If there's one quirk about the Danes that seems to annoy both Americans and Brits more than anything, and that every one of them notices fairly quickly, it's the strange way that Danes behave in crowds.
The first thing you'll notice if, for example, you take a stroll on a sunny day through central Copenhagen, is that everyone seems to be very rudely bumping into you. In America and the UK (and probably other countries that I've never been to) there tends to be an unspoken rule about which side of the sidewalk to walk on so that everyone can pass without being jostled... in Denmark that unspoken rule doesn't seem to exist.
My husband warned me about this before I ever set foot here. He refers to it as their "lack of spacial awareness." My first experience with it was more than a year ago, when I visited Denmark for the first time. If I remember correctly, we were standing on the platform at the Roskilde train station and a woman turned around without looking and elbowed me. She didn't hit me hard enough to do any damage, but certainly hard enough that we both noticed. Or, should have noticed. She didn't seem even vaguely aware that she'd done it. Had this happened in America, even in cities that are considered to have the rudest people, she would have at the very least turned around and apologized before going about her business.
This is not the case in Denmark. Indeed, it must be such a normal thing that apologizing didn't seem to even cross her mind.
Foreigners that I've spoken to about this usually think that this behavior among Danes is extraordinarily rude. Personally, I don't think it's actively rude, but it is certainly passively rude. Rudeness through obliviousness, or perhaps a certain social awkwardness that makes talking to strangers too scary.
Even if it's to apologize for accidentally hitting them.
In fact, there's another side to this "spacial awareness" coin, and I think it very much relates to this awkward fear of talking to strangers...
Let me set the scene: This particular grocery store is set up so that as you enter, there's a bakery counter on the right, and the cash registers on the left. This can create a small bottleneck if there are people finishing checking out, a line at the bakery, and someone trying to enter to store. Yesterday, I encountered this very scenario as I was leaving. One woman in line at the bakery was clearly standing directly in the way of a women with a stroller trying to enter the store. I would have politely tapped the woman on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me." The woman with the stroller, however, instead of talking to a stranger who was quite obliviously standing directly in the middle of the walkway, moved a stack of grocery baskets out of the way so that she could squeeze past without touching the other woman.
The question I have is this: Do the Danes find making their way through crowds as awkward and frustrating as we foreigners to? Do they know that there's a better way?
I say we foreigners band together to teach them. Who's with me?
I am in! :-) Still haven;t got over the akwardness of it.
ReplyDeleteI just wanted to add a danish perspective to this.
ReplyDeleteI think you're misinterpreting these situations. Danes are not scared of talking to strangers, it's just considered impolite to do so. The notion is that it's respectful not to impose. I think it's the jante law shining through. The notion of not demanding attention, because that would imply that you are better than others.
The woman at the trainstation was being rude. The polite thing to do, would have been to offer an apologetic smile, and possibly a subdued verbal apology. Not the gushing kind that you would likely get in the US, since it's considered very rude to impose on strangers by engaging them in a conversation.
The other situation, with the woman standing in the walkway, I would probably have done what the woman with the stroller did. It all comes down to the social convention that everybody is equal. Therefore, I don't have any right to demand that someone else move, just because it would be convenient to me. It would be rude to demand that someone else got out of my way. In stead, I would either do what the woman with the stroller did, or I would walk close to the woman in the walkway and stand there, waiting for her to spot me and move on her own initiative.
This social convension of letting people mind their own buisness and not inconveniencing them by talking to them can be a little ridiculous sometimes. On the other hand, it's nice that you can be "private in public" sometimes. Some of these unwritten rules don't really make a lot of sense, when you put them in writing :-)
/ Ash
I certainly appreciate hearing the reasoning behind it from a Danish perspective. The issue then becomes bigger when Danes stick to these older social norms in a country that's becoming more and more diverse. While these social behaviors may work among the Danes, foreigners often find them rude and disconcerting. As for me, I believe that the woman with the stroller in the grocery store had every right to say a quiet "Undskyld" to the other woman. The other woman was taking up far more than her fair share of space in a high-traffic area. It's not so much demanding that someone move, but quietly requesting that they pay a bit more attention to what's happening around them for the sake of everyone else's convenience, without really inconveniencing themselves in any meaningful way.
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