The Two Sides of Danish People

Danish people, in general, tend to have dichotomous personalities.

Normally, Danes are very cold and take a long time to warm up to people. Danish people even acknowledge that this is true about their culture. I find this occurs much more in the males than in the females. For example, I sit in an office with 5 male grad students, not one of whom will talk to me. Fortunately, the two female grad students I do lab work with are a bit nicer and chattier. But if you enter a store or a restaurant, the employees will not greet you, and ask if you need anything. If someone runs into you on the street, they will not say "excuse me" or "sorry", just push right past you. This can make it quite hard to be a foreigner here, when you're used to people being a bit more outgoing. The other day I was really down about this because not a lot of people in my lab talk to me, so it makes work quite boring. I was really grumpy and kicking myself for not moving to a country with nicer, friendlier, inhabitants. Then, Friday Bar happened.

Friday Bar is what high school and university students do on Friday afternoons. Its basically a low key party at your school building with beer and snacks. At 4 PM on Friday, my coworker/friend Kirsten stops by my office to tell me that they are drinking beer in her office. We sit around for awhile drinking beer in the office, and then go to the Physics Friday Bar, because the Chemistry Friday Bar was closed this week. This is when the other side of the Danish personality came out.

The other side of the Danish personality is wonderful! Once you get a beer or two into a Dane, and they open up to you, they are fun and welcoming people. They love to hear about how things are different in the U.S., and are always interested in what Americans think about Denmark (I told them that we think that Scandinavians are crazy people who drink lots of beer and run around naked, and affirmed that my description pretty much summed it up). Danish people even have a special word to describe this kind of activity/situation: hyggeligt. The best translation for this is "cozy", but that is not altogether correct. It best means when Danish people open up and are friendly and you're just sitting around chatting and drinking beer and maybe eating some good food. So, Friday Bar with my labmates was great fun! We drank beer, ate pizza, and talked about all sorts of topics. I met some more of the chemistry students, as well as a couple Chinese postdocs (they exist in every lab, all over the world) who were impressed that I am going to Singapore. And I found out that a couple guys in my lab scuba dive, and were considering going in DK, so maybe I will get some diving in. Finally, at midnight, I gave up and went home, but they were still partying; I have no idea what time they made it home.

So, although sometimes hard to deal with, Danes are good people in the end. Although this kind of culture without pleasantries is somewhat uncomfortable for me, having grown up in one that requires all sorts of false sentiment to be considered "polite", I have to wonder if it's better to just do away with all of them. It would certainly stream-line things, and the Danes seem to do just fine without them. And really, isn't it more impolite to ask some stranger how their day is going, when you don't care at all about their day, than to lie to their face and pretend to care?