10 things you do if you study in Denmark

They have more fun than you do and this is what they do. University for them doesn’t seem to be a long, continuous torture. This is a 10-thing list about what students in Denmark do and what you would like to do. You can try to be like them, but you will never be like them.

1. One break, two breaks, three breaks…

Are in class and you cannot wait hopefully for the next break? Is your lecture getting longer and more boring than usual and you need fresh air or maybe a coffee? Well, no problems. Just wait five more minutes and it will be break time again. If you are studying in Denmark your lessons will never last for more than 45 minutes. Otherwise, there’s a break. It’s easy to get used to it, however, you sometimes think “come on, just finish your lesson and we go home”.

2. Food or how to become a big ass in class

When you start a new course you are aware of the fact that you won’t do too much. You know, first day, new lecturer and you’ll take it easy. As if this were not comfy enough, lecturers usually bring pastry, cake, croissants, maybe if you’re lucky kanelsnegl as well, plus coffee, tea and bread. And it is that course beginnings at Danish university are food festivals where you sit on your chair, you eat and let your ass get bigger and bigger.

Yeah, laugh, but once you get into the Danish uni, you never know how's gonna be

3. Non-stop eating? Who cares?

This is related with the second thing you do if you study in Denmark. How come you cannot eat in class if it’s the educational staff who brings food. Is your stomach rumbling and you’re just back from the break? Don’t clench or lean your body to hide the noise. Just open up your tupperware and eat a sandwich or something more elaborated, if you are foreigner, or you bunch of carrots if you are a Dane. You are making noise when chewing but God knows that it’s more polite than your “roars” and “burrs” of your stomach.

4. Go easier or go home

If there’s something in the Nordic countries, and well Germany too, that they can boast about and it’s still true, it’s order. They are organized and one can see it from the beginning. In your first day of course they give a paper with all the deadlines throughout the term. You realize that you have to plenty of time to write all your essays, all your assignments and occasionally a project. You don’t live in permanent tension as you would do some circles of latitude below. Write a 5-page assignment in a week. Deal! I don’t have lessons every day.

He can be one of your classmates, or even one of your lecturers or professors

5. This is an exam free product

The end of the term is coming. For other countries it is like that so-repeated quote from ‘Game of Thrones’: “Winter is coming”. You can’t run away, you can’t avoid it. It’s fate and it’s fated. But in the country where the real winter is coming, and not the one with those soulless white walkers, this doesn’t seem so terrifying. I mean, of course you tremble and you’re likely to smoke a cigarette before the exam, but, as I said: exam. Ok, maybe they have two or three exams. It’s cool and I love it because I don’t see myself studying for one, and another and another exam until 6 exams in a chain. In Denmark you don’t end up with anxiety, bald because of the stress or with a corn on the finger of so much writing schemas. But they have more creative ways of examining you, like oral test. They love oral, I guess so.

6. You type, not write

Did we say corn on a finger? Yes, because getting inside a Danish classroom at the university means to see everybody with a computer. There are no papers or pens, but laptops and chargers and maybe some iPad. As well, one can detect who’s Danish, who’s not. It’s like playing ‘Guess Who?’ or ‘Who’s who?’ but with just a simple question: Does he/she have a Mac? If so, it gets a 90% of probability of being a Dane. But this is irrelevant, the thing is like they’re so damn used to typing, that they don’t remember how to write. How beautiful is to handwrite! But beauty has a price. Well, if you don’t want to pay it, Denmark is your place.

If you are a Dane, Apple is your religion, your typings on the keyboard yours prays to God and Steve Job... Who remembers him? 

7. This is COLOMBIA!!! No, it’s Denmark.

Do you remember that scene from the film ‘300’ when Leonidas kicks on the Persian soldier’s chest while screaming “This is Sparta!”? Well, something similar is going to happen if you ask a Dane why they have so much coffee all over the uni? “This is Denmark”, they’ll say to you while kicking out of the student room kitchen. Coffee vending machines, coffee makers, coffee pots, water-heaters, and well, the canteen. What we like: cheap coffee to stay awake. What we don’t like: It’s dirty water, thank you. You’d better make stronger coffee you wouldn’t have to drink coffee every hour and to piss consequently as if you were a mare.

8. Where do you live? I live at the uni.

But why so much coffee? To stay awake while you are at the uni, but they like to spend the day. University is like a casino. You never know whether it’s daylight or nighttime in order you keep on betting. Here it’s the same. The best examples I know are Copenhagen Business School library and cafeteria and Syddansk Universitet in Odense. As far as I know, I just want to go home once my lessons are finished. There’s no need to stay on the campus for longer. But there’s something in the Danish universities that attract you. Why to do nothing at home, when you can do it at the university. And this casino style of non-getting outside is mirrored also in the fact of having showers in the toilet. No, I don’t mean the gym toilets. I mean an average toilet. It’s just like “I go to pee and… wow! There’s a toilet, it’s still wet!”.

Syddansk Universitet endless corridors. Too long way to say "I'm going home".
Flickr: SANTIAGOCOMS.1

9. Drunk after the lessons.

It’s Friday afternoon, almost evening. Lessons are over and you don’t wanna go home yet. You know, you love to live at the university. Let’s go to the Fredagsbar. “What’s that?”, the foreign student asks. Well, every Friday there’s a bar, with music –yeah, music– and very cheap beer. It seems a tramp. Well, if you’re meeting your friends in the city later it may be. You’ll not be able to crawl back home. And the best thing is that the day when the Christmas beer (Julebryg) and the Easter beer (Påskebryg) are released you can wait in the Fredagsbar to have your first drink of those beers.

It's not like this... Well, not at the beginning at least

10. Party in the house, well, party in the university.

Let’s keep on talking about what I like the most, party. Certainly one could think that there’s nothing better than having a Fredagsbar where one goes wild but still on the campus. However, you’re completely wrong. Danish universities hold the semesterstartsfest (beginning of semester party) and the årfest (annual party). It’s crazy. Universities hire DJs and bands, set lights and speakers, put hotdogs and Asian food kiosks. It’s a like to be in heaven, but surely you know how much you’re sinning there and that could be hell. A big reason? Toilets in the Danish universities are mixed, for girls and boys.

Two informational paradoxes in Denmark

Recently I read an article in the Nordicom Review by a professor from RUC, Thomas Tufte. I attended a lecture from him and I couldn’t be happier after it, and now that I had the chance to read his explanation of the correlation between media and global divides. He makes emphasis in three cases: Malawi and its rural zones; Brazil and the telenovela effect; and Denmark as an example of full media access but symbolic and its cultural divides (Tufte, 2009). I found this article as an epiphany, a discovery, of two informational paradoxes taking place in Denmark. Why is this so important? Because Norden -or the Nordic world- represents one of the three information systems, apart from the Asian one in Singapore and the American one in Silicon Valley. I’ll start with the painful one and I’ll conclude with the positive paradox, so if it’s hard to read for some Danes, they could get a happy ending when they finish reading, if they do it, sure.

Tufte pays attention to Nørrebro’s case. This is a neighborhood in Copenhagen, in past a former workers zone, and today a multicultural space where man can find and endless number of languages spoken amongst the people living there. Tufte makes an excellent description of what can be a daily situation. “Living in Nørrebro, as a family of say Kurdish-Turkish origin, or of Pakistani origin, you most likely have complete access to both radio, TV, including satellite or cable TV, Internet access and mobile phones. At home, it is likely that the children in the family have a TV in their (shared) bedroom, and that there is a larger TV screen in the living room” (Tufte, 2009). The consumption of media is high, there’s no doubt, but the question is whether this media access is just symbolic.

Many would say that this is the reality of many places all over the world. Well, I would doubt it. I think one can find this situation in some specific cases, mainly in Northern Europe. Tufte highlights the fact that mainly 1^st, but also 2^nd and sometimes 3^rd generation immigrants consume media in a different way. They tend to use homeland media, instead of the public service media. The quid behind this question is that this ethnic minority does not feel representation or finds misrepresentation in the media (Tufte, 2009). Everyday, they turn on the TV they can watch stereotyped news with roots in the anger, exclusion and fear from unfairly associated terrorism acts. Thus, they prefer consuming culturally closer matters, such as Arab television in Danish, Turkish music, Latino leisure clubs, or Vietnamese restaurants, rather than the local media.

But, suddenly the other side of the mirror comes up. Tufte make focus on the example of the musical talent show, X-factor, “where a large number of the approximately 10 finalists in the Danish version of the programme where ethnic minority” (Tufte, 2009). In those moment, for media, terms such as nydansker, or 2^nd generation immigrant were not used anymore, but the finalists were referred to by their first names.

This is the first informational paradox, which is depicted as “I can have as much as access to the media as I want, but I don’t give a damn because I don’t find representation or my culture is mirrored in a wrong way full of stereotypes and sometimes exclusion”. Is this only a matter from Denmark, not really. It’s more obvious there, but still an issue in other countries, such as Spain. Differences, here, in Madrid, the alternative media consumption is not as big as in Denmark. We have some Chinese newspapers, Latino radio broadcasting and Arab channels, but still far from the Nørrebro effect. The access to media is more limited.

The second paradox is the correlation between how much information one can have and the fact that they don’t use it, as it is other people’s information. This thought came to me the first time I googled myself when I was living in Denmark. Yes, my whole address appeared on the screen of my laptop. Postal code, city, street and door’s number. I also saw that whoever who searched me could send me chocolates or flowers. That was lovely, but creepy in terms of who knows what kind of people could find out where I lived. Krak.dk is the website where apparently, and I don’t still know the reason, many people residing in Denmark appears. Anyways, the matter is not the surveillance issue or the lack of privacy, but do the Danes care about the possibility of knowing other people data.

But, there are two more issues about this access to someone else’s information. I realized that the Danish entry phones at the gateway have the owners’ last name, instead of just a “1^st floor to the right”, as it’s usual in other countries. So it seems not to be very difficult to get to know who lives in the building. In addition the lack of sun entails no curtains, so they can achieve as much light as possible. I can’t imagine that scene in my home country without someone on the streets spying what those “shameless Danes” do at home: If they have cleaned the house, if they invite many people, or if they cook or order food. Nevertheless, the reality is completely the opposite in Denmark. People can see, but they don’t look. Looking involves paying attention. Thus, as a Dane, I can accidentally see someone’s room from the streets, but I’m will not take a main role in Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ spying what others do. The same applies to the names on the entry phone at the gateway. It can be a “look, my last name is Petersen and here another Petersen lives” but never a “let’s see who resides in the third floor”.

The access to personal information is widely easier in Denmark than in other countries, but under the law of “mind your own business”. It’s a matter of respect for privacy. That means a lot from that Danish culture before information.