How To Live In Denmark » Podcasts

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.  Wh

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

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

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 transpar

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.  

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,

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

  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.  

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 spe

If you’re in Denmark right now, you’ll know that we’re coming up on the year’s longest day this week.  June 21.  You know it because it starts getting light at 4 in the morning, and the sun doesn’t go down until 10:30 or 11 at night and then you’re up again at 4 in the morning. In between it never gets really dark, just like in December it never gets very light. During the dark times, I know that I wait and wait for the light times to come.  Sometimes I count – only 3 more months until the light times! Only 6 more weeks to the light times! When the light times do get here, they’re actually kind of annoying.  Sure, it’s great to have some sun, and those long summer evenings.  Green trees and the wildflowers are gorgeous. But with all that light, it’s kind of difficult to sleep.  Everyone I know has blackout curtains and wears sleep masks. They don’t always work, though, particularly when it’s hot, and people start to get a bit crabby after a few weeks of limited sleep.  The fact that it’s light until 11pm is g

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

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 pl

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 count

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 vegeta

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.

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.

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 t

There was big news this week for foreigners in Denmark.  It looks double citizenship will soon be permitted.  Previously, if you wanted to be a Danish citizen, you had to give up citizenship in your home country. Meanwhile Danes who had moved abroad, say to the US or Australia, and became citizens there had to give up their Danish citizenship. There’s now been a proposal to get rid of all that.  It hasn’t been finally approved, but all the Danish parties say they’ll vote for it, with the exception of our anti-foreigner friends in the Danish People’s Party. Now having been here for 14 years, I will probably apply for Danish citizenship.  I realize I’ll have to do a lot of studying about Danish history, and learn things like the difference between King Christian the Fourth and King Christian the Seventh.  But that’s true of any country.  I’m sure people wanting to be American citizens have to learn the difference between, say, George Washington and George Bush. I want to be a Danish citizen for a lot of differ

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.

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.  Real