Living with the Danes
Living among the Danes is pretty great, and most of the time, we feel pretty at home here. There are definitely some cultural surprises now and then though!
I've talked about a few of them in other blog posts, but here are some that have come up recently.
Janteloven
The communal meal and the subsequent mass tooth-picking
Forgive me if I've talked about this before, but at work, we don't go to lunch whenever we feel like it and eat with whoever we want like we did at the site in the U.S. It's very much a cultural expectation that you eat at the same time every day, and you eat with the people in your department.
It's not really a teambuilding exercise, it's practical. There are a lot of people to move through the canteen every day, so if everyone goes at their kind-of-expected time, the flow of traffic in and out never leaves someone without a seat and everyone gets to eat a delicious meal. And even though it's not necessarily designed to bring your team closer together, it does afford you the opportunity to have casual conversations with your colleagues and learn more about them.
I've also noticed that there's kind of an unwritten rule that you don't abandon someone who is still eating. If a colleague takes longer to eat or arrives later, it seems sort of expected that you extend your own lunch break to ensure they have a buddy. No one has said this, but I feel it for sure.
All of this is fine. Sure, I don't really get to eat lunch with Zac anymore, but at least we both have good company. The weird part is that the Danes appear to be totally cool with picking their teeth after a meal at the table.
Personally, I prefer to floss rather than pick. If there is meat or a piece of stringy vegetable or a fruit seed or something stuck in between my teeth, nothing beats floss. For whatever reason, the Danes seem to prefer tooth picking. I would suggest this is a more environmentally friendly thing to do over flossing, but the toothpicks are often individually wrapped in plastic, so I'm not sure that it is. They're on every table and they get passed around every day.
When I was a kid, adults in my life often got a toothpick on the way out the door of a diner or restaurant, but it was more of something they chewed on thoughtfully, not something they actively used. Here, at lunch, people are full-on digging things out of their teeth with them at the table after lunch! I think if I flossed at the table, it would be considered gross, even if I was being a polite flosser, but somehow, the group tooth-picking is acceptable.
It doesn't bother me so much as it surprises me, I guess. I'm getting used to it, but I'm still not participating. I just go back to my desk and floss.
I wrote to the Coping in Copenhagen podcast about it and they picked it up for an episode, so that was fun. They seemed to agree with me that even though it's OK to pick at the table, it's not culturally acceptable to floss at the table, and it seems that not everyone has noticed people doing this en masse, so maybe it's just an ALK cultural thing? We'll keep investigating.
No one's wearing shoes, and we're not sweaty, we're sporty
For YEARS, I have preferred to slip my shoes off under my desk in the safety of my cubicle so I can sit cross-legged in my chair and be comfortable as I type. I always carefully put my legs down under the desk and slid my shoes back onto my toes if anyone entered my cubicle to talk to me, because I was pretty sure it was frowned upon to take your shoes off at work.
Not in Denmark!
I now have a shared office instead of a cubicle, so the first time I felt the urge to slide my shoes off, I was curious about how that would go. It wouldn't be so easy to hide with a straight rectangular desk rather than a wrap-around cubicle desk, and there were other people in there with me already. I chanced it several times and it seemed to go OK.
Then one day, I heard the familiar thunk thunk of a pair of shoes being slid off, one at a time, and hitting the wood floor across from me.
"Ooh! Is it time to take our shoes off?" I asked Thomas.
"Yes. It's hot in here this afternoon," he replied.
Since then, I have noticed many of my colleagues taking off their shoes at their desks! In fact, they even venture down the hall to the kitchen in their socks. Ahhh, finally! This is where I belong. No judgment, just comfy, aired-out feet.
One day, Zac said he wished he could take his shoes off at his desk because his feet get hot. I told him how casual everyone in my department is about it, and he said ever since I said that to him, he's noticed how the guys in his office frequently have their shoes off under their desks. So it's a thing.
I even saw a person walking barefoot through the entire building between people having a standing meeting the other day!
In addition to that, we have three locker rooms in our building (that I know of). Some people ride incredibly far to work on their bikes, and they have to shower when they get there. Personally, I sweat an insane amount just riding the short 3 km to work from my house. On the days I have ridden my bike, I've been too chicken to shower at work even thought it's totally normal, so I just change from workout clothes into work clothes and go about my day.
The last time I rode my bike, I was late for morgenbrød and so I just popped over to the table in my ALK biking shirt and my leggings, still damp, with a sweaty bun on top of my head and rosy cheeks. I waited for people to say something but they didn't. I figured I would just eat quickly and go change immediately afterward.
Later in the day, one of my colleagues came up to me and said, "Did you run this morning?" I said, "No, I biked to work, but I was late and didn't have time to change before morgenbrød. I felt bad attending when I looked so messy." She looked at me kind of confused and said, "Oh. I didn't think you looked messy, I thought you looked very sporty."
Thomas rides his bike a lot, but he has an electric bike so he can keep from getting too sweaty when he rides. My other officemate rode to work on his bike (much farther than I ride), and he was sweaty when he arrived the other day. He sat around working in his biking pants and technical shirt with his shoes off for a couple of hours before he went to shower. I asked him if he did that because he needed to stop sweating before he showered and he said yes.
So, I guess what I've learned is that, at least in my workplace, it's more than OK to delay your shower until you've had time to properly stop sweating, it's normal to walk the halls in your stocking feet, and no one cares if you eat breakfast in your gym clothes. This is healthy culture.
What is a "friend" anyway?
I've been reading a lot about Danish culture because I think it's important to kind of assimilate in a respectful way, but some things you kind of have to just talk to people about to get a feel for what's really going on.
For example, one thing the internet tells me time and time again is that it's hard to make friends in Denmark. It says Danes form many of their friendships as small children and stick with those friends for life. There are even countless examples of this in the text of our Danish class books!
I was talking to a colleague about how many of my friends I've met through work. He said that he likes people he works with but wouldn't consider them "friends." I said I think if you only associate at work, then it's a "work friend," but if you hang out socially outside of work once in a while and babysit each others' kids and feed their cat when they're on vacation and all that, then they are a friend-friend. He said he only considers the people he has very close personal ties to as friends: friends from university, friends from childhood, etc.
Another colleague, who I consider a friend and do things with sometimes outside of work, blatantly implied that we were not "friends." I am not offended by this because I understand that people maybe just define friendship differently.
I think a person can have a lot of different kinds of friends: work friends, old friends, recent friends, volunteering friends, neighbor friends, school friends, etc. I also think that a friend can be situational: they can be the result of the deepest connections or the result of the time and place that you're in when you meet them.
In regard to making friends in Denmark, I think whether it is easy or hard might just depend on what you consider a friend.
No curtains
Curtains and shades do actually exist in Denmark, but many homes leave their windows uncovered, even at night. If you take a walk in the dark through a neighborhood or a city street and look at the houses and apartments, you'll notice that you can look directly into many a dining room, bedroom, living room, or even a bathroom. Of course, it's incredibly rude to get too close or look directly inside, but the ambiance this whole no-curtain thing creates is absolutely charming. It totally contributes to the feeling of Danish hygge. The warm light shining out makes you feel cozy and safe, and the subtle movements or signs of life inside contribute to a greater sense of community and trust. I don't know how to explain it, but what seemed strange to me at first now seems completely normal, and when I see a Danish home all shuttered up, it seems almost rude.
Bike "gangs"
Bicycling, as you are very likely aware, is a huge thing here. Danes join biking clubs, here, too. You might have to wait for a herd of sporty bikers to pass you before you pull out into traffic, you might get nearly mowed over by them when you're taking a walk along the lake, or you might witness them gathering in a parking lot like a huge gang.
Some just ride together on a schedule, and others have sponsors and matching technical shirts. The photo above is a biking group that wears matching shirts, most have the KPMG logo across the butt of their biking shorts, AND they all have matching (expensive) bikes. It's a legit investment and you do not want to be in their way when they come ripping through.
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It's so fun to get to know and learn about another culture. As a disclaimer, the things I've mentioned are only the result of our conversations and interactions with Danes, so some of these things might be more prevalent in some areas than others, and it would certainly be incorrect to assume that everyone would describe these things the same way. I'm just sharing what we know and observe from our point of view.
(And seriously: Take off your shoes at work. Make it a thing.)
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