As the title says, we moved to Aarhus1 Denmark. It’s the second biggest city in Denmark, and located on Jutland, the part of Denmark that’s connected to continental Europe. We moved about a month ago, and I’ve taken up a job managing a few teams at Uber. I’ll have more to write about my job later, once I have a better grasp on what’s going on.
As you can imagine the typical response to saying “I’m moving to Aarhus, Denmark2” was some combination of “What?” and “Where?” Given that we’d never been to Denmark before moving there, it was a kind of insane thing to do. We’re still wrapping our heads around the fact that we live here, and that this is not just a very long vacation3.
The thing that’s struck me about living here is how amazingly child friendly everything is. This is a society and culture set up to make raising children much, much easier. And while policies like parental leave and heavily subsidized4 childcare are usually the things Americans focus on, it’s the little stuff that’s shocking to me. The city actually stocks the numerous playgrounds with toys, so there’s always something there for kids to play with. And even private businesses regularly will have something for children. A brunch stop we went to has a little basket of toys and books to entertain our son while we ate, and our freaking bike shop has a whole room dedicated to kids. As an American the level of detail and care for parents by both public and private institutions is mind blowing.
As a single, illuminating example I can ask this simple question. Where’s your airport’s playground? It’s a question that never would have occurred to me before, but is incredibly obvious now that I’ve experienced it. Airports need playgrounds, both for the kids sake and the parents sake. Our previous airport in Boise did not have one, and it made taking care of a restless toddler very difficult, Copenhagen has three. It made our layover in Copenhagen so much better than our time in Boise, despite our son being awake almost 17 hours at that point. That Boise only has a (paid) arcade is quite the damning fact.
I’ll have more thoughts and updates once our son starts kindergarden and we’ve moved out of the temporary apartment.
Danish pronunciation is difficult. Aarhus is pronounced closer to “Ourhus”, but with a much more rounded “o” sound than is normal in English. You will sometimes see it spelled Århus, since Å replaced “Aa” in Danish spelling in 1948, although place names like Aarhus, Aalborg, and Aabenraa retained the historical Aa. ↩︎
I quickly learned to say “I am moving to Aarhus, Denmark” rather than “I am moving to Denmark” because most people heard the much more plausible “I am moving to Denver”. This caused some very funny interactions when people did have the reaction I expected, and they wondered why I was making such a big deal out of moving to a close by (at least by American standards) city. ↩︎
One of the funnier things to watch is instagram ads going from 100% English to mostly Danish over the past few weeks as the algorithm slowly updates where it thinks I live. ↩︎
And I mean heavily subsidized. Full time (51.5hrs) daycare for a child under 3 is $762 a month. And that’s not the low income price, that’s the normal price. Copenhagen is a little bit cheaper. ↩︎