Tropical Rain-Forest on Danish Plains: Randers Regnskov

Even though I canceled both my vacations this year and decided to work through corona times and wait for some corona free era for traveling outside of Denmark, we decided that we would like to see places during weekends. So last Friday we went to see Randers Regnskov.

Randers Regnskov is a tropical zoo in the small city, Randers that lies in north east Jutland. My girlfriend really sold it to me: "It is amazing, you just must see it, they have created a rain-forest!"

I must say that I was skeptical. Rain-forest in Denmark? It sounds impossible... ok not impossible but it will obviously have to be in some type of the building and if it will have to be in some type of the building, just how large can it be? That was my thought process as we were driving there and to be honest, I was preparing myself to be disappointed... but then I was surprised!

Randers Regnskov is essentially a zoo. What makes it special is that it has 3 completely enclosed domes that were turned into 3 tropical habitats: South American rain-forest, African rain forest and Asian rain-forest. In addition to that Randers Regnskov has water flow that runs through all three domes and it forms artificial lakes, ponds, waterfalls, tiny rivers and big aquariums with animal life in all of them. All this adds to the unique experience of the place. To continue, like a classical zoo, Randers Regnskov also has outside animal habitats where you can see big cats and hyenas.

The domes

When you enter any one of the domes with tropical habitats, you are in for a surprise. Entry doors are a bit dislocated from the habitat, so you need to walk a bit after you enter before you see the animals. Hmm... see the animals is a bit unfair description because when you reach the real thing, it isn't just the animals it is everything. Every dome was designed as a wholesome habitat in which different animal species share the same space and can move around freely within the range of a dome. All of the animals that roam free are of course not dangerous to people, but allegedly, couple of years ago, one visitor got malaria during a visit to Randers Regnskov. Second surprising thing inside each dome is the micro-climate. So, they created tropical forests from Asia, Africa and South America and the micro-climate in each is fitting. It is hot and moist! Temperature in each of the domes is around 30 and moisture is at 100%. After roaming around the domes for two hours it gets a bit tough. I started looking forward to a rainy Danish summer day. The water bottle I had on me was completely wet on the outside after just 10 minutes of walking inside one of the domes. Also, when we were walking under some nets, we could feel on our skin how the water is dripping from above. A very curious experience, it felt like rain but it couldn't have been. All the domes are Cris-crossed with a stony path that are completely blended into the habitats and in the bushes, just couple of meters away, you can see the animals hiding and going about their business while not being too afraid of people. Parrots flying around and "bitching" out loud, bats were just hanging with apples sticking out of their snouts and monkey jumping freely between the trees. All of this is happening while you are walking under waterfalls and over the hanging bridges.

Aquariums

Aquariums were also stunning in their own way. The way they designed them makes you think. There were three types of aquariums there. Let's call them natural, destroyed and mixed. One aquarium had real live corals. Across that aquarium, there was an aquarium with dead corals and trash and the mixed ones were designed as the combination of the two above mentioned types. These corals stand as a stark reminder of the natural beauty as is untouched by humans and at the same time as a display of human destructiveness of natural habitats.

Cats

Big cats are kept outside in decently big habitats that are, just like the aquariums, decorated in a way that displays human destructive power. There are oil barrels spread around together with deforestation equipment. Unfortunately we didn't see the hyenas.

Conclusion

I went in Randers Regnskov ready to be unimpressed but went out stunned. Randers Regnskov is the minimum of what the zoo's should look like, especially habitats in the domes where animals can roam freely at least in the constraints of the domes. It is still a cage but it feels more natural and a bit bigger.

Randers Regnskov did an amazing job by motivating people to reflect on humanity and our influence on the nature especially with the aquariums and the cats habitats. One gets a great approximation of what the nature would look like if we just stayed away and at the same time how we influence it in reality. By either destroying natural habitats for our own needs or by just being careless with our trash and our CO2 emissions. If we continue to act the way we do, soon there will be no more natural habitats for the animals to live in but a lucky few will be able to live in places like Randers Regnskov. 

Cultural differences part I: time and cycling

After living in Denmark for a year and a half and experiencing a lot of the Danish culture it is time to make a brief summary of the biggest cultural differences between Danes and Croatians. What are the main points in which Danes and Croatians differ the most? There is a number differences, some small ones and some big ones but I will start by saying that it is clear, beyond any reasonable doubt that both groups have both good traits and traits that are lacking and most importantly they are both human beings with the same wants, needs, desires and human flaws. The difference that differentiates them most is how they have made their societies tick. Let's go through two moments that are standing out the most.

Take on time

Danes are all about punctuality when it comes to appointments of any sort. Danes are not late, for anything ever. There is no difference between going to work, doctor, cafe with a friend or a party. If they are invited, let's say at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, they will be there at 5 o'clock no questions asked and they will go out of their way to make it on time. If an appointment can't be reached in the agreed time it is a cause for a lot of stress and it is considered disrespectful to the host (in case it is a party or a dinner date).

Croatians have a bit more relaxed take on time in general, but they are also making a distinction between appointments that are considered serious and appointments where one can be a bit more relaxed. Work, doctors appointment and similar type of other appointments is taken seriously and one is never late for those but when Croatians are meeting friends or going out being up to 15 minutes late is acceptable. Thing that best explains Croatian take on time is actually on universities. Being late for a lecture for up to 15 minutes is acceptable in most cases and it is called an academic quarter. So, when you are meeting a Croatian and he is late, don't get angry, he is just invoking his right to an academic quarter

Cycling

This is one of the cultural moments where these two societies stand starkly apart. In Denmark cycling is a way of life, in Croatia it is hobby for enthusiasts. Being a passionate cyclist in Croatia is not easy, sometimes. Bike lanes are few and most often bad. Sometimes the only way to go is to break the law because it is impossible to follow it. Plus, Croatians have a lot of excuses why not to use a bike. Some of the reasons are: it is either too hot, too cold, it is raining, one doesn't want to be sweaty on work etc.

In Denmark, where weather is much worse, people are cycling all the time be it rain, snow, hot or cold. And almost everyone cycles, young and old, parents, politicians and businessmen. Every apartment building has bicycle parking space, bike lanes are everywhere and weather is always good enough for cycling. No weather is too bad for cycling, one can only be improperly dressed.

Hygge

Hygge, the famous Danish concept that has become so popular in the world. I have avoided to write about it because it is a very fuzzy concept and it is very difficult to define it precisely. I will approach it in a couple of ways. First I will give a definition of hygge after which I will show how is it most commonly understood or  after which I will give my take on it from the perspective of where does it come from or in contrast to what does it stand. In the end I will try and show how Danes use hygge in other contexts.

Definition and traditional understanding of hygge:

"Hygge is a quality of coziness that makes a person feel content and comfortable. It's also often used as an adjective meaning "cozy or comfortable.""

This is the most common definition of hygge and this one comes from Merriam-Webster online dictionary. But still, what does hygge refer to?

Imagine the cheesiest possible imagery; It is a snowy winter night and you are tucked in nicely with your partner in a luxury winter cottage. The fire is lit in the fireplace crackling away while you are preparing dinner with candle lights and a nice bottle of wine. There is gentle jazz music playing in the background, conversation is fun and engaging and you have no worries in the world.

This situation is a classical example how hygge should be understood. It is in general a bit fuzzy combination of a good company, good food and drinks and pleasant atmosphere in general.

As my boss once said, it is Danish coping mechanism against the winter depression. And I agree with him, I think that is indeed one cause for hygge. When 7 months long gray, dark and oppressing Danish winter comes, one finds little to none enjoyment in the outdoors, so pleasant atmosphere needs to be created indoors. And if you can make a pleasant atmosphere in your home, as I have given in the description above, it indeed makes life a bit easier during the winter and it does make the winter bit easier to endure.

I think there is one more source of hygge. It is Danish working ethics. When Danes work, they work hard. But when they are off, they are off. And that is where hygge comes in. It is after work relaxation technique. So I am of the opinion that hygge necessarily stands in the opposition to Danish working ethics. When Danes are not working, they are not working hard and that is channeled either into partying hard or into hygge. While partying and hygge may sound like light years away from each other, they actually are not. They are just two starkly different way of relaxing.

If it where only that easy, this entry would be over. The thing is that Danes use hygge for a wide variety of different situations other than the one I described earlier. That is hygge in the broader sense. This take on hygge was the one that was eluding me for a long time and that was the reason why I was reluctant to write about hygge. But I think that I have finally grasped it, so here we go.

Everything can be hygge

Danes are trigger happy with the word hygge and that was the thing that was putting me off track for a long time. Almost anything can be hygge. Conversation can be hygge, coffee, tea, a walk in the park, visit from a friend, playing a game (board game or a PC game), train ride, bike ride. You can have hygge alone, with your partner, with family, with friends and with complete strangers. Even work can be hygge, school can be hygge, shopping can be hygge. It seemed to me like there is no rule. It seemed like the hygge sticker can be slapped on anything and everything. But there is a pattern. In Danish culture any and all activities that are pleasant or cozy can be called hygge. In a sense Danish tendency to call hygge anything that is remotely pleasant is like a good twin brother to Croatian tendency to curse at anything or everything that is remotely unpleasant. It is basically the same pattern but diametrically opposed. Think about it this way;
- Danes: pleasant activity or event = That was hygge
- Croatian: unpleasant activity or event = Curse the shit out of it

That is the essence of hygge. I would describe it as a tendency in Danes to place an emphasis on activities and events that are pleasurable and going out of their way to make them. If you consider how long and oppressing danish winters are and how hard working people Danes are, taking pleasure up a notch makes cultural sense. But, in the end there is nothing magical or mystical about hygge as it was portrayed when it was exported out of the country. But that doesn't make it any less beautiful.

The long days

In the summer, Denmark heavily overcompensates for all the grayness, sunlessness and darkness that lasts between 6 and 7 months. Last year it started with September 1st. On that day the clouds came and they stayed all the way until March 15th. In that whole period, there was in total 4 weeks of sunny days but they were spread out far from each other.

But then the sun came and now the situation is completely different. Rainy days are few and spread out thin. Weather is beautiful but not too hot and the days are long. And when I say long, I mean loooooong. Today on 22nd June sunrise is in 4:28 and sunset is at 21:59. But in reality it means even more daylight, that I had the opportunity to experience firsthand. Last year I was volunteering on Roskilde Festival and one shift was a night shift, from 10 o'clock in the evening to 8 o'clock in the morning. It was completely dark from 11:30 until approximately 3:30. At 3:30 it slowly started getting brighter.

Some time ago I read a comment, from another foreigner who also lives in Denmark, where he said that Danes are taking their holidays in the wrong part of the year because in the summer, parks in Copenhagen are one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

The longer I live her, the more I see reason in his thinking. Denmark is indeed a beautiful place to be in the summer months. Days are long and sunny, temperatures are moderate, it rarely goes above 30 degrees and nature is beautiful in a gentle Danish way. It will not leave you breathless though, like some beautiful sceneries from the Alps, Greece or Norway might. In summer months Denmark is indeed a place to be. You don't need a break from Denmark in the summer, you need it in the winter. You need it when the clouds return and when you experience first hand why does the word 'sky' in Danish stand for a cloud. That's when Denmark gets hard to endure, that is a part of the reason behind the whole hygge 'concept'. It is basically danish coping mechanism against the heavy Danish fall/winter weather. That is the best time to go for a holiday to some southern European country or a north African country.

Even though I miss my family and I would rather go for a summer holiday vacation then not. But corona makes planning a bit tricky and there is a real risk that you could get stuck outside Denmark. It is just the fact of life and it is the same for everyone. Spending the summer in Denmark actually isn't that bad at all. This year hopefully I will have the opportunity to get a break from Denmark when it is really needed.

Bad teachers and language learning

Last year, in September, I started attending Danish lessons. The other day it occurred to me just how fast I have progressed. Last September Danish sounded like white noise to me. When people around me would be talking in Danish I wasn't getting anything. Today, 9 and a half months later I am ready to start reading books in Danish (real books, with the help of the dictionary of course), I can hear what Danes are saying and depending on the topic of conversation I can understand, from the general topic of the conversations to the details, but I still need to focus. If my mind is wandering I still get very little. But the point of this blog post isn't bragging.

When I was finishing elementary school and I needed to choose high school, one of the important criteria for me was the second language. I wanted to avoid German, I didn't feel like learning German and I was lucky. There was an option to sign up for the class where primary foreign language was English and secondary foreign language was Italian. I immediately jumped for the opportunity.

As it turned out, maybe I wasn't lucky at all, maybe it would have been better if I went for German, despite my reluctance. At least today I could say that I know two foreign languages and am currently working on the 3rd one.

I was motivated to learn Italian, not as I am today to learn Danish, but I was motivated. I was always a bit of a geek for learning and school and social and humanistic sciences always appealed to me. But today, the only thing I can say in Italian is "My name is Bruno." I don't even remember how to spell it though. And the lessons were equally intensive as I have them today in language school, two times per week.

The problem was that we had a horrible teacher. She neither could teach nor keep us in check. Every class was mayhem and it was like that for 4 years and we weren't happy with that either. There was a couple of students in my class who learned Italian in the elementary school. I remember one of them saying to me at the end of the fourth year that now he knows less Italian compared to when he finished elementary-school.

So after four years of learning Italian from a person who wasn't supposed to teach, I got nothing. After 6 and a half months (from September 1st to middle of March when school stopped because of corona) of learning danish, taught by good teachers, I got enough knowledge that by working at home I brought myself to the level where, with the help of the dictionary, I can read real books in danish and news. Tthere is still a lot to do for me. But compared to where I was at the beginning of September, today I am light years ahead.

The tragedy of Croatian educational system is that bad teachers that unfortunately work in schools, like my Italian teacher, are not uncommon. While I was working on university I was talking to my students about it often and there wasn't one student who didn't encounter at least one, sometimes more teachers who were like that. The problem is that, as I was joking around, when you get a permanent employment contract in Croatian schools, you can get fired only if you kill a student or arrive into the classroom naked. How it is in Denmark, I cannot say. My experiences for now were positive but very narrow in scope to make an assumption on a bigger scale.

High living standard

The reason why Danish living standard is so high because of their labor unions. When labor union movements started in Europe, they spread to Denmark as well but with two key differences. One was that they were super successful in organizing workers and the second one was that they decided not to take the path to communism. If we boil it down to the essentials these are the two key reasons for the high living standards in Denmark.

At it's high point, between 1973 and 1982 membership of all labor unions in the whole country was a bit over 2 million. That is, 2 million people in the whole country were members of some labor union. Just for the comparison, in 1980 Denmark had total population of 5.1 million people. I think that portrays the picture of just how strong the labor unions were.

To simplify it, that gave negotiating power to the unions. Their membership was high enough that they could mount a serious pressure on the employers. Because of that employers organized themselves in unions as well and the negotiations started. Through and because of this balance of power between union organizations and employer organizations virtually everything related to work, working conditions, maternity leave, vacations etc. at the start was exclusively negotiated between these two groups and politicians stayed away. And this is what the Danes proudly call "The Danish model". This model and its huge success from the end of the 19th century to mid 1980is brought the prosperity Denmark is enjoying today.

But Danish labor Unions didn't buy in on the labor union ideals all the way. They stopped short of communism. Which means that while they did ask for better working conditions and shorter hours they never questioned the employers right to delegate work tasks. So importance of the employers was acknowledged and respected.

But maybe Danish labor unions were too successful. From 2007 membership in the labor unions is in a steady decline. Could it be that young Danes forgot why do they live such good lives? Foreigners most likely don't since they weren't brought up in Denmark. But that is a story for another post. Important point to take from this one is that Denmark is a well off country because it adopted a model in which profits are more equally distributed. Where middle and lower middle class have high buying power and that is the thing that makes their economy run around. If it weren't for the labor unions and the collective mentality "we are all in this together" Denmark wouldn't be where it is today.

How to kill a Croatian

Croats are very proud people and they hold their nation and national accomplishments in a very high esteem. They will say, full of pride, that they chased away the Turks (Ottoman Empire), French (Napoleon), Germans (WW2) and successfully defended against the Serbian aggression in the last war even though Serbia had the full might of ex-Jugoslavian army in control. When you hear it this way, you would think that Croatians are sturdy folk and that you shouldn't mess around with them.

But, there is also the other side of the medal. Croatians are also very soft and tender souls who are prone to succumb to ailments to which the rest of the world is immune. Unlike the rest of the human kind, while a Croat thrives in trenches and being under siege and will withstand it no problem for the indefinite amount of time, draft, direct contact with wet or/and cold surface without protection and exposure of his wet hair to cold outside air may cause his untimely and unexpected demise.

In Croatian culture, since your earliest age there are three things that are an absolute no no. They are more important then the 10 commandments and don't forget that Croatia is mostly Catholic country with very strong religious feelings. The 3 absolutely forbidden activities are:

1. Thou shall not sit in a draft!
2. Thou shall not sit on a cold or wet surface without one layer of protection!
3. Thou shall not leave the apartment with wet hair!

As I said, failure to abide by these three commandments may result in an untimely death.

In Croatian culture children are told by their parents, grandparents and all other care takers that failure to follow these three rules will always result in sickness. Whenever someone gets sick the conversation goes in accordance with these lines:

Sick person: " I am not feeling well. I have a slight fever, headache and I can't get out of bed. I have no energy for anything."

Healthy person: "But what did you do? Why did you get sick?"

Sick person: "I don't know, I was taking all the precautions."

Healthy person: "But the other day, when we were at your place didn't you make a draft?"

Sick person: " I did but it was because we needed to get that awful smell out of the apartment."

Healthy person: "And then we came and you forgot to close the window and you were sitting in the draft for hours. There you go, that is why you got sick."

In essence, when someone goes ill in Croatia and the Croatian think tank tries to pinpoint the source of the disease, they will inevitably be led to either draft, exposure of wet hair to the outside air or sitting outside without a protective layer between the but and the sitting surface, depending on what did the sick person do in the last couple of days. Croatians do not get sick from viruses or bacteria they get sick from the draft.

There is one caveat though. Sitting outside in the cold in the cafe bar does not count. That can't cause any diseases. The biggest culprit for getting sick in that category is concrete. If you sit with your but on a concrete surface without additional layer of protection will get you sick.

When a Croatian finds himself in such a situation he must apply one layer of some material between his but and the concrete surface. And you would be surprised how easy it is to protect oneself. All you need to do is put one plastic bag or one side of newspapers between your but and concrete in order to be safe from all kinds of nasty diseases that type of activity can cause.

So, if you have a Croatian national in your surroundings, of whom you are not particularly fond, invite him to your home for a coup of coffee. Coffee is the perfect lure for Croatians, offer him a seat next to the window and open another window at the opposite side of your apartment and watch him disappear into nothingness.