This past week I went on a class field trip to Berlin, Germany. While it was incredible and I learned so much about the Holocaust and my own Jewish identity, by the end of the trip I found myself expressing to my classmates how excited I was to go back home.
Immediately after I said that, I realized that I wasn’t talking about home as in the small town on Long Island where I grew up, or even Wesleyan, which has come to be my home over the past two years. I was talking about Copenhagen, where I had been studying abroad for not even two months. I had a feeling of comfort when I came to the realization that, for the first time, Denmark felt like home.
This feeling did not come immediately. When I arrived this August, I quickly realized that I had done nothing to prepare for my abroad experience. I barely knew anything about the Danish culture and, to be honest, I really only chose to study abroad here because the classes were taught in English, there were plenty of classes to choose from, and Wesleyan students who had gone on this program in the past had given positive reviews. None of these reasons had anything to do with Denmark or the Danish culture.
I was expecting the transition to be easy. I was assured that all Danes speak English, and I naïvely assumed that as long as I could communicate, there wasn’t much to worry about. I didn’t even consider that signs and labels in stores would be in Danish. I found myself buying a type of Cheerios I didn’t like, and polish for wine glasses instead of dish soap, simply because I could not read any of the signs in the supermarket. I also found myself getting lost on the metro because I couldn’t understand the announcements, and getting lost again on the way to my apartment from the metro station, because I couldn’t find the street signs or rely on the GPS on my phone like I normally would.
Now that I’ve been in Denmark for nearly two months, I’ve figured out what to buy at the grocery store, and I can actually read some Danish words. I can easily navigate the metro and get to and from school and my apartment without even having to think about it anymore. Actually, twice today, I even helped people who were confused about which metro to take.
Most importantly though, I’m getting a sense of the Danish culture, and it is far more different from America than I ever expected. Going into this experience, I figured that Denmark would be fairly similar to America in terms of the norms and values and thought living here would be comparable to living in New York.
I was completely wrong. The Danish society is rooted in trust, which makes a lot of the Danish social norms the opposite of American norms. I ride the metro at least twice a day, and my transportation pass has only been checked three times so far, because the Metro employees trust that you will follow the rules of the system. Here, I don’t feel the need to put my hand over the zipper of my purse to make it more difficult for pickpockets, like I have in the other European cities I’ve visited. Once, I actually rode the metro with my backpack completely unzipped. Someone could have easily stolen my laptop, but instead the people near me told me that it was unzipped. Stores will leave their merchandise outside overnight because they trust that it will still be there the next morning. And the amazing thing is, it is.
To me, the most shocking example of trust in Denmark is how mothers will go inside a store and leave their babies outside in their strollers all alone. I learned in my Danish class that a Dane once visited America and left her baby outside a shop, and the mother ended up getting arrested and charged with child abuse. But Danes are so trusting, and conversely so trustworthy, that babies are left outside all the time, often even on some of the busiest shopping streets in Copenhagen, and they are unharmed.
Along with this trustworthiness comes another one of Denmark’s incredible qualities: its safeness. I see young children, around elementary school age, riding the metro without an adult every day. A parent could never send their eight-year-old child alone on the subway in New York, but in Denmark there is barely a concern for kidnapping or child abuse. Sexual assault, which obviously has been a huge issue on college campuses in America, is extremely rare here. In my adolescent psychology class, my professor was in disbelief when we told him that one in four college-age women in America have been the victims of sexual assault. In Denmark, the number is under one percent. It is unbelievable to me that I feel safer walking home alone at night here, in a foreign city, than I do at Wesleyan.
Part of this is due to the gender equality here. It is actually not very common for a guy to buy a girl a drink here, because it is viewed as more of an insult than a form of flattery. From my “Sociology of the Family” class, I’ve learned that Danish fathers and mothers play a pretty equal role in raising their children. When a couple has a child, they are given a certain amount of time for parental leave, and the couple can split the time between themselves however they choose. As a result, a lot of fathers end up taking paternity leave, which is definitely not nearly as common in America.
There is more general equality here than there is in America. Denmark has a welfare system, in which most people pay at least half of their earnings to the government, and in return, there is free health care, free day care, and free schooling, including college! Students are actually given a stipend in order to attend college. Due to this welfare system, there is a much smaller gap between the rich and the poor than there is in America. Nobody is very rich, but barely anyone is so poor that they can’t survive. So many resources are provided that Danes are generally happy paying such a high tax for their country.
In the “Positive Psychology” class I took a year ago at Wesleyan, I learned that Denmark is the happiest country in the world. After living here for not even two months, I understand why. So many of the issues we worry about in America, such as safety and paying for healthcare and education, are not much to think about here. I am the happiest I have ever been, surrounded by the happiest people in the world.