My first day in Copenhagen was a rude awakening. After arriving on a gray, drizzly morning in mid-January and spending most of the day meeting my new roommates and settling into my apartment, I was left in a city cloaked in darkness by 4pm. The next morning, the first rays of sun did not emerge until 8:30 am. I had known before coming to Denmark that their winters don’t get a lot of sun, with late sunrises and exceedingly early sunsets, and being from New Jersey, I was not unfamiliar with relatively short winter days. Yet, arriving in Copenhagen at the peak of its darkest month still felt like a shock, one that I knew I would have to adjust to quickly. If there was one thing to grasp onto in the seemingly endless darkness, it was the fact that arriving in the dead of winter meant that the days would only get longer, brighter, and warmer moving forward. And while this thought consistently acted as a beacon of hope and anticipation for seemingly the entire city— a light at the end of the tunnel, if you will — I discovered that one of the most rewarding parts of studying abroad in Copenhagen was learning how to not only cope with the dark winter days, but to embrace and enjoy them.
For those who are still doubtful, as I certainly was initially, it is important to note that it does not take much time for the days to start getting longer. Each day, the sun sets about two minutes later and the sun rises about one to two minutes earlier, which means that the days are almost two hours longer each month. While the sun sets around 4pm in mid-January, by mid-March it sets a little after 6pm, and even more excitingly, daylight savings time swoops in right before April so sunset is around 8pm by the beginning of the month. Staying over the summer rewards you with sunsets as late as 10pm! Similarly, the sun rises around 8:30 am in mid-January, but rises by 6:30 am in mid-March and 6am in mid-April.
Yet while this information is comforting, the first two months can still be difficult to navigate and may feel like they are inching along at a snail’s pace. Rather than waiting for the days to magically provide more sunlight, I found it to be much more helpful to adapt my daily routine to the new environment I found myself in. For example, instead of doing homework during the day as I would normally do back home, I left it for the evenings and began carving out time after class, while there was still ample sunlight, to explore the city, hang with friends, or do any other fun activities. During the first few weeks I found this particularly important in helping me acclimate to the city. I would spend two to three hours during the afternoon wandering through the streets and exploring different sights and landmarks, sometimes with a group and sometimes solo. This ensured that I was still able to see Copenhagen in all of its glory even with only about eight hours of sunlight a day.
Additionally, the darkness gave me the perfect opportunity to indulge in the delightful Danish philosophy and practice of hygge. Hygge (pronounced hoo-gah) loosely translates to ‘coziness,’ but it encompasses so much more than that. It emphasizes spending time with family and friends, and often includes lots of candles, blankets, and warm drinks. It emerged as a way for Danes to keep their spirits up during the long, dark winter season, and while it has extended to more of a year-long lifestyle for many, it is still at its strongest in the darkest and coldest months. Finding cute cafes and libraries and spending time eating, drinking, and laughing with friends quickly became one of my favorite activities to do and helped me build deep relationships that carried me into the brighter and warmer seasons.
As the days eventually got lighter, I wouldn’t say that I necessarily missed the early setting sun — in fact, I wouldn’t say that at all — but I can confidently say that it made me appreciate the longer days so much more and exposed me to a new hyggeligt lifestyle that I have since brought home with me (and which has made the similarly dreary Michigan winter much more manageable).
