The way Danes don’t interact

Hello again everybody.
I’m back in Denmark after five months of crazy fun adventures in the states. As I promised I will keep up my blog. I’ll keep writing in English hoping that some of my English speaking readers will keep enjoying my blog. I'm changing the name of my blog, but until I figure out what to write about the name will be the same.

Now that I’ve spend the last months making fun of American ways I was thinking about doing the same to the Danes – as it turns out we’re pretty weird too. I don’t know if this will be the main theme of my blog, we’ll see how it goes.
Here’s my first post written from Denmark. It’s called “The way Danes don’t interact”.

When I first landed in the states (New York to be more specific) I spend the first two days hurting my neck because I was looking up at the buildings. I’ve probably never seen a building taller than 20 floors, so the Empire State Building or Rockefeller Center is pretty impressive. But this didn’t impress me as much as what a saw on the streets, in bars or the subway. All over the place people were talking to people they didn’t know. They talked to me too. Asked me where I was from, why I was in the states and so on. Because I’m from Denmark my first thought was “Mind your own damn business.” In Denmark we go out of our way to avoid talking to strangers.

When you for example take the train from Aalborg to Copenhagen in Denmark (a five hour train ride) nobody will contact you unless they know you, want to see your ticket or yell at you because you are in the seat that they reserved.
There’s only one type of person who will contact you on a train – the much feared lonely old ladies. I fear these creatures more than I fear getting kicked in the nuts by David Beckham. That’s why I always bring my two shields with me when I’m taking the train – my MP3 player and my laptop. On a Danish train you’ll see people hiding behind screens or earplugs to avoid contact with other people. If we have been stupid enough to leave both these shields home and are unlucky enough to sit across from an old lady, who wants to tell us about her grandchildren that never call her, we instantly buy a newspaper to hide behind. We would rather read about the tragedies of the world than face the one in front of us. This is the Danish way, but not the American.

In New York people were much more interested in talking to strangers than I’ve ever experienced before, and it took me a while to get used to. Then I made my way to Missouri and realized that people in the Midwest are even more outgoing than in New York, actually MUCH more outgoing. I’m pretty sure that if you used the Newspaper trick on a train in Missouri the person in front of you would just keep telling you about his farm or guns or truck or football or his favorite buffalo wings.

The sad thing is that even though I find it absurd that Danes don’t talk to each other, there’s no way I’m going to speak with the lonely old lady that without a doubt will be sitting in front of me, when I take the train on Saturday. I’ll have my iPod charged and my laptop filled with movies.