?

Denmark does have a national animal – the mute swan (Cygnus olor) – but an image of a swan doesn’t provoke the kind of immediate association with Denmark that, say, a koala bear does with Australia.

That said, mute swans are easy to find in Denmark. You can see them sailing down the quiet streams of the country’s historical parks, such as the vold in Fredericia or Utterslev Mose in suburban Copenhagen.

But these strong, individualist, and often angry animals are a strange fit for a country that prides itself on co-operation and peacefulness. They’re also not really mute – in fact, they have a noisy hiss that can signal an attack if they feel their nest is threatened.

Given that these muscular birds are about a meter tall and their wingspan can be twice that, you may feel threatened too.

When I first began working in Denmark, people used to start saying around April or May, “So – are you taking three or four?”

What they meant was, are you taking three or four weeks off for your summer vacation?

 Now, in the United States, where I come from, even taking two weeks off is extravagant. You always have the feeling that if you’re gone too long, there may not be a job waiting for you when you get back.

In Denmark, a long summer vacation is legally required. If you have a full-time job, you get six weeks annual vacation, and you are legally required to take three of those six weeks sometime between May 1 and September 30.

Even if you’re unemployed, you get paid time off from looking for a job so you can enjoy time off in the summer. And there’s been a lot of controversy this year about whether the newly arrived refugees in Denmark should also get paid vacation from their required Danish language lessons.

Many Danes consider vacation to be a human right. Any discussion of poverty in Denmark is likely to include an interview with a person on the minimum kontanthjælp sincerely complaining about his inability to afford a vacation abroad. If you get sick during your vacation, you can even request more time off to compensate.

That’s the social welfare state – I hope you all enjoy paying taxes to support it.

I got an email a couple of weeks ago at howtoliveindenmark.com 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.”

Lady – I won’t say your name on the air – but you’re full of baloney.  Of course I like Denmark.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.  I do have a pretty nice country to go back to.  

I like living in Denmark, for a lot of different reasons.

One of them is that people here have a lot of time to spend with their children.  There’s a cliché in the U.S. business world of the CEO who quits because ‘I want to spend more time with my family’.  That always means he’s been fired.  But in Denmark, people really do want to spend a lot of time with the people they care about.  I think that’s one reason why a lot of people here are not very ambitious – because getting ahead means working a lot of hours, and they want their free time.

The pace of life in Denmark is much slower than it is in the US, or the UK.  There’s much less competitiveness, which can be a good and a bad thing. There’s never a feeling of fighting to get through the day.  Before I lived in Copenhagen, I lived in Manhattan, and there, everybody wanted your job, everybody wanted your apartment, everybody wanted your boyfriend, everybody wanted your seat at the restaurant – everybody wanted everything you had, all the time.  Denmark is much more relaxing.  And people have much less stuff here.  The taxes are so high that you can’t buy a lot of stuff. People don’t go shopping just for fun. So people have fewer things, but better things.  That means less clutter, and less stuff to clean, which is always a positive in my book.

Other things I like about Denmark. I like the biking culture, and the mass transport culture.  I do have a drivers’ license, and I enjoy driving a car, but I also like the interaction with people you get on a bike or a train or a bus.

And the public transport system generally works well – not always, but generally. Things work well in Denmark, not as aggressively as they do in Germany, where I used to live, but generally well.   I love Southern Europe, but I don’t think I could live there. The disorganization would drive me crazy.

In general, I find Copenhagen quiet, but sophisticated. I’m happy living here.  I have no plans to live anyplace else.

In Denmark, romance is like a two-speed bike. Speed one is casual sexual affairs with someone you may never see again: speed two is a serious relationship where you’ll be expected to go to all your partner’s dull family events. There’s not much of a middle. And what there definitely is not is dating.

While I’m not an authority on the Danish visa or immigration systems, I’m often asked for practical tips about moving to Denmark. So here are a few things to think about when you’re packing your suitcases or, if you’re doing a corporate move, packing your shipping container.

Number one, make sure you bring money. Denmark is an expensive place to live where you will own less stuff, but better stuff.

That said, there’s no need to bring much furniture, even mores if your furniture is nothing special.

You can often buy Danish design furniture cheap at local second-hand stores and flea markets, and for everything else, there's always IKEA - in Denmark, or across the water in IKEA's homeland of Sweden. 

I love old books. I love the kind of old books you get at antique bookstores or on the Internet Archive. And I have a good collection of old books about Denmark.

I like old travel guides, most of which are still pretty useful because Denmark doesn’t tear a lot of things down the way they do, in say, Los Angeles or Hong Kong. In Denmark you’ll pretty much fine most castles and monuments right where somebody left them hundreds of years ago. 

If you want to see a famous church or square or the Jelling Stone, your Baedecker guidebook from 1895 will work just fine for you in most cases. 

But I can also recommend two great old books on Denmark, which you can probably find at your local antique book shop, or on DBA, the Danish auction site owned by eBay. 

When you're putting together a cv for Denmark, titles and grades and long descriptions of examinations (unless they’re required for the job, as they are for accountants, architects and engineers) aren’t a golden ticket to employment, even if you’ve attended an excellent school.  

Your Danish cv should focus on projects you've worked on, and how your contributions to those projects relate to the job at hand.

One of my favorite types of speaking engagement is introducing Denmark to some of the smart, motivated young people arriving from around the world to study at Danish universities.

Since the publication of my first book, How to Live in Denmark, I’ve been speaking regularly to audiences of new arrivals, and I probably learn as much from them as they learn from me.

Among the things I’ve learned is that the aspects of Danish culture that the Danes are most proud of can be troublesome for newcomers.

Hello, and welcome to the How to Live in Denmark podcast.  I'm Kay Xander Mellish.

 Whenever I hear that Denmark is the happiest country in the world,  I think of Donald Duck.

Donald Duck is extremely popular in Denmark, as he is in all Nordic countries. He is much more popular than Mickey Mouse.  He even has his own Danish name - Anders And.  Which means, basically. Anders the Duck.

I don't know how much you know about Disney characters, but Donald Duck - or Anders Duck - is kind of a second-class citizen. While Mickey Mouse is the perfect gentleman, outgoing and take charge, the face of Disney, Donald is lazy. He likes to come up with clever ways to avoid work, or avoid any exercise whatsoever. He likes to play fun little tricks on people. He's often short-tempered, and jealous of Mickey.

Donald Duck is an underdog, and Danes identify with the underdog.  They identify with the idea of low expectations, and then being pleasantly surprised when things turn out well.

This is the secret to Danish happiness.  While Americans might identify with bright, happy Mickey, there's a lot of room for disappointment if your bright, happy plans don't work out the way you hoped they would.

Danes are OK with dashed expectations, of disappointment.  

When I first arrived in Denmark, you could shut down any dispute in Denmark by appealing to equality and the common good. Solidarity - “solidaritet” -  and “fælleskab”, or community, or even “samfundssind”, societal spirit, were magic words.

They still are with the older generation that built Denmark’s welfare state. If you want to convince this generation of anything, just make a reference to solidarity and community and societal spirit. Works like a charm.

I’m often asked if the younger generation is as dedicated to these principles as their elders, and if they still follow the "Jante Law".

Jante Law is not really a law – it’s like a legend, in which people living in Denmark are not supposed to act like they’re better than anyone else, or smarter than anyone else, or know more than anyone else. 

But young people aren’t too keen to put up with that, in particular in an environment where they are competing internationally. For many Danish young people, the idea that all Danes are equal and we must all move together, at the same pace, seems outdated.

And one contemporary example is the rise of the electric bike. 

What has now been accepted in Denmark’s bike lanes is a concept that is used to be very "uDansk", or un-Danish….that some people simply go faster than others. 

This is the 125th episode of the "How to Live in Denmark podcast", and originally ran in 2023.

Get all of Kay Xander Mellish's books about Denmark at http://books.howtoliveindenmark.com. Book Kay for a talk to your group or organization at http://events.howtoliveindenmark.com.

August in Denmark brings the first signs of fall: a crisp chill in the air, the changing color of the leaves, the annual posters warning drivers to be aware of small children riding their bikes to school for the first time.

And foreign university students in the local 7-11, asking that their buns be warmed up.

I saw a newly-arrived young American student in my local 7-11 this morning, asking that her newly-purchased bun be warmed. The 7-11 clerk told her sorry, but there were no bun-warming services available at that branch.

She wasn’t too pleased, but it’s always a mistake to expect U.S., U.K., or Asian-level concepts of customer service in Denmark: in this egalitarian country, nobody serves anybody, and if they do they are frequently grumpy about it. You and the store clerk are equals, and nobody’s going to warm anybody’s buns unless it was agreed to in the original deal.

While I didn’t dare approach the angry American bun-woman, I thought it might be useful to her and to others list a few tips for arriving in Denmark at any time of year. You know, random things I wish people would have told me before I arrived.

It might seem like a counterintuitive time to talk about beaches, in the middle of a long, very cold winter.

But in these times of COVID, beaches are one of the few places in Denmark you are currently allowed to meet up with family and friends.

Beaches, parks, frozen-over lakes: these are the big social meeting points at time when cafés, restaurants, bars, shops, gyms, schools, theaters, museums, places of worship, and hairdressers, barbers, and nail salons are all closed. 

But getting a small group together outdoors is still allowed, and the beach can still be a nice place to be – even if you have to put up with sand’s that frozen solid, slippery rocks, and bitter, bitter wind off the icy cold water.

It's been a beautiful autumn here in Denmark.  Warm, with golden sun, blue skies, red and yellow and orange leaves on the trees.  Just gorgeous.  And unusually warm for Denmark. It's always exciting when, instead of wearing your winter coat every day from October to April, you can wear it every day from November to April.

 But this unusually pleasant weather can’t help but spark conversation about global warming.  So far the biggest impact climate change has had in Denmark are some severe rainstorms, when end up flooding a lot of basements and overwhelming a lot of sewer systems.  It’s intriguing to think that plumbers may become the great heroes of the twenty-first century.

Danes care about climate change, and they’ve made a business specialty of green technology, or what they like to call clean technology.  Cleantech.  It sells windmills to create windpower, and burns most of its household garbage in an environmentally friendly way, to create home heating.

Danes care about the environment because they care about nature.  Less than a hundred years ago, Denmark was a mostly agricultural country, and Danes still feel close to the land.  Children in Denmark are constantly being taken out into whatever forests or meadows are nearby – in the cities, they pack them onto buses and trains to go get the forest experience.  There’s even something called forest kindergarten for children age 3 to 6.  If you go to a forest kindergarten, you’re out in the woods every day, hot or cold, rain or shine.

So it's ironic, given this love for the Earth and the environment, that the Danes were recently named the world’s fourth biggest polluters, per capita, by the World Wildlife Fund.  Only three Middle Eastern countries. – Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, were worse.  

You wouldn't know it, but Denmark and China have much more in common than both having red flags and a love for green technology.  Denmark and China have a surprisingly deep relationship. It helps that the Chinese have a deep love for Hans Christian Andersen.

Foreigners in general are often trying to look for a job in a way that works well in their home country, not Denmark.

Basically, this works as about as well as trying to tell your new girlfriend the same jokes that made your old girlfriend laugh. If the setting is Denmark, the approach has to be Danish.

Danish jobs are all about independence and teamwork. It’s not like they need a red Lego brick and you have to convince them you’re a red Lego brick to get the job. The employer has a problem that needs solving and you have to convince them that you have the brains and the experience to solve it, and the drive to make it happen.

Denmark is a pretty good place to raise children. Working hours are shorter, and it’s perfectly OK to leave work at 3 or 4 o’clock to pick up your kids.  There’s a good system for early childhood health. A nurse visits to your home when your child is a baby, and then there are regular checkups with doctor. If your child has the sniffles, you can take off work and stay home with her – the first two days are paid. 

And, of course, there’s the day care system.  It’s not free, but it’s reasonably priced, and it’s nice to be able to drop off your kid in a safe place with trained people while you go to work.  

In some countries, there’s a lot of controversy about whether very young children should be in day care or at home with their parents.  Not in Denmark.  97% of kids go to day care, even the children of the Royal Family.  Even the future king, currently known as the eight-year-old Prince Christian, went to day care. 

Everyone goes to day care partly because the Danish tax structure means both parents have to go to work. 

But Danish day care is also social engineering.  It’s about creating that equality and community spirit that everyone prizes in Denmark.  Day care is the first step in making your child more Danish than wherever you come from.

No elite education, no competition

The Jante Law is part of all Danish education.  There’s no elite education here, no advanced, or gifted and talented programs.  If you child is better than the others at a certain subject, his job is to help the students who are not as good. 

If you come from a very competitive society – the US, the UK, China, India – that can be a bit of a shock.  There’s no competition in Danish education.  The kids work in groups. There are no competitive schools you have to fight to get into.  There’s no standardized testing until the kids are 15 or 16. And there are relatively few tests within the daily school lessons. 

In Danish school, your child’s social life is considered what’s most important.  Does she have friends?  Can she get along with the other children in the class?  Does he like to go to school?  Does he fit in? 

The idea is that if a child is socially comfortable in school, if he or she wants to go to school, then academic success will follow. 

It has been said that Danish birthdays are the most important in the world. Adults, children, even the Queen of Denmark make a big deal about birthdays. And there is specific set of birthday rules and traditions for every age and role you play in life. Let’s face it, Danish birthday traditions are a minefield for foreigners. Get it wrong and you could make some serious birthday faux pas.

For example, if the sun is shining on your birthday, you may find Danish people thanking you. ‘Thanks for the sunshine’ they’ll say. This is because in Danish tradition, the weather on your birthday reflects your behavior over the past year. If you’ve been good, the weather is good. If you’ve been bad….well, then. You get depressing, grey, Danish rain.

If you’ve been asked for a job interview at a Danish company, congratulations. Danish companies don’t like to waste time, so they wouldn’t be setting aside time to meet you if they didn’t think there was a solid chance they might hire you.

Job interviewing in Denmark is a difficult balance, because the Jantelov makes all forms of bragging or self-promotion distasteful to the Danes. You’ve got to convince the person interviewing you that you’re skilled and capable without sounding like a used car salesman.

In June of each year, the streets of Denmark are suddenly full of young people wearing stiff white caps with bands of various colors - burgundy, midnight blue, light blue. These teenagers have just graduated from gymnasium, the Danish equivalent of high school, and the white hat is a sign of that accomplishment. 

They wear the white hat everywhere they go for the two or three weeks after final exams, and it awakens a deep sentimentality in the usually practical and private Danes. It has a sort of magic. 

When my daughter received her white cap last year, total strangers stopped her in the street to say “Congratulations on the hat” – tillykke med huen. Bus drivers congratulated her as she boarded, and so did supermarket clerks at the checkout counter. 

Getting the hat is seen as a very happy occasion on the road from childhood to the big wide world. The white cap holds a special place in the Danish national consciousness.

The open-backed truck tour

If you visit in Denmark in June, you’ll see teenagers celebrating their graduation, riding through town on the back of open-backed trucks, wearing their fresh white caps and cheering or blowing whistles. Using there’s some pop music pumping at a very high volume. 

The sides of the truck are covered with white banners, traditionally bedsheets, on which are painted slogans that are more or less obscene.

Everybody on the truck except the driver is several beers in and shouting at passerby on the sidewalk, who shout back. 

This is a special episode, because this is the fifth anniversary of the How to Live in Denmark podcast.The podcast began in the summer of 2013; at the time I’m recording this, it is near the end of Summer 2018. We’ve had more than 80 episodes and around a million streams and downloads. Most importantly, I’ve received a lot of messages from people like you saying that the podcast and the books that have come out of the podcast have been really helpful for you in adjusting to Denmark. I’m so happy to hear that.

I originally came to Denmark on vacation. I was living in Manhattan in the time, right downtown in Greenwich Village, but I’d been living there for about 10 years and was really ready to try something new. I visited all the hip cities in the US – Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Chicago, Austin Texas, but I just didn’t find a place where I really felt I fit in.

At the same time, I had a friend living in Paris. We’d meet up and check out different parts of Europe, and one September we thought, OK, why not Copenhagen. It was a beautiful September, warm and sunny, and I thought, well, here’s a country with good weather.

When you go back to your country of origin, it’s alarming sometimes to realize how Danish you are becoming.

I’ve been on vacation in the USA for a couple of weeks. 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.

The jolt back to reality usually happens at baggage claim, when one of my fellow fliers of the Danish persuasion bumps right into me at the baggage carousel without saying Excuse me, or Pardon, or Entshculdigung, or any of those other nice oops-I’ve-just-run-into-you phrases so common in the rest of the world.  For Danes, the standard response after accidentally running into someone is a sullen grunt – HUMPH- along with a sour look of annoyance that you got in their way.

I’ve been living in Denmark so long I sometimes lose perspective. I forget what it’s like not to live in Denmark. Specifically, I forget that in most countries, adult men and women don’t want to walk around in an elf hat, even if it is Christmastime.

In Denmark, the red and white elf hat is part of any Christmas activity where alcohol is involved, and a few where when alcohol isn’t involved. Children occasionally wear elf hats, which are called nissehue in Danish.

But you’re more likely to see an elf hat on an adult, quite possibly on your boss or your professor or somebody else you’re supposed to respect.

Wearing an elf hat as a grown-up in Denmark is the way to show you’ve got a sense of humor about yourself, that you’re up for a party, that you see the fun in Christmas. Or, that you can see any fun in life at all after four weeks of nonstop grey skies and rain during Danish November.

Danish names are very strongly stratified by age. Ole and Finn and Knud and Kaj and Jørn and Jørgen and to some extent Poul and Per, are over 50. Their wives and sisters and secret lovers are Inger and Karin and Kirsten and Ulla. Or Bente. Another guaranteed old ladies’ name is Bente. Bent is the male version.  Being named Bent is a problem for Danes who travel, because in many English-speaking countries, ‘bent’ is old-fashioned slang for ‘gay.’ In those countries, if you hold out your hand and say, ‘Hi, I’m Bent,’ you may get an unexpected reaction.

If you’re newly arrived in Denmark, making Danish friends is not easy – in fact, surveys show that one of the main reasons internationals end up leaving is the difficulty of building a network.

The irony is that Danes are actually very good at friendship. Their friendships are strong, reliable, and deep-rooted. Friends can count on each other.

But because Danes take friendships so seriously, they like to keep their number of friendships under control. They don’t want to take on more friends than they can keep their deep commitment to.

The statement “I just don’t have room for any more friends” sounds perfectly sensible to Danes, and utterly stunning to foreigners.

When internationals ask me how they can make Danish friends, I have one primary piece of advice.

It is: find a Dane who did not grow up in the part of Denmark where you live now.

It seems as if every country has a city or region that it is the butt of jokes. The rest of the country makes fun of the locals’ unattractive accents and supposedly low-end behavior. In Denmark, that city is Randers.

Randers is a city in Northern Jutland, about a half hour away from Aarhus. It used to be bigger than Aarhus, and bigger than Aalborg too, but it was a manufacturing town, and when manufacturing fell apart in Denmark after the Second World War, so did Randers.

The stereotype of Randers today is...muscle meatheads, possibly criminal... possibly in some sort of motorcycle gang... with a rough, gravelly accent... lots of tattoos and leather.

And that’s just the women. The men are the same but with shorter haircuts.

Listen to hear more about Randers and how Danish urban planners ruined what was once a very nice medieval town into a paradise for very fast cars and Mokaï, a canned alcoholic fruit cider sometimes called "Randers champagne."

Find out how you can spend more than DK1000 on a pair of gloves in Randers, and how you can visit a full replica of Elvis Presley's mansion Graceland nearby. 

This is the 120th episode of the "How to Live in Denmark podcast", and originally ran in 2023.

Get all of Kay Xander Mellish's books about Denmark at http://books.howtoliveindenmark.com. Book Kay for a talk to your group or organization at http://events.howtoliveindenmark.com.

In Denmark, the right to a long summer vacation is enshrined into law - the national vacation law, which states that all employees have a right to three weeks’ vacation between May and September.

Shops close, too. An ice cream shop in my neighborhood closed down for the entire month of July last year. You would think this would be peak time for ice cream, but for the owners of the ice cream shop, their own vacation was more important.

This year, I noticed that the bicycle store up the street is closed for three weeks – hope you didn’t want a new bike to enjoy the summer. So is the local "smørrebrød" sandwich shop. Too bad about your picnic.

Danes believe that if you take a good, long, Danish vacation, you’ll come back refreshed, with new perspectives.

Free time is precious in Denmark – certainly more important than prestige, since people don’t generally use their job titles, and far ahead of money, since whatever you have the government will be taking a big bite out of. Free time is cherished, free time is wealth, and that’s one of the reasons the summer vacation is so prized. 

You’ll often hear Danes ask each other how many weeks they’re taking for summer vacation. “So, this year, are you taking 3 or 4?”

This is the 123th episode of the "How to Live in Denmark podcast", and originally ran in 2023.

Get all of Kay Xander Mellish's books about Denmark at http://books.howtoliveindenmark.com. Book Kay for a talk to your group or organization at http://events.howtoliveindenmark.com.

Like so many other aspects of life in Denmark, gift giving in the holiday season comes with dozens of unwritten rules and unspoken expectations.

Should you give a gift to your boss? What about your colleagues? Will you and your Danish friends exchange gifts? And why does almost every store in Denmark ask if you want a “gift sticker” when you buy something?

Here are a few basic tips about gift giving in Denmark.

Denmark is getting rich selling pharmaceuticals to other countries, but within Denmark itself, the approach is inconsistent. Getting illegal drugs doesn't seem to be too difficult, but getting legal drugs from your doctor can be.

I did a little crowdsourcing for this week's podcast.   I asked some of our listeners, and some people on Facebook - what were some of the small cultural mistakes  - the dos and don'ts, the faux pas - you made when you first arrived in Denmark?

I got a whole selection of answers.  Don't keep your shoes on while entering someone's home was one thing.  Don't arrive even a few minutes late was another. The 8:00 meeting is not an 8:05 meeting.  Trying to bum a cigarette - not done in Denmark.  Calling after 9:30 in the evening or so - not done in Denmark.  Dropping by to see a friend unannounced - not done in Denmark.

One girl mentioned that she had eaten the last piece of cake on a plate.  You should never eat the last piece of anything in Denmark, at least without asking every single person present. If you don't want to do that, the proper etiquette is to slice the piece of cake in half, and take half.  And then the next person will slice that half in half.  And so on. In the end there will be a little transparent slice left to shrivel up in the middle of the plate.