Hello all once again~

As someone who loves running on trails and discovering new paths wherever I go, I found it strange how I’ve encountered less green spaces in my stay in Copenhagen than I did in Wellesley. Green spaces to me look like community gardens and grass roofs, but I realized I encountered a more brutalist take on public infrastructure with often graffitied steel play structures and random public swings and trampolines (used by children and drunk adults alike). I personally expected more “physically “green space” coming into one of the most sustainable countries in the world, but as I learned more about Denmark’s history on colonization and gentrification to take such spaces, I realized the dark past behind my observations.

Since then, I have a more nuanced and jaded perspective on such places. 

Although biking is a norm in Copenhagen, it is often more convenient for people to take the metro when it’s raining or snowing, due to slippery conditions. I realized how unsustainable this could be, especially as the Danish metro is quite expensive and delays more often than the commuter rail and T back home. While the metro itself is clean and easy to navigate, it still has the same brutalist architecture as the playgrounds I passed by to work and home. In terms of accessibility, Denmark had some ways to go. It was after I got fined for over $100 being in the wrong zone, I was thinking how unfair it would be for newly arrived low- immigrants to commute in Denmark. We learned in my sociology class that often refugees and asylum seekers are placed in camps far away from any major cities and towns, and therefore makes it harder to commute to jobs and flights from Copenhagen and Arhaus. Also due to the distance of these camps to all other cities, these first gen low-income people often get fined for having insufficient subway tickets and often uncertain citizenship due to the Danish immigration policies. They have the risk of deportation and lose a bunch of money in the process. 

Man, this kind of ended on a sad note, but after volunteering at my local food pantry, I’ve interacted with a bunch of new Danes around the world. I’ve worked for three hours with a grad student from Nepal, a Ukrainian expecting mother, and two Italian entrepreneurs who have paid and fought their way within the Danish immigration system. They were saying that after struggling through these challenges, they truly appreciated living in Denmark for its other benefits like free healthcare and education, even with the high cost of living and existing as a minority in a mostly white-dominated space. However, that’s not to say that everyone will settle down with the status quo. Last week, I attended a climate protest just this last week on banning fossil fuels from the North Sea and saw so many Danes from different places around the world. The only thing I noticed was that this movement was mostly comprised of white ethnic Danes, but it was still good to see some people come together for a cause?