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Comment by coreyh14444 | Hacker News Reader

American living in Copenhagen here. We check all of these boxes. The entire channel that runs through town is swimmable thanks to decades of work cleaning it up. On a warm summer day, you could expect maybe 1000+ swimmers in the water in the city centre across all the locations. We also do Vinterbadere (Winter Bathing) throughout the year. The only time you can't swim is after a day or two of sustained rain and there is an app and red/green light system. My family lives on one of the new infill man-made "islands" and we have canals that run through our neighbourhood and you can swim laps around our apartment building.

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It's just fun/sad reading about the concept of "swimmable cities" when you've taken it for granted all your life. Most cities with fjords or channels here, have "harbour baths" - essentially outdoor swimming facilities with springboards and tanning beds. Would have thought these existed elsewhere.

It is probably not that uncommon. I've been swimming both in Oslofjord and Danube (AT, SK).

AT, SK?

Austria and Slovakia

Is there specific agencies or services that will help look into relocating? My wife and I visited briefly a few years ago and have not stopped thinking about it since. It was everything we wanted that North American cities just don't offer due to our heavy vehicle-centric urban planning.

If too many Americans move there it'll just become the naval equivalent, everyone driving around in their massive twin outboard speedboats rolling coal to go grocery shopping and nobody will be able to swim anymore there either lol.

Someone at this company gave me some advice a while back: https://gatewaytodenmark.com/ - but I don't know if they mainly focus on corporate clients or what.

In my case, I came via "Startup Denmark" where I started a company here and had a Danish co-founder: https://www.nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/Applying/Work/Start-up%20Den...

But now I'm preparing to switch to the Pay Limit Scheme as I got a fulltime offer: https://nyidanmark.dk/de-DE/You-want-to-apply/Work/Pay-limit...

The process isn't easy per se, but from what I hear it is miles better than US-immigration.

In Geneva, apart from being able to swim in the massive Geneva lake (100km long, crystal clear like most seas), one can swim portions of Rhone that flows out of the lake. The only exceptions are places where it can drown you or chop you up quickly due to some water constructs (for lack of better words).

Its also quite popular to hop on some inflatable boat or mattress once its safe, just before Jonction [1] which is amazing place on its own, and just take the slow flow for couple of kms in very nice forest environment. Basically till next dam.

Zurich has very similar situation, just way more restricted for free lake swimming.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=geneva+jonction&udm=2

> Zurich has very similar situation, just way more restricted for free lake swimming.

Why restricted? With very few exceptions (i.e. path to and from emergency services) you can hop anywhere into the lake.

I'd advise caution at some places (i.e piers where passenger ships dock) but else than that you can just hop in, wherever you like.

At least, within city limits.

It wasn’t always the case that the lake was clean and swimmable—as a kid in the 90s I remember it as kind of a “new thing” to be able to, since it had been polluted for decades and people came to prefer the public pools.

Living in Copenhagen as well. Came in the comments to find exactly something like this :) We are privileged more than most in this regard.

Yes you are, I visited a couple years ago. My boys found the topless sunbathing intriguing. Haha

[OT] how long have you been in Copenhagen? Are you learning Danish or do you get by with basic Danish and just use English?

Not OP but my partner lived in Copenhagen for two years. As with all of Scandinavia fluency in English is very common, practically universal in cities so you can happily live there without speaking a word of the local language. Also unlike most of Europe it's a lot more acceptable to just assume English is spoken and lead with that rather than stumbling through in the native language to start with.

That said it's still polite to learn some basics, e.g. thank you to mix in. If you're planning on living there long term you will want to learn Danish for social purposes unless you're planning to mix exclusively with immigrant communities. It's a very international place so English can often be the default language that any given group will all speak.

Edit: oh and an interesting quirk English is often spoken with an American accent! I think because they watch a lot of American TV shows and movies.

> Edit: oh and an interesting quirk English is often spoken with an American accent! I think because they watch a lot of American TV shows and movies.

We (mostly) ditched received pronunciation / transatlantic accents in school in the late 20th century. IME, the (taught) accent is now primarily a construct of what Swedes perceive to be how English sounds. American culture has a strong influence here.

In the population aged over ~50, it's not uncommon to hear RP / Transatlantic mixed with a heavy and thick local accent, with/without Scandinavian words thrown in.

  "I would gilla to order one glass tack" (I would like to order an ice cream please)

> you will want to learn Danish for social purposes Are non-Danish speakers really going up to B2+ Danish, even if they live in Copenhagen for a decade? It seems like Danish people would still speak better English and non-Danish people would almost certainly speak better English.

I live next door in the Netherlands in a city in the south. You don't learn the language because it's required to survive but to be polite and assimilate and make local friends. All of the Dutch friends I currently have are other expats, but now that my language skills are better, I'm trying to make more friends that I only speak with in Dutch.

Also, once you get to B2, you will naturally get to C level if you interact with the language every day. It might take years, but you'll get there!

Yeah, exactly. I have said before that I think as an American it is easier to fit in culturally in Denmark than it would have been if we moved to the UK.

I moved to Copenhagen a couple of years ago. Still learning Danish but you can get by with knowing only English without any problem. Pretty much everyone can understand you.

4 years. My kids are fluent now because we threw them directly into Danish public school cold-turkey as it were. My wife has studied a bit and knows some. For my part, I've just been too busy with work to learn much Danish and 99% of work is in English across a few organizations I've been with while being here. And 100% of the people you meet in Copenhagen will speak English near fluently so it is not necessary for daily life. In fact, you are more likely to find restaurants where nobody speaks Danish in the city. All of this is different if you travel to rural areas of course. It only becomes a problem if you are in a social situation with a bunch of Danes because they'll want to socialize in Danish. In small groups it is fine, they'll switch to English for me, but a big group makes it harder.

What's the app called? I'd like to reference it to see if I can swim when I visit :D

Here you go: https://www.badevand.dk/

For the record, I've only seen it red once or twice all year, so the odds are already in your favor. And at the more popular swim spots, there will be a physical sign with a little green or red light.

You can see it in the By & Havn app (City & Harbour in Danish): https://byoghavn.dk/ny-app-til-alle-os-der-elsker-koebenhavn...

Also in Badevand app: https://kbh.badevand.dk/

1000+ people for a city of 600k people doesn't seem like much? Maybe I'm overestimating how much people use each "thing" a city offers.

Arguably a lot of people consider it too cold most of the year. But otherwise I would say that when the weather is good the water is filled quite up with people at a comfortable level!

A lot of the people in the city might go the 'real' beaches instead.

Do you and your family participate in winter bathing often, or is it more of a seasonal tradition for you?

During covid, my wife went every single day for months through the winter. There are lots of Danes that go for "streaks" of going every day as well. Oh, and speaking of streaking, especially in the winter they'll go in fully nude. As you don't really want a wet bathing suit to deal with when it is freezing out.

It's fascinating how some people make it a daily practice, not just for the physical benefits but also for the mental challenge and resilience it builds.

This American in the Netherlands eyes his filthy canals with envy of the Danes.

Yeah, in my city it's not that bad in the canals, but we have PFAS and GenX thanx to Chemours, down south we have 3M from Belgium dumping PFAS. Other rivers have crap from Germany.

They say: You can swim, it's not that bad, but eat 1-2 fish from said river and you're over the max your body could (theoretically) safely ingest for a year.

I just moved to a Dutch city with a large canal and I'm definitely jealous that you can't swim in it! Luckily we have a lot of small recreational lakes that are clean and have other accessories for swimming.

Why you can't swim after the rain? Does the water get dirty, or else?

Sewage and rainwater in the canals.

It can cause overflow from flooding sewer drains, which runs off into the canals. If that happens you'll want to wait a day or two for it to clear up.

In many cities the sewage and rainwater drainage systems are combined in some areas.

Since all other replies are a bit too concise, I'll try and dive deeper (ha ha).

1) Naturally, rains wash out street grime and small pieces of rubbish which may easily bypass the sewage system altogether and end up in the river.

2) Cities have systems in place to treat wastewaters before releasing them into the rivers. However, these systems need to store yet-untreated water in reservoirs, and heavy rain may fill these up. Then, the only solution (if you don't want sewage to blast out sewer holes) is to release the water without treating it. In fact, one of the main upgrades made by Paris for the recent Olympics was a massive, 30-meter-deep new basin [1] built exactly to mitigate that risk.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/giant-reservoir-ready-s...

So naive question.. but how can they ensure all the water upstream is clean?

I guess in Copenhagen its water is coming from the Baltic so maybe it's less of a concern (short of container ships having issues near the city). But the Seine river flows through many communities before it reaches Paris. Many opportunities for actors to illegally dump things in the river and for all sorts of nasty runoff agricultural and otherwise to make it in periodically along the whole stretch.

Continuous water testing at the city limits also sounds impractical

> Continuous water testing at the city limits also sounds impractical

Why? Surely a small team of a few people could have that as their job, and it would be completely worth it, to help keep all the people that want to swim safe.

And like, aside from the manual testing of the water that this team would do once or twice per day probably, they could have a few different sensors to catch some of the most likely kinds of pollution.

On top of that add hefty fines and maybe even a year or two of jail time for anyone caught dumping pollutants into the river, and you have a good disincentive against polluting the water.

And have a strong sense of pride of nature in the country so that people will naturally want to be mindful of the environment we live in. Promote this kind of thinking in schools and in public service announcements (billboards, ads, etc) from the government.

It's not technically impossible to continuously monitor a river, but as the neighboring comments shows, it's kinda of cutting edge stuff and basically nobody is doing it. It's also very much not cheap. Pinpointing where upstream someone dumped stuff in the middle of the night is virtually impossible

Yeah, it is helped by the geography. The channel in Copenhagen isn't a river, it is directly open to the North+Baltic seas, so we don't have this runoff type challenge of other European cities.

It seems to be normal practice. Two weeks ago Russia poisoned a river flowing across the border into Ukraine. The standard monitoring tools and infrastructure seemed sufficient to monitor the situation.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/toxic-substances-flowin...

Advances in remote sensing are making continuous water quality monitoring much easier. At our company we use a combination of satellite imagery and in situ optical sensors to monitor rivers and reservoirs. As well as a general water quality index, we can estimate concentrations of harmful nutrients, chlorophyll-a, phycocyanin, suspended matter, dissolved organic carbon to name a few.

A further advantage of satellite remote sensing for water quality is that it can be done by a neutral third party, without permission or access to the land, which can help bring a bit of objectivity to the politicized narrative around water quality we are seeing at the moment.

https://www.gybe.eco/

multiple daily satellite images of the whole length of a river... I know you can purchase these kinds of satellite products, but as I understand it - it's incredibly expensive. Doing that all year round seems cost prohibitive

Considerably more affordable than the alternatives:

- multiparameter sondes (submersible sensors): More expensive, maintenance heavy, only measure at one point.

- Manual grab-samples: Again more expensive when you factor in labour, unreliable, single point.

Remote sensing has its disadvantages though; cloud cover can be problematic for example.

> only solution

Other than "don't put sewage in the rain collector".

Copenhagen’s sewage system was built in the 1850s and it was indeed considered to build a two-pronged solution. There was much resistance against this because it would eliminate a whole industry of “night men” (poop collectors), as well as people drying and trading it as fertilizer. So they build a single-pronged solution that was initially only allowed to be used for rain water.

https://ing.dk/artikel/ingenioerer-maatte-kaempe-haardt-faa-...

Runoff water (which contains nutrients, metals and organic compounds) add to the volume/discharge of the water system while also increasing the amount of suspended material in the water (turbidity).

The increase in water discharge also causes sediment to lift from the bed where e coli bacteria live happily in the sediment (think of shaking a bottle with solids that have fallen to the bottom). The potentially harmful bacteria is now suspended in the water for a few days, also growing in number as a result of the runoff nutrients until the increase in the water volume drops and the water can no longer suspend the sediment.

This cycle is the largest reason why, it's not just the runoff (which can also contain animial feces with e coli, etc), it's the runoff with nutrients stirring up the water and lifting e coli which then feasts on the nutrients.

https://www.usgs.gov/publications/escherichia-coli-bacteria-...

Although the outdoor swimming facilities are amazing, the swimming pools used for sports swimming are still few, small and generally overcrowded.

Pools are expensive to build and they almost always need chemicals and filters to be safe to swim in making them expensive to run. Where there are natural lakes/streams/ponds they are typically safe to swim in and much cheaper.

Which is to say anywhere pools are the primary place people swim, they will be few, small, and generally overcrowded (and also expensive). If you live where there are natural places to swim you will generally find it better, but many places don't give you those options.

What does it mean to do winter bathing throughout the year? Do you call it that in June still?

Well, I meant it in contrast so some places that do Polar Bear dips or whatever just on New Years Day or whatever. Basically, people swim 365 days a year here. It doesn't get cold enough for the channel to freeze over, but we sometimes get some ice by the shore and the hard core ones will chop a hole.

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