SWEDEN
Swedish people are living for the summer and it’s true that the cold and the short days make it a challenge to live there in winter. Even if the lack of light could be a happy downer, I found joyful people on my journey. And I learned quite a few things about Sweden.
DENMARK
“Out of 97 countries surveyed, Denmark is the happiest nation on Earth”
Well, I can totally understand it since Copenhagen has almost everything of the dream city to me. The sea is at a walk distance and you can even park your boat on the canal in front of your house. Parks are everywhere and the architectures is very diverse with huge monuments and colourfull houses. The city center is only for pedestrian and I found Danes very outgoing. What a great place to live in!
But the funny thing is that when I asked people I met if they were happy, half of them said no!
Check out this report on Denmark:
extract from a great article
« Vaillant brings a healthy dose of subtlety to a field that sometimes seems to glide past it. The bookstore shelves are lined with titles that have an almost messianic tone, as in Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. But what does it mean, really, to be happier? For 30 years, Denmark has topped international happiness surveys. But Danes are hardly a sanguine bunch. Ask an American how it’s going, and you will usually hear “Really good.” Ask a Dane, and you will hear “Det kunne være værre (It could be worse).” “Danes have consistently low (and indubitably realistic) expectations for the year to come,” a team of Danish scholars concluded. “Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.”
