On visiting a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
January 10, 2011

Copenhagen, Denmark
The first thing I notice are the tall stacks of apartments--dozens of buildings similar in design, height, facade, graffiti-scarred exterior doors--thousands of apartments neatly built on top of one another. Some have views of the local park, most look out onto windows of other apartments, row upon row.

It feels like cage living even though there is freedom to move; few do because living here in this working-class neighborhood is what they can afford and convenient to the city center.

Here there are also small neighborhood stores, cafes, a butcher shop, an ethnic restaurant, food markets to supply the locals with daily bread and veggies, places to park bikes and bus lines streaming to work in the city. The daily routine for the employed or home-maker is waking up, breakfast, out to work or food shop, walk the baby in a carriage, take the dog for a walk on a leash, clean house, work at the business office, back home for dinner (when people can see into many windows at others' domestic order).

As generally organized and tidy, quiet and friendly as things appear I also notice how diverse is the neighborhood with a mix of younger scraggly unemployed males, Middle Eastern women under headscarves, middle class Danes with kids and big strollers, wobbly oldsters with walkers, trendy twenty-somethings in black, some LGBT couples, Muslim-owned small-variety-shop keepers, white Lutherans and a Danish Thai soup place near a Vietnamese eatery.

A person acclimates to his or her own life, circumscribed by work, relationships, dwelling, neighborhood, money, political/social system. We go to school, or not, get a job that suits us, more or less, have kids, ready or not, and develop a daily routine, for the most part, that provides us with an acceptable level of comfort or ennui.

And we go on as we can. Generally satisfied or accepting our acclimatized life and don't look, or do look, for more than what we can achieve by our own efforts. Here in Denmark socialized medical care also helps maintain an appearance of contentment. So life continues with the heralded Skandic quality lifestyle so admired around the world.

Things work well here--the buses, the clocks, the electricity, steam heat, the opera house, Tivoli, the Queen's appearances and even the self-regulating-dope-dealing affairs in Christiania alternative village across the canal; books in the ultra-modern King's National Library are checked out electronically and all across town freshly made bread and pastries each early morning fill the window shelves of the bakeries. Crime is low (incarcerated criminals get paid for labor at standard wages).

And yet I doubt I should choose to live in this efficient society and city full time, much as I admire efficiency and reliable infrastructure. It's much like Switzerland here, which is a good thing.

My hesitation is that it's all so predictable, repeatable, so well ordered and self-perpetuating that after a while I crave a bit of Asian disorder and African unreliability. The street kitchens of Bangkok woking food at one in the morning or a noisy crush during a Buddhist holiday or a public water dousing at Songkran (photo right). Or the chaos of Lusaka's (Zambia) bus station when a seven AM departure really means eight-thirty and crossing the border from Mozambique to Malawi means a pot-holed dirt road and an indolent customs agent eating breakfast from a plastic bag as he fondles my passport (or tells me to come back tomorrow). Or a color-splashed Nepalese festival--take your pick of 40!

Compare that to the ultra-sleek, on-time, spotless Danish trains that cross the Oresund Sound underground between Denmark and Sweden exactly every thirty minutes with no suggestion of a passport.

I seem to fall within that range of interest and desire that wants both the best and worst of civilized life, today's convenient technology and yesterday's uncertain self-reliance. Clean and gritty. A sinfully delicious Danish pastry (photo above left) and the mystery of a Chinese dim sum or Nepalese politics.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once suggested, "a foolish consistency is the hobglobin of little minds." That's not really true--but something in that direction.