FACTS ABOUT DENMARK 2
- No place in Denmark is more than 30 miles (50 km) form the sea.
- Denmark has more pigs than people.
- Denmark has been inhabited since around 12,500 B.C. and agriculture has been evident since 3,900 B.C.
- Canada and Denmark have been fighting over an uninhabited island by leaving each other bottles of alcohol and changing their flags since the 1930s.
- 99% of Denmark’s Jews survived the Holocaust because the Danish organized a massive evacuation to neutral Sweden.
- Denmark physically borders only one other country, Germany.
- Lars Ulrich, the drummer for the heavy metal band Metallic, was born in Denmark.
- Copenhagen’s Stroget, at almost 2 miles (3.2 km) long, is the oldest and longest pedestrian street in the world.
- Walt Disney visited Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen once and was so inspired that he decided to create something similar in America, Disneyland.
- Iceland severed ties to Denmark and became an independent republic only in 1944.
- Bluetooth got its name from the second king of Denmark, King Harald Bluetooth.
- Danish Lurpak® butter is world famous. It can be bought in stores in more than 100 countries worldwide.
- The English are famous for their love of bacon, which they began importing from Denmark in 1867.
- The Danish alphabet has three letters not found in the English alphabet: Æ, Ǿ, Ǻ. All three are vowels and come after the letter Z in the alphabet.
- Danes are certified foodies. They are the fifth largest exporter of food in the world, despite their small population.
- The Danes have a term Janteloven (The Law of Jante), created in 1933 by a Danish/ Norwegian writer. It is often quoted in public debate in Denmark and consists of “Ten Commandments,” all boiling down to “You are no better than I am”.
- Janus Friis, the Danish IT entrepreneur who developed the Internet telephone company Skype out of nothing, sold it to Microsoft Corporation for $8.5 billion USD in 2011.
- Danish inventor Jens Olsen spent 27 years building the World Clock in Copenhagen. It began keeping time in 1955 and will supposedly be able to accurately keep time for the next 570,000 years.
- Soccer is Denmark’s favorite and national sport. The Danish football team became known worldwide through a gutsy performance in the 1986 World Cup and they followed it up when they became 1992 European champions.
- Cyclist Bjarne Riis is the only Dane to win the Tour de France, in 1996, although a later admission of drug abuse cast a shadow over his exceptional performance.
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