Great Danes

I recently returned from a weeklong trip to Denmark, and Homunculus is here to say: them’s country has gots it going on. There is nothing rotten in the state of Denmark.

To compare and contrast:

When you get off the plane in Bangkok (which, compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, operates like a Swiss watch), you wend your way through the airport’s hallways before being dumped into an enormous pile of bemused chaos, also known as the passport control area. It is a shit show of Bangladeshian proportions. Think the DMV, minus the aid of deli-line numbers. For 10-15 minutes you veer uncertainly between serpentine masses, which may or may not be lines, before settling into a definite spot in a queue -- which may or may not be twice as slow as the adjacent one -- for the next 45 minutes.

In Copenhagen, by contrast, I got off the plane and walked twenty yards to a kiosk manned by two guys who looked like this:

God I miss Stefan Edberg.

The blond family in front of me was processed in about thirty seconds; I was done in ten. I had my bag ten minutes later, and three minutes after that I was on the subway for a short ride to the city center.

The rest of the trip went just as smoothly. Everything in Denmark runs on time, and everyone speaks flawless English. The streets and buildings are pristine. More people bike, it seems, than drive; I heard one car horn my entire week there.

It had been seven years since I'd visited Europe, and after three years of extensive travel in second- and third-world countries, I have to say, Denmark was a pleasure. The section on Scandinavia in the international chapter in America the Book sums it up nicely: “Scandinavia has blended cold, hard Teutonic efficiency with European social liberalism to create five of the cleanest nations on the planet. You can literally eat off the sidewalk in Copenhagen.” That's true. I did.

Not everyone there is blond, but, well, a lot of them are. Here are some pictures I took of blond people:

(And here is what these girls will look like in 20 years, if my trips to the bars in the touristy area were any indication:

)

Coincidentally, on the day I returned there were two major articles about Denmark and how much it kicks ass (what are the odds of that?). Thomas Friedman wrote his column about the Danes' ecological ingenuity, and this piece in the Washington Post explores the now-repeatedly-reproduced statistic citing the Danes as the happiest people on earth. Having seen it firsthand, I can corroborate everything in those stories. I would say that being there made me ashamed of my country, except that I was already ashamed of my country before I went. Then again, as my new Danish friend replied after I forwarded her the piece from the Post, at least we still have Paris Hilton. True that. We'll always have Paris.