Our first year of living…
…Danishly? With all apologies to Helen Russell (Great book, you should read it if you’re considering moving abroad, especially if you’re considering moving to Denmark). I posted an old archive link from our Going Smaller blog the other day, which I had written about 6 weeks into our great Danish adventure.
It’s difficult to say if things have changed a lot since then. Getting settled in, whether it’s a new home across town from your old one, or a brand-new home in a brand-new country is more of a slow evolution. Mostly you don’t notice what has been normal and what still feels “different” until you pause to really reflect on it.
Life, Daily
Our day-to-day has pretty much normalized. Of course, we’re in summer break right now from school, so it throws the norm off a little bit. An 8km ride to where day camp is, rather than the barely 1km ride to school. Next week there’s no camp, so R and C will be playing it by ear most of the time. A week currently showing a mix of some sun, some rain, and some thunderstorms.
We’ve figured out where to get our groceries most of the time. Sometimes it’s still a frustration to find something specific, and certain frustrations never go away — like getting a decent size box of cereal, so instead you buy two with twice the packaging and twice the waste. Cereal going to waste due to getting a stale is a very remote possibility in a house with an 8-year-old living in it. But we are able to cook the vast majority of our meals. The quality of the protein here still never ceases to amaze, the produce when we get it ourselves is quite good, though again with massive amounts of plastic packaging and waste. The milk and cream we can buy is amazingly good.
Some things remain a bit of a mystery on how you go about them — or maybe we’re doing it like everyone else and just don’t realize it. Getting a grill set up, for instance. In the US, if you want to grill, you probably buy your grill, your propane, and any other supplies you might need from a single store. Two stores if you happen to buy the grill at Costco and then get everything else you need at Home Depot or Ace Hardware. But the hoses are very standardized, the selection is enormous, and your biggest problem is picking what you want from all the choices.
Compare that to here, where we are now on week three of getting our grill setup. Grill from one (online) shop, table from another (online) shop, gas hose (which I also bought from online shop and was the wrong adapter for tanks they sell in Denmark) from another shop, propane tank from a local gas station (which was close enough, but had to look up — not having a car means you don’t tend to pay much attention to where the closest gas station is), hose clamps to seal the gas cable will be coming from yet another store because the replacement hose/regulator that was supposed to have them in the box didn’t. No one store sells all the things, and even if they did, you’d have to transport them somehow without a car (propane tank in a cargo bike on poorly paved roads is a scary proposition). And you’re usually selecting from a choice of one. Maybe two if you’re lucky.
That, in itself, isn’t really a problem, it’s just a story that ends up replicating itself often. There feels like there is a greater level of difficulty in everything you do. And there is — that is part of immigrant life. This is not your home, your culture, and you’re still learning all these things, usually with a language barrier that adds to the challenge.
Blue Skies
Despite frustrations, and I won’t lie — there are many — we have been enjoying our time. The travel in particular has been lovely and looking to get better. C’s long-term consultancy with a boutique Seattle area tech firm came to a close some months ago, and thankfully we can make that work, fiscally speaking. She’s been cooking, working on her own hobbies and goals — making more art, writing more, cooking most of our meals, probably shouldering too much of the parenting while my own work has amped up and demanded ever more of my time. Since moving, we have had the privilege to visit Paris, Alicante in Spain, Billund in Denmark, and London. We just got back from a weeklong road trip through Sweden which took us to Gothenburg and Stockholm.
In a few more weeks, we’ll finally get to make up for the cruise we were going to take in April of 2020 that never happened (something something covid). It was supposed to be our first cruise ever; after it getting cancelled, then one aborted attempt to re-schedule it until we realized this covid thing wasn’t going away, and finally we just put on indefinite hold until we felt safer doing it. Money tossed into our savings account until we could book a new cruise someday. C idly browsing Disney’s cruise offerings and noticed they had a screaming deal on a veranda state room for August. Of this year. In a fashion very unlike us, we booked it later that same day. We normally plan these things for weeks or months in advance before booking them. This cruise, however, starts its journey at the Copenhagen cruise terminal a 25-minute walk from our home. It also returns there. No train, no plane, just a bus or maybe a taxi if we’re feeling like we don’t want to schlep our bags. Not a bad way to finally get to try our first time cruising and see if we like it.
We have more travel planned before the end of the year. Two trips to Spain that have been booked for months — one to Barcelona during the fall break, and then a December trip to Mallorca so we get some much-needed mid-winter sunshine.
Life Goes On
School will resume in mid-August. R loves his school, loves his friends, and is thriving now that he’s finally getting to experience “normal, non-covid protocol school”. We still bike almost everywhere, though we often use the metro or train for longer trips, sometimes even with our bikes. We’ll get to enjoy the next few months of summer like weather with our fully furnished home, our bikes, and our growing familiarity with this place we find ourselves living in.
This entry to our story might feel a bit negative at times, but that’s largely because all the good things are just that: good. Perfect may well be the enemy of good, and when it comes to learning to live in a new country with fairly different culture, norms, and expectations, we have found that to be more true than any other time in our life. Embrace the good, try and let the frustrations shed like water off a duck, and just enjoy living.
