Sort of about research, sort of about Janteloven

I have been known to fall for a couple of April Fool's jokes in the past. The best one being that Virgin Atlantic had designed a bottom glass plane, so passengers would be able to see the ground whilst in the air. I didn't share on Facebook, although that's how I discovered it, but I remember thinking "God, that's so cool" without taking a second to think about why that actually wouldn't be practical or possible. Am I glad I didn't share. When it was revealed by 12pm that all the enthusiastic sharers had been tricked, goodness only knows how many people had been taken in by it, such is the power of the internet. (I'm going somewhere with this, I promise).

I stopped going on expat forums and I left pretty much all the expat Facebook groups apart from Expat In Denmark. Why? Because there's a lot of crap and a lot of the comments/posts are simply parroted sweeping generalisations about Danes and/or Denmark. It also quickly becomes clear, when challenged, that things are simply being repeated and not researched. Common statements out there in cyberspace are that Danes are cold, Danes are all racists, Danes tell you off for putting the wrong toppings on rye bread etc (by the way, I don't know why anyone would put smoked salmon on rye bread - the bread overpowers the fish).

Janteloven, however, is the one that annoys me most.

A quick Google of Janteloven (or Jante's Law)  will lead you to believe that a Dane will knock you down if you ever dare achieve something. Janteloven is also something I only ever hear expats cry about. Hand on heart. I have only ever had one Dane refer to Janetloven and it was as a joke comment to my husband's Facebook status which boasted that we were in sunny Thailand, and everyone else was in rainy Denmark. Other than that, never heard it uttered from a Dane in seriousness.

I'm writing about this because expat forums are flooded with disgruntled people who claim that Danes don't like it when people do well. Based on my own research and experience with speaking to Danes (friends, family, colleagues, networking) I believe this to be a myth.

When I finally got a job, when we bought our first flat, when my husband bagged himself a new client ... we all got genuine congratulations. All of those things were big achievements, so congratulations were deserved. What is not looked upon kindly here (in my experience anyhow) - and this actually goes for the UK too - is when people brag. And I'm not talking the sort of bragging that parents do when their kids get brilliant school grades - that's bragworthy - but I'm talking the crass, unclassy sort of bragging conducted by who we call in the UK, and I apologise in advance for the language, Billy Big Bollocks. The swaggery types who march around and think they're better than everyone else. The arrogant types who exist to have power. The Donald Trump wannabes who flash the cash unnecessarily. Those are the sorts of people I hear put down in conversation and, in my opinion, rightly bloody so. To be so arrogant is uncouth, and I like enjoy it if and when I see such people taken down a peg or two. That is how I define Janteloven. It exists in more countries than Denmark - it just so happens that there's a Danish word for it.

Please feel free to agree or disagree, I always welcome discussion.

Just speak it. My progress with Danish contd.

I've lived in Denmark for one year and twenty days. When I first got here I could, thanks to a Teach Yourself series and my husband, hold a very basic conversation if the person spoke slowly. How are you, my name is, etc etc. Now, according to my husband, I am borderline fluent in the language. I didn't think it would be this quick (and please note that I say "borderline") but I am obviously pretty proud of that achievement, so I thought I would share how I managed this. A follow up from this post.

If you have read previous posts on the blog you will know that I have a Danish husband. Before we moved to Copenhagen he taught me some basic Danish. He thought that I could have soaked up more but to be honest, with a full time job working in London this just wasn't possible. Of course if I put my mind to it and dedicated all of my spare time to it, there's no doubt I would have been better equipped when I moved over. Nevertheless, I had a bit more of a head start than a lot of people which is definitely better than nothing. If you do not have the luxury of being with a Danish partner or friend in your first days of the move, or before you have moved, then Google online courses. www.danskherognu.dk is a good one.

This preparation held me in good stead for language school. Like many expats here, I wasn't able to land a job before moving over to Copenhagen so once my CPR number was in order, I registered to go to language class four times a week so I could up my Danish as much as possible. The first couple of modules in language class gave me a really good grounding in terms of grammar and Danish etiquette. I also went to the Sprog Cafe they ran every Monday so I could practice what I had learnt in class with other expats and volunteers from Røde Kors (Red Cross). Considering the amount of people at the school, not a great percentage of people showed up for this which is a shame as just speaking the language is the best opportunity. If your language school offers something like this, go for it. If not, you can advertise on websites such as Couchsurfing or InterNations for a language swap - particularly if your first language is not English - or you can advertise in local cafes. Quite a few of my Danish circle are interested in other languages, particularly the Romance languages. Give it a go. If you don't have this opportunity or if it is not successful, there are meet-up groups such as The Danish Language Speakers where you meet Danes and other expats and have everyday conversations, but in Danish.

Saying that, I have now given up language school. I completed modules 1-3 and got near to the end of module 4 but I found it was no longer benefitting me. By the time I had gotten to module 4 I had switched to evening school on account of my (then new) job so I had two very long days twice a week. But it wasn't just that. Because I was putting my Danish into practice wherever I could, the stuff we were learning at language school just wasn't cutting it for me anymore. I got so much more out of, for example, picking up phrases from my sister-in-law in an evening and speaking with my in-laws whenever I could. Watching the Danish news everyday out of habit also really really helped. Back to talking about school, I also had a fairly patronising teacher - there was a German guy in my class who spoke Danish very well as he spoke it at work, however he wanted to improve his written skills. One assignment we had was to write a short story - fair enough, this will help in terms of improving one's writing skills - however when my German classmate had to read it aloud, our Danish teacher started gasping at 'exciting' parts and kept saying "woooow!" all the way through. At the end, instead of feeding back something constructive, she said to the whole class: "wow! Vi har vores egen H.C Andersen!"
Maybe it's just me, but I don't need that sort of crap when learning a language, certainly not at the age I'm at and certainly not at the level we were at where most of us were fairly proficient already in terms of what I call advanced conversational Danish. Like I said, I was picking up most things from my family and the television. The last straw for me with language school was the teacher bringing in this really old fashioned kiddie bingo game where we had to describe what was on the card. The sort of crap that we were doing in module 2 (and I found it patronising back then too). It was the last Danish lesson I went to and I don't regret it one bit.

I said in an early post of mine that language school will not be the golden ticket to fluency and I really do stand by that. There is only so much that you will pick up in a classroom environment - for me it was the basics. I then pretty much took the language and ran with it. I just spoke it. I am now at a stage where I can reserve a table at a restaurant over the phone, I have most conversations with Danish friends and family in Danish and people very very rarely now switch to English whereas a year ago it would be the source of many a frustration in the supermarket, restaurant, etc. It wasn't easy to get to the standard that I am at and I still have quite a way to go before I consider myself completely fluent but I did get over the hump just through sheer perseverance. If you feel you haven't quite gotten over that hump then you just need to keep going.

Keep practising. Keep talking. You'll get there - just speak it.

Expat experiences of a native Dane (who also happens to be my husband)

Wow, I've not written for a while. I have started a couple of posts with random musings but I'm not happy enough with them to post them. So in order to get this up and active again, I asked my husband to write a post. Before we get into this, let me introduce him a little so you have an idea of what he's like.

Philip comes from Frederiksberg. For those of you that don't know Copenhagen, Frederiksberg is a municipality in Copenhagen. Philip has lived abroad three times (USA, Italy and the UK) and is very well travelled - we actually met in a Manila hostel. We now live in Vesterbro (soon relocating to Frederiksberg) and Philip works from home as a translator. So, his own expat experience coupled with 1) him being a native Dane and 2) his talent for writing I thought made him a good candidate for a guest post. Here he writes about his experiences when he lived in Southern Italy. Enjoy!

"When Nicola asked me to write this, I agreed immediately. Then I started wondering what I had gotten myself into. After all, what did I know about relocating to Denmark? I thought for a while about writing from my own point of view about expats I had met in Denmark, where they had gone right and wrong, but it seemed awfully pompous. Then it dawned on me that I actually had relocated to Denmark. Back in 2002 and 2003 I spent about nine months studying English in Washington, two years later I went to Italy for three months to teach English, and then about six years after that, in 2011, I lived in London for about a year and a half. Each time I came back to Copenhagen, in effect relocating.

As I’m sure you can guess, returning to my home country was not much of a shock. The time I spent in southern Italy, however, was. I consider these three months one of the most challenging, frustrating, and rewarding experiences of my entire life. I didn’t know the language, I didn’t have any contacts that I had met in person, and I was going to teach for the first time in my life. I had signed up for something called the Comenius program, an internship as an assistant teacher, and all I had was a place to live and a women’s bicycle with Winnie the Pooh stickers on it to take me the 2.5 kilometers to school and back. As I discovered, life in southern Italy is quite different from northern Europe. The days were brutally hot, the nights were warm and soothing. I found people to be very friendly, almost exclusively, but they rarely spoke any English, and my Italian was clumsy at best.

I decided to sign up for Italian classes. They were free, and at first they seemed perfect. The teacher spoke nothing but Italian. She was friendly, yet strict about pronunciation and grammar. But she did have a habit of being on her phone a lot. Even after the lessons had officially started, she would leave the room to talk on the phone, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes. Adding to the problem, she had been burdened by some cost-saving decisions by the school management, which meant she had to accept a few Italian people, aged sixty or seventy, who were illiterate. They were kind people, trying to make up for lost time, but every class had a portion allocated to them – our teacher would write letters on the blackboard, which frankly was a waste of time for the rest of us. This went on for a few weeks, until further cost-cutting led to more newcomers. This time it was “people with problems” as our teacher called it, people of lower than average IQ. They were not there to learn per se, simply to be watched. Every once in a while one of them, Vito, would get up in the middle of class and leave, and our teacher had to chase him down the hallway, telling him: “Vito, no.” It was getting so that we barely had any time to learn in class, so I decided to quit. I still had Italian TV. I still had a beginner’s and an intermediate Italian book, which I would read many times over. Also, whenever I went to this one café to use their internet and have a coffee, the owners would talk to me, perfectly happy that I didn’t say much and often had to ask them to repeat themselves. They knew that I taught at the local high school, which somehow made them like me. One of them would talk at great lengths about the Roman empire, getting into complex grammar and speculation, which caused me problems. Sentences like: “If the Roman empire had not fallen, then…” Another guy working there had trouble understanding why I wasn’t fluent in Italian. He had a theory that words in Italian mirrored what they meant. “Cavallo!” he would say with a majestic air, as if it were obvious that it meant “horse”. A third person was always exasperated with the second person, asking me to forgive him.
As this was all in Italian, I was continually at a disadvantage. I would miss parts of sentences, sometimes vital parts. Embarrassment would ensue. But I kept getting a little bit better. This turned out to be an advantage in my job as a teacher. For example, I was initially thrown by the fact that my students got the words “time” and “weather” mixed up, until I learned that they were both “tempo” in Italian. Sometimes, people would invite me for social gatherings and the Italian that I had picked up would once again be a considerable advantage. At the end of the three months I had made a few friends (none of whom I have any contact with today, but I still consider them friends), and I was able to converse with people in Italian if they spoke slowly.

Relocating to Denmark is challenging in a different way. People tend to be very willing to speak English, which can be a disadvantage when you want to learn Danish. It might be harder to find that place where they’ll talk to you in Danish non-stop. But there are always ways, there are books, there is television, there is risking embarrassment to get better at a foreign language. People tend to pick up on it if you’re willing to invest your time and energy in learning the language of their country, and from there on all elements feed off one another. Knowing Danish makes reading Danish more fun, it makes watching Danish television more satisfying, it makes it easier to meet new people. The frustration might still poke its head out, but you will progress. And if something truly isn’t working – like lessons – face up to it and find a different way. 

Sometimes that’s where the fun lies."

Expectations: part 1 - service

Even before I moved to Denmark, I tried to get actively involved in the online expat community. I distinctly remember an expat here writing "you wait until you get here ... " in response to one of my posts, I imagine with a virtual wagging finger and evil cackle. Apparently I was naive in stating that my experience with Danes had been positive. Apparently that was impossible. Apparently service is just DREADFUL. Apparently this. Apparently that.

To be honest, I'm unsure what people expect. Service wise, the majority of arguments I have read cite the kassedame at Netto/Bilka/Brugsen etc., or people who work in the kommune. Friends wise, I have heard too many arguments on those oh-so-cold Danes. Jobs wise, I should be shocked that I got a job as a foreigner given how workplaces here will never give up a precious job opening to a foreigner. Costs wise, I should probably be surprised that I'm not pleading poverty.

So - I'm going to share my experiences and thoughts. So I'll start with service. My Danish husband and I enjoy good service. Nay, we as the customer deserve good service. But our expectations of what good service actually is differs from place to place. I work in retention marketing (and love it) and it is my job to provide a good user experience and customer service so I have very high standards, depending on the place and what I expect to get from the experience. My husband is just ever so slightly more forgiving than me, but it's a fine line.

Anyway, back to topic, let's talk food shopping. When doing the food shop, I have absolutely no desire to talk to anyone. My goal is to go in, get food, pay, pack, cycle home. I don't go in to make friends. I don't go in for conversation. Am I strange for this? I have read so many people moaning about how the service is bad in supermarkets. But what should we be expecting here? A full on conversation? How's your day going/how are the kids/etc? Don't think so. The cashiers in my local supermarkets (I'm in the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen) will always say "hav en god dag!" with a smile before quickly moving onto the next customer which I think is nice enough - like I say, I'm not in there to make friends and a miserable face at the till will not make me boycott a supermarket.I have to say though - the service in the independent places close to me, such as the greengrocers and smaller delis, tends to be great. Particularly a lovely little French deli near Frederiksberg called Le Gourmand, especially if the older guy is behind the counter.

Now for restaurants/bars/hotels. THIS is where I want good service. I'm not in there to make friends, but I am in there to potentially make a long term relationship with the place. If I get bad service in a bar/restaurant etc., I will and have boycotted places. The only places in terms of this sort of service where I'm more forgiving are the bodegas. You need to be tough to run one of those bad boys and I actually quite like the rough around the edges feel about it. A sweet smile just wouldn't feel right. From a restaurant I expect to be welcomed with a smile, I expect menus to be handed to me - not shoved or thrown - and I expect to have the full attention from whoever is serving. I think that's fair. On my part, I always go in with a smile as well. I pay particular attention to service in these establishments and I always remember good service. Always. It makes me want to go back. Anyway, my experiences here in Copenhagen haven't actually been that bad. I can count on one hand the number of places I have boycotted due to bad service. But, particularly recently, I have had a lot of brilliant service. Maybe it's because I've been paying more attention recently and so I've made more of a mental note, but who cares why. The fact is that good service does exist here. So, I've listed the places at the end of the blog where I have had good service, because 1) I think they deserve to be visited and 2) they do an excellent job of rebutting the broken record of "Denmark = bad service". Copenhagen isn't that bad. Trust me. I do however need to maintain that we as the customer have our part to play in service too, albeit smaller - always go in with a smile and good manners.
With bars my expectations are a little lower than restaurants but still high - I once went to a bar with my friend visiting from the UK and it took approximately three minutes before I was served, even though I was the only one there. One girl was crouching down behind the till, fiddling with the bar's iPod, and the guy standing behind the bar had his back to the beer taps and was chatting away to his co-worker. When I finally got served it was almost with a look of annoyance. Needless to say, we drank our beers and then got the hell out of there. I haven't been back since. (To be fair however I tend to stick with bodegas in terms of bars so I don't have *that* much experience with bars so I hope they're not all like that!)
Hotels ... well, as I live here I haven't had that much need for a hotel. However I did stay in Hotel Kong Arthur in the centre of Copenhagen for my wedding, and we've recently come back from a short trip to Jutland - we stayed in a hotel just outside Horsens for one night. But in both (very different) hotels, the service we received was great. Hotel Kong Arthur were extremely professional and very friendly - my parents stayed at the same hotel for five nights and were very happy with the service there. No rudeness. The hotel in Horsens was a different but just as pleasant experience - the girl on reception when we arrived was genuinely friendly and the guy on reception on checkout was just as friendly. As soon as he learnt that I was from the UK he switched to English but not because he thought I didn't understand Danish (as it was, his accent was quite difficult to understand so I was relieved!) but because he seemed quite proud that he had lived there for a while and just wanted to converse. I was made to feel very welcome in different ways by both hotels.

Service businesses e.g. cycle shops/mechanics. I expect to be treated with respect here - I'm the customer and they are the expert. We don't own a car so we don't use mechanics but we have used three cycle places since moving here. Two out of the three offered professional help, one in particular was very friendly, and the third one were just plain rude (we haven't been back there either).

I could go on, I really could. I've been making a point of paying real attention to the service I get in different places this month - I have to admit that I've had more good than bad. But then again - I research the hell out of pretty much everything, especially restaurants. TripAdvisor is my bible in that regards. If there are too many comments about bad service then I won't risk it.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to reassure people that it's not all bad here. Good service doesn't lack - you just need to know where to go. To help, here are the eateries where I got good service - and good food.

Spisehuset 56
Enomania
Les Trois Cochons
Spuntinos
Marv & Ben
Peder Oxe
Pintxos Tapas
Strangas

Enjoy.

Let me know what you think.

Another post about networking

Whether you are already an expat in Denmark or whether you are still thinking of moving to Denmark, you will probably have read on every single expat website the importance of building a network. My blog is not excluded from this - I have mentioned in past posts about the job hunt that networking is important. The thing is, you read about building networks so much that it almost seems like flippant advice. Take it from me, though - it's not flippant. It genuinely is important.


How do I find work in Denmark? 
<insert generic job sites>, <government websites>, oh, and networking is important.
Oh. No new info, I guess.

So yes, many many posts on why networking is important in your job hunt, but fewer posts on how to do it. When I have mentioned the importance of networking to people in person, I can see that they have heard that advice many times and it is often met with a slight nod of the head, a yes-I-have-heard-that-already answer, or even an eye roll (this actually happened to me once). But what the eye-roller and many others didn't and don't seem to realise is that by talking to me and/or others, be it at language school or an expat event, they are networking. Every time you shake hands with somebody new, every time you are introduced to somebody even in a casual way, every time you chat with people at language school, you are networking.

Take the eye-roller. That irritated me. I had been asked a question and I had tried to give practical advice, which was met with what I think is an incredibly rude gesture. But what if I had actually been in a position to help this person? As far as this lady was concerned, I was just another expat in Denmark at language school, learning the complicated language that Danish is. But for all she knew, I could have worked in recruitment. She could have had the skill set for a job I was trying to fill. But after being met with that attitude, I didn't really want anything further to do with her other than be civil. It's the way I feel about bad service - treat me badly and I will put up with a bad waiter (for example) for as long as I am forced to, but once our time is over I will not come back and certainly not recommend the establishment. I'll give another example closer to what we're talking about, in one of my old jobs I had an assistant. She started out well but then started to come in late, started to come back from lunch nearly drunk and then got into the habit of coming in hungover. She soon left, and I was relieved. A few months down the road she applied for a job where a lady worked with whom I had a very strong professional relationship with strong mutual trust. She had gotten the CV and saw the old workplace, where she knew I worked. She called me for a recommendation and of course I could not give a glowing one, after the behaviour I had seen. We call that burning bridges.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the frustrations of job hunting in Denmark and I know it's difficult - I was unemployed for seven months with very little to apply for, let alone have a chance of interview. However, even if you have heard the old networking advice for the umpteenth time do not eye-roll, do not dismiss -  for when you are talking, no matter where you are, you are networking without realising.

Still with me? Good.

So yes, I believe that you are nearly always networking. Whether posting on an expat forum, LinkedIn (especially if you are posting on LinkedIn), going along to an expat event or language school then you are networking.

Please do not get sucked into the downward spiral of moaning and eye-rolling, no matter how frustrated you are with the job search as, again, you do not know who might be able to help you. You won't be able to help feeling frustrated but use this energy in the search for a job. I got SO frustrated but every knock back just made me more determined. I got rejected from one job after the first interview stage and when I spoke to the interviewer for feedback I asked him at the end of the conversation if he minded me adding him on LinkedIn and he was happy to oblige - as I kept it professional and friendly, I knew that if I heard of another opening in that company then I would be able to contact him and ask him about it.

And what would a blog post of mine be without a list? Here's a very quick guide on how to network at different places.

1. LinkedIn (ok, so you may have read this before - I always write about it)
- Join Denmark based groups relevant to your job field
- Introduce yourself and explain your career experience but do NOT use this introduction to ask for a job
- Participate in discussions - this is your chance to shine and show off your knowledge. By doing this you are getting your name out there and showing the Danish job market what you are made of and what you can offer
DO NOT
- beg for a job in your first post
- simply click 'Add Connection' without any personal message as you will more than likely be ignored, and I fully agree with this. I hold my hands up as guilty for when I first arrived - I thought that simply by trying to add people in similar circles that I would really up my network. Some people added me without questioning but one day somebody simply said: "we have a policy of not connecting with people we do not know" - was taken aback at first but I now agree. Networking is not just about having 500+ on LinkedIn - it's about what you do with the existing ones you have, and building up quality contacts over time - not quantity.

2. Expat events*
- If, like me, you are a member of InterNations then try to research who will be at the event
- Again referring to InterNations, message one of the guests to tell them that you noticed they worked for Company X/have experience in Y/etc .. and would they like to meet at the meet up for half an hour? There, you can exchange email addresses and LinkedIn info
- For all expat events; look for somebody on their own. They will be willing to talk to you and it will be less scary than trying to infiltrate a group conversation. Introduce yourself confidently, smile, explain what brought you to Denmark, what you are doing now, and what you would like to do in the future. Perhaps they know somebody ...
- Firm handshake. Always a firm handshake.
- If there are no meet-up groups that suit you, why not start your own? I met a very good professional contact of mine via a marketing professionals meet up group that he started. Before I got my permanent job I was seriously considering going freelance - I happened to mention this to him and he suggested that he make some introductions for me (two weeks after that conversation I got a permanent job but it is a good connection to have there)
DO NOT
- stand alone. Do not wait for people to come to you but at the same time, do not force yourself on a group either. Introduce yourself with "hi, would you mind if I joined you?" - nobody will mind.
- get into the habit of slagging off Denmark. No matter how you feel about the place, this is not the time nor place to do it.


3. Language school
- Smile!
- Talk to your classmates in the break. Put down your phone and talk to people. Get to know them. Eventually you'll know what their professional background is, they'll know yours, you can exchange details for Facebook but also get their LinkedIn details. Use each others' networks. Who knows who knows who.
DO NOT
- see the second DO NOT under 'Expat events'. Although language school is more relaxed, if you get into the habit of slagging off Denmark/Danes with others, you'll get sucked down into a negative spiral and it'll start to show in the way you present yourself. By all means, voice a frustration but come back with a solution: "I feel X way, but to rectify this, I shall do Y .. " etc.

4. Online forums inc. expat groups on Facebook
- similar to LinkedIn. Introduce yourself and give a little bit about your professional background, why you are in Denmark
- start a relevant thread that is relevant for you. Do not piggy back onto the back of somebody else's thread. Otherwise who exactly are responders supposed to give advice to?
- always acknowledge when somebody has replied to you. Remember that nobody is obliged to give you any advice so when they do, thank them for it. When people ignore my advice on online forums, it is tantamount to the eye rolling girl - I do not like it as I believe this to be rude, and will be very unlikely to help them again (I will however give the poster the benefit of the doubt as they may have not seen it the first time)
DO NOT
- ignore people's advice

There you go. It's been (another) long post, but I hope you found it useful. Any other tips please leave below.