How To Live In Denmark » Podcasts

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