I Found My Viking Pride

Vikings (Danes and Swedes 700 years ago.)

My mother’s family comes from a Denmark and has a love for their ancestral homeland.  I shared none of this danish enthusiasm.  Growing up, I was surrounded by hippie, Latino and Asian culture.  I had never really considered viking (Scandinavian) culture.  Scandinavian culture never seemed relevant to me.  Until last summer when, in a statistics class, I met a nice young Danish woman and we started dating.

Her family lived in Provo so I got to listen to them all jabber away in danish.  I learned a lot about Danes.  I noted, for example, that they had a friendly rivalry with the other “viking countries” (like Sweden and Norway).  As my relationship with this young Dane got more serious I invested myself more into danish culture.  I took an intro-level danish class over the fall semester.  As I learned more danish, I became more invested with this Dane and her family.  We were engaged in October and began making plans for our wedding.

IKEA, at the couch section

But, two weeks later, she broke off the engagement and our friendship.  I pretty much never saw her or her family again.  So, I was left in the middle of my danish class and I felt all alone.  But, I had to keep working, I didn't want to fail the class.  After the breakup anything Scandinavian just felt painful.  Class was torture.  However, a few weekends before the end of the semester I went with some of my fellow danish students to IKEA, a Swedish furniture store.

We competed in a scavenger hunt race against Swedish and Norwegian students, with a prize for first place.  I had never been to IKEA before and had tons of fun scrambling to find stuff.  Our team gave the hunt so much energy and cunning that we won first place.  As we bragged about beating the Swedish teams at their own store I felt a strange pride swell up within me.  It wasn't american pride, Californian pride or Mormon pride.  I had discovered my viking pride.