Students openly drinking on campus certainly contrasts the hush-hush binge drinking culture seen in universities across the U.S.

But in a country with some of Europe’s highest rates of youth alcohol consumption, the Friday bars are routine.

“We’re so used to finishing the week by having the Friday bars. There’s like a barrier that has to be broken down, and it’s beginning to be a ritual,” said language student Simon Bysted.

Jesper Bech, another student who helps run the Langauge Department bar, said some of his best memories in university come from his nights as a server.

“You can know someone, but you only really know them after you get drunk together,” Bech said.

Some say built-in bars make it easier to socialize in a country that describes itself as introverted. Claudiu Schwartz, an American who moved to Aarhus three years ago for work, said every office he’s been a part of has had a Friday bar.

It’s been useful to get closer with his officemates, he said, but he can’t help but feel like it’s a way to make up for the country’s “cold” demeanor.

“I’ve never heard about it in any other socially healthy country, just Scandinavia. Make eye contact with them and they will get panic attacks,” Schwartz said.

Listen to the voices of the students behind the bars in the podcast below:

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

It’s a sunny Friday afternoon in Aarhus, Denmark. Days with weather like this are rare to come by, and my friends and I were certainly not the only ones to hit the grassy lawns and soak up the rays in University Park.

From across the pond, we saw crowds of people dancing, playing beer pong and handing out Carlsburg beer to one another. These were Aarhus University students gearing up for a long evening of drinking, starting steps away from the classrooms they just finished lectures in.

Everyone here knows all too well what a Friday bar is. And as an American student studying here, I’ve become accustomed to grabbing a pint with my classmates the moment we finish our studies, bogged down with our backpacks and all.

But I still wanted to hear from the handful of students responsible for putting it all together, so this time, I’m tackling the Friday bars solo, visiting faculties that I don’t know a soul in, in hopes of getting ahold of some organizers. I’m Olivia Wynkoop, and this is your deep-dive into the Danish Friday Bar culture.

Walsøe: It’s quite a lot of work being here, considering we’re probably the largest Friday bar in Denmark.

Wynkoop: That’s Lauritz Walsøe, one of the 12 medicine students responsible for serving over 500 people every Friday evening in his faculty’s bar, called Umbilicus. It’s partially the biggest Friday bar because its faculty has over 2,000 students.

Walsøe: A lot of people, when they’re done with their own Friday bar that closes at 8 or something like that, head over to ours. I think it really gives people some space to relax between a very stressful study.

I think if they didn’t have this, they wouldn’t have as large a social network as they do now.

Wynkoop: He’s recently been committing 30 to 40 hours a week gearing up for the bar’s final events before the semester. He said his grades are taking a toll because of it, but the camaraderie between the twelve of them makes it worth it.

Walsøe: I just gotta work extra hard after the sixth of May, when we have our last Friday bar. It takes a lot of toll, but it’s an amazing experience to be apart of, especially when we’re such a small group of members.

Wynkoop: A short flight upstairs brings me to Mads Pontoppidan, a Friday bar organizer for the Public Health faculty. He shared similar sentiments about how his work at the bars is negatively affecting his grades.

Pontoppidan: Six or seven other people on my semester are doing exactly the same, and we’re helping each other because we’re so much more behind everyone else.

Wynkoop: But he said this experience has essentially made up his social life in university. Seeing hundreds of drunken student faces a week has given him a bit of notoriety on the campus, but his closest bonds are with his fellow servers.

Pontoppidan: I do this because of the community that we built. We just have this special bond that no one can actually understand. When we’re actually together, it’s just… well how do you say? Best friends.

Wynkoop: Then I had a chat with a language student and former Friday bar staffer, Emile Feddersen. He looks back on his two-semester terms at the bar fondly, though he did provide a more critical perspective. For starters, he was equally as surprised as to how prevalent the drinking culture is in Aarhus when he moved here from Moscow.

Feddersen: …And you can imagine how strict they are with booze. So then I come here and they’re like, we’re getting shit faced, literally in the classrooms if we want. I’m like, really?

Kids just go ballistic with the amount of alcohol they can consume. It’s very convenient, right?

Wynkoop: He said it can get a bit repetitive. It can make the long, unpaid hours of cleaning up other people’s drunken messes feel like it’s not worth it.

Feddersen: The culture of Friday bars is as follows: you go to the Friday bar, with your guys, you get drinks and you go to town.But if you have to clean, you’re stuck for here for another two hours. And sometimes people puke and plants and smash chairs and you’re like fuck, you know. That’s not what it’s about.

It’s very exciting when you don’t know the people. But then at some point you come in and you know the guys and you’ve had those drunk conversations millions of times before, so you know what you’re going into. Nothing’s going to be different this time.

Wynkoop: Emile also said Friday bars can create a very comfortable social bubble and enforce a “segregated” way of life, one in which its best to stay within the confines of one’s academic studies.

Feddersen: It’s a comfort zone. But the Danes love that, as the whole culture is about creating your own little bubble and not going out of it. You go to Friday bar with your co-workers, you go to the Friday bar with your classmates, and you don’t really expand.

It is true that it’s very hard to break the ice with Danish people, the cold Nordics, right? That’s what they say. That’s definitely a fact. So yeah, these Friday bars, they can actually enforce this type of behavior.