On your next visit to Copenhagen, I invite you to see Denmark differently.

My journey as an anthropologist began as a rebound at the Open University in 2014. I had just returned from China with a broken heart, and the thought of going back to engineering studies seemed even bleaker than missing China and the war that summer. Anthropology seemed like an ideal hiding place. I imagined myself setting out on an adventure: meeting distant tribes, learning about ancient rituals and forgotten wisdom, and immersing myself in worlds unlike anything I had known. But oh, how wrong I was. The first anthropology course didn't take me to another world. It locked me in a hall of mirrors. The image of the anthropologist seeking exotic cultures rested on early traditions of the field that placed Western culture at the center of the world and saw it as the sole measure of progress. In the 1970s a crisis of thought led to sharp critique of this condescending approach that judges others only through its own standards. We all look at the world from a viewpoint shaped by culture, history, and life experience. So what seems natural, strange, or taken-for-granted tells us a lot not only about what we're looking at, but about ourselves. When anthropology is done well, it becomes training in reflexivity. It asks the researcher to pause on what seems obvious and examine the assumptions that shape how she understands others and herself. The encounter with the "other" is always also a practice of re-meeting the familiar. This exercise — observing ourselves observing the other, the strange and the odd — helps us understand that our view of the world was never neutral. Once we grasp that, the walls of judgment begin to crack. The encounter with difference stops threatening who we are and becomes an invitation to expand the boundaries of thought. It's a viewpoint that turns every human interaction into a playground of discoveries, and gives us the freedom to move through the world with flexibility and curiosity.