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...