The sun

It is difficult to explain the happiness you feel when you finally see the sun in Denmark, if you haven't experienced it personally. Danes go bonkers in the spring when the sun arrives. One guy even told me that it is ok to stop working and go for a bit of sunbathing. That is huge, coming from a Dane and their high working ethics. That happened last year at the end of March, it was the first sunny day after a long winter. Last year I found it funny, but this year I don't anymore, because I lived through the Danish fall and winter and they are hard, but that is difficult to imagine. You must go through it at least once. And it isn't because of the short days, it is because of the lack of sun. On the winter solstice, there is 7 hours of daylight, which is an hour and a half less then what I am used to. Day in Zagreb lasts for 8 and a half hours on winter solstice. But the sun went away last year with the first day of September and it didn't return until middle March. It was worst at the beginning. I remember I called my old neighbor on 20th of October and told her: "Can you believe, today is the first day after the beginning of September that I actually saw the sun?" There wasn't one day with any sun for a month and a half. It was horrible! It was just gray, grey and gray and rainy and grey without end. It was like living under a boring, uniformly grey cloud. No wonder that in Danish language the word "sky" means cloud. That really gets to you, but it creeps in slowly, you don't even notice it. One day, while I was raiding home from work, I caught myself thinking: "Can't these clouds go away just for one day? Why does it have to be cloudy all the time?"

And I was going like that from day to day and my mood kept getting worse and my back started to hurt more and more. Until I started having really depressing thoughts. At that point I started drinking vitamin D and through two weeks it got better. Vitamin D took the edge of.

This type of depression is different to the depression that you get when life smacks you on the head. It is a bit tricky to describe. I was happy with the way my life was going and still am but there was constantly some heaviness that was creeping in from somewhere and I couldn't pinpoint where does it stem from. When I started taking vitamin D, it became easier. The heaviness vanished and the only thing that stayed was the longing for the sun. And that went away in the middle of March when the sun returned after a long winter slumber.

The other day I was talking to my girlfriends father about it and he told me the story where it hit him especially hard. He is working as an electrician and one winter they were working in the basement of a building. The thing was that when they entered the basement, they had to walk a long way in order to reach their workplace. The walk was so long that for the lunch break, they didn't go outside but they just had it in the basement. He worked through winter like this. He hadn't seen the sun in months because he would arrive to work in the morning, before the sunrise, spend the daytime in the basement and go home at night. That year he said was awful. It got him so hard, he was barely able to get up in the morning and get going. After work he was worth nothing. He was only capable of staring at the TV and nothing more.

So, the lack of sun during wintertime is a serious issue in Denmark and the only thing that can offset it a bit is vitamin D. And trust me, the fact that quarantine went into effect at the same time the sun returned to Denmark, is a proper little tragedy. Now that the sun is out, few people can enjoy it. I think that will hit a lot of people hard. The worst case scenario would be that quarantine rules are in effect while the sun is up and that they lift when the sun retires behind the clouds in the fall. That would be a serious problem indeed, let us hope it will not come to that.

Is this winter depression?

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.