In which Denmark confuses me

Whoah, Danish political parties have logos. Logos are so much cooler than donkies and elephants. I guess you need them more when you have more than two parties.

If you ever want people to look at you like you've got to be joking, become a professor of Danish Politics and Society and draw a scale of the seven main political parties on the board, explaining that the parties called "the Left" and "the Conservatives" are both rightwing, while "the Radical Left" is centrist. Or, if you prefer, you could become a professor of the Danish language and explain to equally incredulous students that Danish has two genders, neither of which is masculine or feminine. Your choice.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

There's a lot of graffiti here - more than in the US. Yesterday a new one appeared on the floor at my train stop: "Playfield of Satan - Vladimir Nabokov." I have to respect any culture that quotes Nabokov in its graffiti.

I have a horror of feeling like a tourist, which means I don't really take photos of the images that interest me most - the shop windows, the amazing combinations of clothes and shoes, the preschoolers in the playgrounds, the espresso cups, the people and their bicycles. I've finally realized I need to be keeping a sketchbook instead of just trying to remember it all.

I'm such a lightweight it's sad

I'm trying to think of a polite way to tell Jørgen that three-quarters of a glass of wine makes my head swim and a glass and a half renders me incapable of focusing my eyes properly and to please, please not pour me a second glass. Also, one of the cacti in my window put out a big pink flower over the weekend, and Jørgen's been cooing over it and taking pictures ever since. (I wish I had pictures of this burly sunburnt greyhaired Danish beer-truck driver admiring his cactus flower.) The cacti get a little more of my regard now.

Left behind

My host family keeps bringing up Hurricane Katrina, which is in the headlines every day even here. I don't know how to react except to nod. What I really want to say is:

A few months ago the images of the homeless, helpless people stranded in New Orleans would have seemed foreign to me, the kind of people I only see in newspaper photos or through the window of a car while driving through the inner city. Now they look to me like the women in the shelter from this summer. Storms and domestic violence both strike people from all parts of society who are in the wrong place or the wrong relationship, but you can probably guess the kind of people who hit rock-bottom enough to have to live in an overcrowded shelter without even a bedroom to themselves. (To be honest, this is not even rock-bottom. Rock-bottom is the women who leave an abuser only to wind up living on the streets because they have nowhere else to go, and we have to turn them away because they're not technically in a crisis situation.) It's the same kind of people you see in the photos of the Superdome: poor, black products of poor education, poor nutrition, and bad jobs. And when the rest have some way out, they're the ones left behind. It infuriates me.

Hygge-less

The biggest culture shock I've met with so far hasn't been with the Danes but with the other students. In the airport in Iceland it dawned on me with horror that the crowd of young people with popped collars waiting for the flight to Copenhagen were to be my classmates. I don't think I've ever gone to school with people who popped their collars before. There's scarcely a nerd in this whole crowd (except a few of us who are in hiding, I guess.) I'm trying to work on the concept that we're all in a strange place together and I can be friends with people with expensive highlighting jobs and Louis Vuitton handbags, really I can. It's just coming very hard.

I think one of the reasons I wanted to come here was the idea of hygge. The short translation is "cosiness", and we've had several lectures on it so far: Hot chocolate or tea around the fireplace is hygge, but having the TV or radio on is not. Beer in a cafe with lit candles on the table is hygge, but waiting for your train in the rain is not. Cats are always hygge. (I have to disagree with one part of this - I really think watching the Red Green Show as a family and making comments has to count as hygge, as does making bread and listening to Thistle & Shamrock on a Sunday afternoon or putting dinner on the table and listening to Prairie Home Companion on a Saturday night.)

I don't think my host family really holds much stock in this concept. During breakfast the radio is on playing the Backstreet Boys or Shania Twain. Dinner is a twenty-minute affair with little conversation. After dinner they both go to watch TV in the living room or in their bedrooms. Maybe it would be easier with more people in the family, but they can't really help that. What if when I'm 63 I'm like Jørgen with a dead wife and most of my kids moved out and a family life that consists of watching TV in seperate rooms in a house without hygge? It's a scary thought.

I think I'm going to buy a plant to put on the windowsill in my bedroom. I miss having something to take care of. The sill currently houses about five cacti. Surely cacti aren't very cozy? I wonder what I can get that will have flowers on it for the longest.

The Danes

During orientation several of the staff have alluded to "the statistic", which is that since the DIS program started in 1959 something like two DIS and four DIS-Dane couples get married every year. When some of us were recounting this at lunch yesterday, you could see the eyes bug out on one of the guys at the table. "Are you serious? I hope it's me! I mean, look at the women on the street. Not that I have marriage on the mind, but I sure wouldn't mind marrying most of them. And the people in this program, too - I've never been in a place with so many beautiful people."

This is possibly the most common comment by students this week - how beautiful the Danes are. I had heard it, but I didn't really understand until I got here. The people you see - I mostly notice the women, but I guess it applies somewhat to men - have these wonderful stylish clothes. Not trendy-trendy, but just really good-looking. At home a twenty-year-old blonde gets some kind of attention walking down a street: in the suburbs random men honk their horns or yell or whatever, and in most parts of the city I look out of place because I'm white. Here I've realized that it's the first place I've been where I can walk around and go completely unnoticed because the streets are full of beautiful people, most of them blond.

Simon and I used to debate whether people whose hobby/obsession was clothes, shoes, etc. were inspirational or just made other people feel bad. While I'm here as long as I know I don't look awful I don't feel the need to live up to the image of the women on the street. (Of course, this is a good thing because you've never seen so many tall willowy people with flaxen hair. They, unlike me, would look good if they were wearing a burlap sack.) It's not like being a losing competitor - it's like being in a work of art every time I'm on the street or in a store.

The problem is that it seems kind of useless for foreigners to put much effort into becoming part of it. A woman wearing red high heeled sandals and a gorgeous print dress while riding her bicycle down the street from work is part of the work of art - she's just an average mom on her way home from work. And she's a joy to look at. But if she did the same thing in Richmond she would look out of place, as if she were making too much of an effort. Men would yell at her (aside from nearly running her over with their pickups because her bike lane wouldn't exist in Richmond.) As Mandi from my Russian class, the most stylish girl I know, said, she just can't go into academia because what would the point be? Her students wouldn't appreciate how fabulous she is.