Danish Swim

There’s a big public health-club type place downtown called DGI-Byen. “Byen” means “town” or “city” so this name means something like “Danish Gymnastic Institute City”—you get the idea. It’s kind of a mega-gym.

They have all sorts of facilities and different types of pools there, including a really cool one that’s shaped like a donut. It’s sort of like swimming in an indoor canal, with walkways overhead. One circuit is 100 meters, so if you swim ten times around that’s one kilometer. I’ve bought and used two 10x entry cards so I’ve been there 20 times over the past six months or so. Louis has come with me a few times.

The swimming is fine—I’m the slowest swimmer in town, at least among that part of the population that has the use of all four limbs. But the locker room is a cultural experience all by itself. On a busy Sunday it’s packed—lots of fathers with young children. There are always plenty of naked toddlers (boys and girls) running up and down the aisles calling out “Far!” (Dad!). Along with the Danes there are Turks, Russians, and any number of other ethnicities represented. In the shower area there are typically 20-30 people: old, young, fat, thin, really fat, tattooed, circumcised, uncircumcised, hairy, bald. Babies in little plastic tubs line one side of the room.

This is about a close as I’ve gotten to the “communal” Scandinavian experience. There is a certain collective trust that applies here—a sense of “we”-ness, that allows Danish parents to park their baby carriages outside cafes while they go inside for coffee—leaving the babies in the carriages. The parklands north of town, along the way to work, are full of individual people strolling along the paths and there is not that sense of mistrust and anxiety you might experience if you met a stranger along a forest path in the US. And there are so many more pedestrians here that the byways all feel somehow…convivial.

But for a family of Americans working for an American company and sending their child to an international school, most of our exposure to Danish-ness is superficial. That’s why we still take Danish lessons—Michael is Denmark’s unwitting ambassador to our family, a role he seems to relish. So when he brings tabloid magazines featuring pictures of the royal family and starts explaining who’s who, we listen intently though a day or two later we’ve forgotten all the names.

There are some Americans at work who came here a decade or more ago, by themselves, in their 20s. They met Danes and got married. They speak Danish, take Danish vacations, visit Danish in-laws, and complain about the kinds of things that Danes tend to complain about. Part of me is jealous of them, or at least jealous of the transition they’ve been able to make that I never will make. But it isn't specific jealousy--a sense that this is something that I *should* have done. Just a regret that I can't absorb and know all that there is to know and absorb about Denmark and being Danish.