Good Day, Sunshine

It isn't sunny often in Denmark. When the sun occasionally peeks through the clouds during a lecture at DIS, you can watch the entire class begin to unconsciously lean toward the window. Heads turn, and people perk up almost instantly. And the Danes are junkies for it too. I often joke that my Copenhagen suburb of Sjælør can feel like a ghost town, especially early in the semester when I left for class before the sun came up and arrived home just as it was setting. But Danes come out of the woodwork in droves on sunny days, and the atmosphere on the street is noticeably more cheerful.

Tuesday was one of these days, intensely sunny and not a cloud in the sky. Without the clouds, Denmark feels like a different place, a different country entirely. It's almost disorienting how good it feels to walk around under a clear, blue sky after weeks of gray, gray, gray. As it was my one-month anniversary in Denmark, I decided it was time to explore Sjælør a little more thoroughly. Embarrassing though it is, most of my wanderings had been around the center and surrounding neighborhoods of Copenhagen, and my only routes in and around Sjælør were:

apartment ---> Sjælør S-tog station
apartment ---> Fakta
apartment ---> Mozart's bakery (highly recommended)
night bus ---> BED

I wandered into the neighborhood behind my apartment building, and immediately realized that this was not an ordinary neighborhood. It was a storybook town for children, with colorful miniature houses, snow covered gardens, and hedge-lined lanes. My roommate later explained that it is a colony of summer "garden" homes, that began in the 1960's when Copenhagen was still very industrial. City dwellers purchased plots of land very cheaply, and built small houses and planted gardens as a place for barbeques and picnics during the summer. Very few people actually live here. This made more sense. During my wandering, I had been envisioning either a colony of extremely short Danish squaters or people crawling around these little cottages on their hands and knees. I'm looking forward to walking around the gardens again in the springtime when everything starts blooming.











Along the way, I met a jolly Danish fellow who I will lovingly refer to as "The Cat Man of Solskræten". I was caught off guard when he began amiably chattering to me in Danish as I walked by. Most Danes are extremely reserved in public. We learn in our Danish classes that Danes consider it a right not be spoken to in public and I consider a feat even to make eye contact with these evasive people on the S-tog.

He told me that people pay 2000 kroners a year to live in the gardens and asked me about my studies and my home in Colorado. But after a few minutes of friendly small talk he informed me quietly, "My cats, they are coming." And sure enough, his cats started slinking out of the hedges left and right until we were surrounded by about 8 strays, some purring, some hissing at one another, and he introduced me to all of them. "This one is...oh, how do you say? A fatty?" He told me that people come to the gardens with their cats in the summertime but when they go home, they leave their cats behind. The cat man lives in the gardens all year round and feeds them. I could hardly stop myself from bursting into laughter when I realized that this was the first time in a month that a random Dane had made small talk with me on the street, and here I was standing in a garden colony of miniature houses with Fatty the cat rubbing against my legs.


The strangest things happen to me in Denmark. This week's misadventures include being nailed with a snowball by a drunken Greenlander on Købmagergade and attempting to figure out who the HELL is stealing one black sock from my drying rack in the basement every time I do my laundry. I may or may not have been asking for that snowball, but the disappearing sock joke is getting old, fast...

Doris and Harry Wander to Sweden

With our Wednesday free of field studies and an itch to get out of Copenhagen for the day, my friend Rachel and I decided to hop the border to Sweden for a little "harry trip".

A little background on Harry: The Swedes are the brunt of constant jokes among their Scandinavian counterparts, the Danes and the Norwegians. From what I have gathered thus far in coffee shop conversations and passing references, Danes think that Swedes are humorless bumblers who talk funny. When practicing my Danish to chuckles about my accent I ask, "Do I sound like an American?" And 9 times out of 10 I get the response, "No, you sound like a Swede." The Danes are not accustomed to hearing their language spoken with an accent; it is a very obscure language for anyone to spend their time learning. Consequently, I can’t even say “tusind tak” without getting a blank stare or a sarcastic little smirk. And I’m beginning to think that telling me I sound like a Swede is not, in fact, a consolation, but I joke within itself.

My Norwegian grandfather, on the other hand, placed his jabs at a more serious level. “NEVER trust a Swede” he used to say. Though officially remaining neutral during WWII, Swedish efforts to appease the Nazis by opening their borders indirectly enabled the occupation of Norway in 1940. And those 5 years of occupation are something he never forgave them for.

What purpose does all of this background information serve, you ask? Because while they jab at Sweden constantly and almost unconsciously, the Danes and the Norwegians do love Sweden for one thing. THE SHOPPING. I first became acquainted with the concept of a “harry trip” two summers ago when visiting family in Norway. My aunt, uncle, and their 2 children were in the process of preparing for a harry trip, in which they would climb into their car, drive over the border to Sweden, and buy everything in sight at an outrageously low price. Since Norwegian agriculture cartels are so stringent and the tax on alcohol is so high, beef and liquor are popular purchases when the Norwegians hop the border. The trips came to be called “Harry” by way of the former Norwegian Minister of Agriculture, Lars Sponheim, who criticized these border jumpers and named them “Doris and Harry”, a pair of superficial humans with no academic background who dared to undermine his protectionist agricultural industry.

In Denmark, where the standard of living is equally as high, harry trips are manifested as trips to Malmö, Sweden, about 30 minutes from Copenhagen across a massive bridge. My roommate informed me that the Danish government is similarly concerned with Danes who are undermining the system, and they charge around 500 DKK for every car crossing the bridge. In other words, if you’re going to Malmö by car, you’re planning to fill it to the brim. Fortunately, for about 130 DKK (around $25) and a willingness to purchase only what you can carry, the train to Malmö provides a cheap and convenient means for traveling between the two cities.

Doris and Harry departed fair Copenhagen without a plan, without a map, without any expectations. Their intentions were neither cultured nor academic. After a month of living in expensive Copenhagen, their only desire was to buy some clothes and sit down for a meal without the distinct and compulsive urge to smack their foreheads against the wall upon opening their wallets.

They shopped, they ate, they were content. They spent the afternoon wandering around King’s Park:





...and a sleepy little graveyard covered in moss and dripping with rain:



They met a Swedish couple in the park and stopped for a photo op:





They ate cream puffs their size of their faces and sipped hot chocolate in “Les Trois Roses”. They felt they were in a scene from the movie "Chocolat". They never wanted to leave:





But in the end, they wandered back home to Copenhagen. And smiled when they realized that they had started calling Copenhagen "home".

Odense & Århus

There are so many thoughts bouncing about in my head that are screaming for the organization pen to paper, or in this case, fingers to keyboard? It is safe to say that this past weekend has been the best since my arrival in Denmark. I feel entirely enriched and inspired. I am full of laughter. I have laughed harder these past days than I have in a very long time.

Thursday to Saturday was the first short study tour to Western Denmark, to the second and third largest cities of Odense and Århus. We traveled with our programs by bus and I was immediately pleased to see that while other more popular programs were split onto two buses and separate tour groups, our Migration & Identity crew of around 35 fit nicely onto one bus. The weekend turned out to be a nice bonding experience, as we had yet to really participate in any activities with our specific program. And with four girls to every sardine can of a hotel room, the hygge factor went from 0 to 100 in the time it took to lay out 4 full grown bodies and 4 sets of luggage in an 8x10. Reminiscent of a cargo hold, but memories were made regardless.

In the realm of academia, we were able to visit a slew of integration projects and councils to further explore the problem of immigrant integration in Denmark. I think this is a very ironic problem, as most aspects of Danish society are extremely progressive in comparison to the USA, namely in energy conservation (remember the grocery bags?) and gay marriage (Denmark was the first country in the world to legalize registered partnerships in 1989). But while the USA is a country founded on the idea of immigration, a melting pot since the very beginning, Denmark’s historically homogeneous population didn’t start experiencing immigration until the Turkish work permit migration in the 50’s and 60’s. In the grand scheme of things, immigration is very new to Denmark, and passions are much higher here in regards to the topics of integration, assimilation, and multiculturalism.

At the Odense Integration Council we talked with the Ethnic Job Team, a group of 30 job counselors who help immigrants break into the job market with the goal of bringing as many as possible into the workforce. Job training and Danish classes are provided, and helping immigrants set reasonable goals as to the nature of their employment is key. Most interesting was the fact that the majority of foreign degrees are not accepted in Denmark, so teachers, lawyers, and doctors are often required to go to university AGAIN or settle for a job that they are often over-qualified for.

An entertaining lecture followed by a Turkish scholar who turned out to be a little more radical than even our tour leaders may have expected. While his basic claim was that Danes are, in fact, NOT racist, the means of proving his point was through a complex web of cultural relativism and deconstructionist discourse: you can perceive the Dane’s behavior as racism, or as rational anxieties. While he presented an interesting point with a fervor I can only hope I will one day feel for my field of study, many were left scratching their heads, or laughing quietly to themselves when his critique of social science was summed up in the phrase “psychological masturbation.”

Søndervangskolen is the school in Denmark with the highest percentage of immigrant youth, at 90%. We were given a tour of the school by Simon, whose parents fled persecution in Eritrea and started a family in Denmark. When asked how he reacts when people ask him where he is from, he responded, “I tell them that my parents are from Eritrea, but that I am Danish. I was born in Denmark and I am a Dane.”



Bazaar Vest is an indoor Turkish/Arabic marketplace that results from the high immigrant population in Århus. Less academic, more enlightening, we spent an hour wandering the shops and falafel stands, and the most heavenly fruit market I have ever laid my eyes upon.







Saturday night was the best of times. Great conversation with great new people and a "Carpark North" concert in downtown Århus. Eat, drink, and be merry they say, and that is exactly what we did.





At the close of the trip, I found myself wandering the spacious galleries of the Aros Kunstmuseum and I could have happily spent an entire day. I can think of few things more intellectually satisfying than getting lost in an art museum.




Aros boy, a 17 foot fiberglass sculpture and the museum's most famous exhibit.


This interactive exhibit represents the most universal part of human life, the heartbeat. Grip the pulse sensors at the back of the room, and your heartbeat is transferred to the first lightbulb as a flicker. Your heartbeat moves up and down the rows as more people add theirs, until eventually, it goes out.




Michael Kvium's
"Double Brown"


Jars of horse parts as art.


A solitary
resting
place.


View of Århus from the top.

"This is MY Country"

Wednesdays at DIS are days for "field studies". Instead of sitting in the classroom, we get the opportunity to engage ourselves in hands on activities at local institutions in order to contextualize the 8:30 AM lectures that may or may not be fully absorbed during normal class days.

Today was a field study for my Cross Cultural Encounters class, the core course in the Migration & Identity program. As a project for the semester, we are collaborating with local asylum seekers in order to publish the next edition of the only publication run by asylum seekers in Denmark, New Times. There is currently much debate on the asylum system in Denmark, as the rules are much stricter than those of other EU countries. It is considered extremely hard to be granted asylum in Denmark, and it is necessary to produce quite a bit of documentation, including documentation of persecution. In other words, you must be able to prove, on a piece of paper, that returning to your home country poses a legitimate threat to your life or your health.

The Dublin Convention makes matters even more complicated. Passed in Denmark in 1997, the convention is a piece of EU legislation that seeks to streamline the application process by requiring the first EU country in which the asylum seeker is apprehended to take responsibility for this person and process their application domestically. Once you have been fingerprinted in Denmark, you may not leave Denmark to apply for asylum in another EU country. This poses a serious obstacle to many seeking asylum, because the laws on granting residence permits are so stringent, and the citizenship test and expectations of self-support are so high. As a result, there are a very high number of people waiting in the limbo of "asylum centers" who have been rejected by Denmark but who are unable to return to their home country for fear of persecution. There are people who have been sitting in these centers for 10 years without any hope of being granted a normal life in Denmark.

This morning, we were seperated into groups and introduced to the asylum seeker and the article topics that we will be working with for the next months. Farnam, our asylum seeker, is in the unique position of being an "unaccompanied minor". His parents were mathematics teachers in Iran and were too public about the fact that they were practicing Christians, not Muslims. In Iran, this is grounds for execution. He left Iran for Belgium, with the end goal of settling in England. However, Farnam was seperated from his parents, who moved on to England and were fingerprinted there. A family friend bought Farnam a ticket to Denmark and told him that he would have to purchase a ticket to England in the airport, but he was detained in Copenhagen where he was fingerprinted.

He is 16 years old and he has been living in a foreign country for 7 months by himself, unable to directly contact his family in England. He told us that when he was apprehended, he was promised by the authorities to be reunited with his family, but that promise has yet to be upheld. And because of the Dublin Convention, he cannot legally join them, nor has he the means. His English is extremely advanced for only 7 months in classes, and he received his diploma in Iran when he was 14. He hopes to attend university to become an architect. He hopes to return to Iran one day.

The most striking comment he made today was about the manner in which the Danish authorities speak of Denmark. "You are in MY country now..." He says the Danes speak of Denmark as if it is the best country in the world, all other places inferior. He says that they expect him to be more than happy to be here, living in an asylum center, without his family.

In two weeks, my group has arranged to visit Farnam at his asylum center in order to see what a day in the life of an under-aged asylum seeker in Denmark is like.

This boy is remarkably composed and well spoken, given his situation. And by the end of the meeting, I was feeling quite petty for complaining about the rainy weather and the crowed train on my way into the city.