The First Week

Hello, reader! This is my first blog post. I don't really know how to go about doing these; I'm so used to posting political discourse on Facebook, haha! Anyway, here goes:

It's been just over a week since I arrived in Denmark. I am staying with a host family in Nærum (pronounced "neh-rohm"), a village about 30 minutes north of Copenhagen. My host mom's name is Isabel; she is a book keeper for a local school, and enjoys glassmaking and painting in her free time. She also has a laser therapy business, and told me she may be able to help me with my allergies, so we'll see how that goes :)

Isabel has three daughters, Rose (12), Silke (pronounced "silk-ah"; 17), and Sara (19). Sara just moved in with her boyfriend, Phillip, so I've taken her old room for the upcoming four months.

The family lives in a Danish row-house; this means that, similar to "town houses" in the US, each dwelling is connected to the next. Every family has their own private garden (separated from one another by tall fences) and a shelter for their car(s) and bikes. There is a shared garden/park space in the middle of the neighborhood with picnic benches and decorations leftover from Christmas. I haven't gotten a good picture of the neighborhood yet, because it gets dark so early; I'll try to take one when I leave for school one morning.

Isabel and her kids all speak English very well! In fact, most Danes can speak at a conversational level, and many are fluent. Danish children start learning English when they are just six years old; this means that Rose has already been speaking English for six years - longer than I had been taking Spanish by the time I graduated high school! When I need to ask for directions or to check out at a cash register, my "snakker du engelsk?" is almost always met with a "sure!" or "yeah, do you need help?" It's made me think a lot about how much better the American education system would be if kids started to learn foreign languages at a younger age like the Danes...

Even though I converse and ask questions in English, I've been trying to learn basic Danish phrases from my host family and through Duolingo. It's a tricky language to read because few words are pronounced phonetically. Y's are pronounced like U's, J's function as Y's, and a D at the end of the word is likely to be pronounced like an L. In addition, depending on where they appear in a word, V's can function like U's. For example:

- "Thank you for the food" = Tak for mad, pronounced "tak for mal"

- "I speak some Danish" = Ja snakker nogle dansk", pronounced "ya snakka no-l dansk" (with the "a" in dansk sounding as it would when you say "land" in English)

- Lyngby (a village near Nærum) is pronounced "Luhng-buh"

- Copenhagen = København, pronounced "kuhr-ben-how-n"

- "You are welcome" = Du er velkommen, pronounced the way it looks

Also, apparently some words have multiple meanings, so the language can be highly context-dependent. Basically, it's super confusing, but I want to make a solid effort :)

That confusion has certainly already come into play when I'm heading to class. Thank goodness for Google Maps and Isabel's favorite app, Rejseplanen (rye-se-plan-en, or "Journey Planner")!

To get to class, I either:

-Catch the bus that stops outside the neighborhood, transfer to the 150S / highway bus, ride for 30 minutes to get to Nørreport Station in the city, and walk about 10 minutes to class; or

-Bike the mile to the 150S (instead of catching the neighborhood bus), ride to Nørreport, and walk from there to class.

On the second day of orientation I accidentally left my bus pass at the house, so I got kicked off the bus. Luckily, I was able to buy a ticket when the next one came by, with the help of an impromptu volunteer translator standing in line behind me :) Other than that, figuring out the transportation system is getting easier by the day. The city and surrounding villages are very safe and locals have been incredibly approachable.

In addition to generally getting settled in, I've been pretty busy! So far, I've:

-Walked around Copenhagen with classmates;

-Tried fiskefrikadeller (fish meatballs) in a harbor where one can see Sweden in the distance;

-Visited the school where Isabel works;

-Biked around Nærum;

-Gone ice skating (if you can call it that; I mostly held onto the wall and pulled myself across the ice!);

-Played shuffleboard;

-Learned some new Danish board- and card-games from my host sister, Rose;

-Tried straight Danish licorice (not for the faint of heart!!!);

-Met several of Isabel's family members and friends;

-Visited some really interesting art galleries, including one where local artists paint live; and

-Explored a few quirky shops around Copenhagen.

You can see pictures of some of these things on the "gallery" page :)

In addition, some interesting things I've learned so far include:

-Home-making one's meals, for lunch at school or work, is a near-universal practice here, to the point that it's rare for a school to have a cafeteria;

-You have to watch out for bikes more than you have to worry about cars in the city;

-People trust one another enough that it's common to leave babies in their carriages on the sidewalk while the parent(s) are eating lunch or ordering coffee;

-Paid family leave is amazingly generous compared to the United States, for all types of households (i.e., men are encouraged to take paternal leave, and LGBTQIA+ families also receive support from the state);

-Danes my age are horrified when they hear about how much college costs in the US (they get stipends to attend university here);

-The welfare state structure enjoys support from the majority of consequential Danish political parties;

-"Green taxes" ensure that water and gas are used sparingly (however, an unexpected amount of citygoers smoke); and

-Denmark has a state religion - the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark - even though Danish politics and people are overwhelmingly secular.

I hope to elaborate on some of these topics in my future posts, because all of them are intriguing to me. I'm taking classes on the welfare state, gender in relation to human rights discourse, Scandinavian masculinity, and cultural diversity/integration, so these courses will soon shed some light on all the questions I have swirling around in my head :)

Anyway, that's all for now! Hej hej (bye-bye) and thanks for following my journey!