It all started with a couple warm towels being handed to me by a smiling, tall blonde woman. I had just thrown up on my sweater and pants, it was 7 a.m., and my plane was about to land in the Copenhagen airport. I was miserable, but the graciousness of everybody around me made it hard to show my misery. I knew I smelled like puke, but nobody minded. "It happens all the time".
Denmark is full of such people, I soon found out. Smiling, tall, blonde, and gracious.
Yesterday I was walking to get a sandwich with my roomate, Christina, and a scruffy man with a hat on approached us on the street. Instinctively I became nervous, thinking that he was crazy or trying to heckle us as he showed Christina a picture in a tiny book while he muttered something in Danish. If I was still in DC it wouldn't have been unrealistic to assume he was crazy, homeless, or simply trying to bother two innocent young girls. "What did he say?" I asked as we walked away. "He wanted to know if I knew where the address was on that bus pass. He was trying to return it to the man who lost it. I guess he just found it on the ground." He was returning a bus pass that he found on the ground? To the man's home? I'm definitely not in America anymore.
"Take the 5A bus home," Christina told me as she waved goodbye after helping me get into the city, get a bus pass, and find my school. 5:00 came along and I saw the 5A as I approached the bus stop. I ran to catch it, hopped on, and thought that I was on my way home. About 30 minutes later I leaned over to the woman sitting across the row and asked, "Does this bus eventually reach Amager?" "Oh no! You are going the wrong way!" She then proceeded to tell me every detail of what I needed to do to get home, how long it would take me, and did not let me leave without assuring me that it would be easy to fix my mistake and giving me a smile big enough to instill just the amount of trust in her that I needed to make it home.
I have been here less than 48 hours, but I haven't run into a single rude or mean-spirited Dane. I sat by one child on my first bus, and one on the way home. When I got off the bus, I walked by a group of three children with a soccer ball, kicking it down the street. "Who lets these kids roam the city by themselves??" I thought. Then I realized that nothing was going to happen to them--it's Denmark. Nobody would dare harm a child.
