København Er En God By

When asked about my time in Denmark, the word I keep returning to is "good". I find myself repeating the same few phrases: "Copenhagen is a good city," "The Danes are good people," "I had a good time". But the word "good" I'm using here does not mean "okay, fine, nothing special", as it does when replying "I'm good" to "How are you doing?" No, when I say "Denmark is good", I mean good in a deeper, richer sense. I mean good as synonym to quality, superior; I use it to evoke kindness and thoughtfulness. I intentionally use "good" instead of "great" because the second superlative does not have the same associations about values. When saying "København er et godt by" in Danish, the emphasis is naturally placed on the word "godt", as if the language itself is aware of how important and meaningful that word is.

And in talking of Copenhagen's goodness, I turn to the same few stories:

Copenhagen is a good city to live in. One of the first things I noticed when I walked around my neighborhood in Indre By was little silver metal pieces arranged in a broken up line along the edge of the sidewalk. At each intersection the rectangles would become a square of circles and then keep going as rectangles in all four directions. When it was cold and snowy, these pieces of metal became slippery and I had to be careful not the trip over them. Confused about their role, I asked my Danish teacher what they were. She told me they were guides for the blind. Of course. They lead the blind safely along the streets and help them orient themselves through the city. How good is that? It seems so obvious when explained. And how logical too, for a city to make itself accessible to all its citizens, not just its able-bodied seeing ones?

The Danes are good people. When my parents came to visit, we walked to dinner in Nørrebro. We passed an interesting wooden playground along the way and stopped to climb and swing. My dad kept repeating his catch-phrase of the trip: "The Danes have it all figures out!" We then had a delicious dinner and bused home. When I got back, I checked my phone to find an odd Facebook message from a stranger: "Cléo I have all your documents please call me". At first I though it was spam, or an attempted hack. But then I checked my pockets and realized I no longer had my card case which held, in fact, all my documents. I called the stranger and he explained that he found my card case at the playground. Finding my name on my ID, he looked me up on Facebook and messaged me. A stranger had picked up my card case and reached out to return it to me before I'd even realized it was missing. How good is that? And the next morning, this kind stranger biked over to meet me instead of waiting for me to come pick it up at his house because it was his day off, and he wanted to go spend it with his aging mother. Have you ever heard anything more good?

Denmark is a good country. My Danish class took a field trip to the town of Dragor to learn about Denmark's role in WWII. Our tour guide informed us that during the war, 7,220 of Denmark's 7,800 jewish citizen managed to evacuate and survive. That's over 90%! Isn't that good? When the order came for the jews to be deported, the Danes organized a resistance network within days. Jews arrived in Dragor from all over the country to embark on fishing boats and cross the Øresund to Sweden and to safety. If they were not able to pay the fishermen for their passage, a fund was set up to pay in their place. How good is that? And when they came home after the war had ended, it is said that their apartments had been kept clean by their neighbors. Isn't that so good? And now, at the end of our visit of Dragor's harbor, our tour guide was apologizing on behalf of the Danish resistance for making jews pay for their passage to safely in their time of crisis. How crazy good is that??

I had such a good semester. I lived in a beautiful apartment in the center of town. I sat in my window box and read fiction and philosophy and watched as the trees in our communal courtyard bloomed. I was walking distance from Nyhavn, the most famous and photographed block of the city, and I was a short bike ride away from my favorite museum and the beach. I lived with 10 strangers who so quickly became dear friends. I had interesting readings to do as homework, and still found time for creative pursuits. I had difficult essays to write, and I still found time for dinner with friends. I had engaging academic discussions in classrooms, but also in museums and in bars. How good is that?

Yes, I had a good semester, it was all so good, I had it so good.