CLIMAT. TRAVAIL. RELIGION.

In Paris this summer was inaugurated Vélib’. I was kind of expecting the same thing here in Copenhagen. “Not at all”, as T. Ally & Charly Greane said. Why would you want to rent a bike whereas you already have one? If you’re Dane, you own a bike. I could say I’m real Dane now. I have a bike. You hear me, I have a bike! I got it on last Thursday. In France I don’t have my driving licence, so that I’m not “free” yet. In Denmark, freedom is not getting a car, but getting a bike. I’m a free man in Denmark; I could even say that I’m a real man now, a male. My bike is a kind of racer. The colour? Deep blue and flashy green. It looks a bit like the bikes we have in our family house in Bretagne (Brittany). Old bikes my parents and even my grand parents use to ride on. They still work, like my new Danish one. Now I go to RUC (Roskilde University Centre) by bike, instead of 50 minutes by foot, 15 minutes by bike. That’s pretty much better.

Another constituting element of Danish culture is beer. I’m student in Lille, in the north of France. There you can find some serious beer drinkers. Before coming to Denmark, I thought I was one. But once again, “not at all”. Danish are drinking all day long; at any time, and everywhere. In France if you drink alcohol in the train or in the subway, whatever the time is, people watch you with determined contempt. Here not. They sell beer at the university canteen, and other kind of alcohol as far as I remember. On last Friday, a truck of beer came on the campus, Danish students organised a boat race on the lake of the campus. Everything began at 3 p.m. Everything means drinking beer. En bon Français, I still cannot imagine myself drinking beer with friends during the afternoon inside Sciences Po Lille. When you drink water in France you drink beer in Denmark; when you drink wine in France, you still drink beer in Denmark.

One last thing I notice here is the Danish sense of fashion. “J’ai mis le Fred Perry, c’est pas pour rien” said The Shoppings, a French indie rock electric band. My girlfriend bought me some Fred Perry shoes for my birthday. I’m quite proud of them. But the point is that in Denmark, you find some Fred Perry shoes or clothes in the Danish “Decathlon”. It’s almost like you can find some at the supermarket. Everybody wears this, even the children. On last April I saw Uffie on show, she was wearing some Reebok sneakers, flashy yellow and orange ones. This summer at a party on a boat where Smirnoff Ice used to be free every Wednesday, a guy from The Teenagers was wearing some very flashy Reebok too. I’m not used to seeing this at every corner of the street in France, but that’s the case in Denmark. Here sneakers are like 7-Eleven, they are normality. They are democracy.