Copenhagen: The day I got a visit from a religious sect

Early this morning, an insistent ringing on my front door woke me up. Bleary-eyed and still in my pajamas I toppled out of bed and opened the door just to see…Two Koreans, asking me to let them in!

Real Koreans (not adopted ones, like me) are a rare sight in Copenhagen, but I was still in my REM sleep phase, so I didn’t really hear what they were saying, but muttered that they could come back in a couple of hours, when I was awake.

I went back to bed and tried to fall asleep again,  but I couldn’t, so I got up and started cleaning my apartment while trying to figure out what in the world two Koreans were doing at my front door on a Friday morning.

At noon I got the answer, as they showed up again, and I invited them inside. To start with, they claimed to be theology students, who were writing an essay, but one movie and 10 bible quotes later it became quite clear that they belonged to some kind of religious sect.

I explained to them that I was not religious at all, and they stared at me with big, sad eyes while they explained that it was for my own good, and if I did not join their sect, I would cut off my right to eternal life.

I tried to assure them, I could live with that, it was ok, but they just looked more and more upset by my ignorance. As a last desperate gesture, they showed me some drawings with Danish text, where the earth was described as a “soul prison” and heaven as “a place of eternal joy ..just like Christmas every day “.

I told them that Christmas once a year was more than enough for me and then proposed that instead of wasting their time on me, they should go and visit someone slightly more open to their ideas, and after having promised that I would stop and listen to them, if I saw them someday on the street, they finally gave up and left me to a life in sin..

Read more blog posts about life in Copenhagen on my Copenhagen Blog