The days got really short for what I am used to. Sun rises around 8:15 and sets around 15:40, but that is fine, at 21st of December there will still be 7 hours of daylight. What I find a bit more problematic is the weather. From 1st of September until 3rd December, there have been 3 sunny weeks, out of 13 weeks. For the rest of the time it was cloudy and sometimes rainy. And when I say cloudy I mean whole sky is just uniform dull and depressing grey. That is 10 weeks of gray skies from September 1st. I am not surprised that in the Danish language the word for cloud is "sky". A lot of times it certainly looks like that the uniform gray mass is the sky.
Yesterday I started feeling a bit under the weather for no apparent reason. Life is good here and I like it very much. I love what my girlfriend and me built for ourselves in under a year (I moved in the middle of February) and we are working great together, oftentimes we are fooling around that together we make one competent housewife. Job-situation is good and I like my job. Staircase cleaning suites my character. It is completely stress free. I work alone (as I like it), my boss is great, we get along perfectly, money is good, with our 2 paychecks we have plenty and then some to put on the side. I cycle a lot which I love. Language school is going nicely and I meet some nice people there. Every Wednesday we are going to the board-games club which satisfies my introvert social needs. So all in all I have assembled my life the way I like it and in the way I can grow and develop further. And jet I started to feel a bit down with the beginning of December.
Winter depression
Allegedly this may be the winter depression. During winter time in Denmark there isn't enough Sun. Even during fall. As I said it is constantly cloudy. Exposure to sun is important because that is how we synthesis vitamin D. Even though it can also be taken in with certain foods: fatty fish (tuna, mackerel, salmon), egg white, cheese, liver paste. Interestingly enough this food is in abundance in Danish cuisine. Two symptoms of Vitamin D deficiency are depression and back pain and a lot of Danish people suffer from winter depression and are taking Vitamin D supplements. Since I am not taking vitamin D supplements it makes it more plausible that it may be winter depression. I even heard that when you go to the doctor in winter months, you will get a question "Do you take your vitamin D regularly?". Alas it is too late for me this year because you need to take it for a full month before you start to feel the beneficial side-effects. I can only imagine the horror of what winters look like in northern Norway, Finland and Sweden. One guy who was in my raid group couple of years ago lived in Hammerfest in northern Norway. One time I checked how longs are the days/nights there. Sun sets on 23rd November and rises on 21st January. That is almost 3 full months of continuous darkness! That is bad, I must say that I can't imagine how continuous darkness looks like.
Anyway, if you moved to some of the Scandinavian country and life is good but you start to feel a bit down in December. Worry not, it is just the lack of sun that is getting to you. It is quite normal in this part of the world. Now, I'll go and make some tuna paste, it may help.
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