observationer

I've been living in the north of Europe for four years now. Can confirm that I expanded my horizons and learned a lot about myself and people here. But also people back home.

Let's start with some of the cultural shock I experienced. 

First thing I can point out is something I can call empathy leveling. Most of people are superficially distant and from a southern European perspective cold. Later you probably knew from the stereotypes like "it's cold but, standard,hey!". But, what I learned is if someone embraces you after some time,they are genuine in that. It's different situation from back home where you meet a person and it takes about 7 minutes to have a lifelong friendship feeling. You won't be invited to anyone's house for a year,but once you are,you can expect to have help with dismembering a body,no questions asked. 

On the other side, people are not cruel. In situations where facts are presented in a rational manner,even with alcohol present, people tend to keep their cool, accept new information and admit potential misjudgement. There's also a lack of action in potentially dangerous situations,something I can atribute to the trust in the institutions. I've heard more than one time that I shouldn't act and let the police/firefighters/ambulance deal with it.

Second huge shock was that noone covers their mouth when yawning. I remember vividly my 6th grade biology class teacher yelling at me that she's disgusted with the sight of my kidneys when I yawned and promptly kicked me out of the classroom.

Here people yawn in the middle of the sentence on a date powering through the yawn so the sentence wouldn't suffer. Imagine my surprise when I saw that for the first time on a gorgeous girl. 

Biological functions are also very much not taboo. Shitting is normally discussed among friends and lovers. I'm not going to go into details but I had a cute situation where I was driving a truly beautiful woman and she said that she has to fart. I was a bit taken by surprise but for some reason that spells closeness to me. Something that family does.

Seconds after that,she said through laughter that she shat herself. No embarrassment. Just a fact. But hilarious situation.

Next one is nudity.

I used to take my son to a local pool every weekend because he loves water. And the first time I went to leave my stuff in the locker room I was greeted with a sight of about 10 people of all ages having a friendly discussion among themselves. Butt naked. Scratching their balls, touching each other when someone makes a joke I suppose. And a woman, equally naked coming in to call her kid to come. Noone payed attention.

A few years ago I was with my friends from previous work place and we went to sit on one of millions of Copenhagen piers. All immigrants except for the two. In Denmark you can drink in public. In Sweden you can't. Mostly.

It was a warm day for the middle of May. 

So there were we, playing bunch of music from 4 continents and a young lady approaches us,sits next to us for a few minutes and promptly takes off her clothes and proceed to jump in the sea. All of us stopped talking. Except for the 2 Danes. It is so uncomfortable thinking about it because I am sure that we looked like bunch of creeps. Which we are,have to admit. But after she swam a bit she came out, stayed some time next to us and after she dried up she put on the clothes and left.

And the culture around bodies is so much healthier than I grew up with. Perhaps that's a personal thing. I'm not sure.

People just seem to enjoy their bodies more.

Sex is another one but I won't get into that now.

There's a lot of things that I find interesting here. I'll probably write more in the future. For now this is it.