Fried eel & Veggies

Over the last few months I've often looked out the window and say out loud... "Crap, it's snowing again!". It usually starts snowing just an hour or two before I have to go out - which makes my bike ride to the train station a little tricky. The best part is that it accumulates so freaking quickly! Chris is a trooper - through wind and snow he still commits to his daily bike ride to work. Winter has taken a toll on our poor bikes - everyone should also take note that gears don't change easily (or in my case, at all) when the temperature falls below minus O. Winter has also taken a toll on me. I am ready for some sunshine - I am ready to rise before 8am (in the summer the sun will rise at 4am) and ready to put our balconies to good use and have our meals out there. We went to Ikea yesterday to start picking out our patio furniture!

I am also ready to start speaking Danish. I need to find more opportunities to practice what I am studying... hopefully this practice will come as part of a job. The one language that is coming in handy is Spanish. I've begun teaching private lessons and I love it. It's a great challenge for me; talk about dusting off that good old university degree! I may pursue this new little hobby a bit further, I'm having way too much fun correcting homework and coming up with lesson plans.

At the grocery store the other day, I saw a man buy what looked like a thick black rope. I investigated a little further and confirmed that fried eel is a very popular dish in some parts of Denmark. Yummy?

The one thing we often laugh about is the amount of packaging that we end up with in the kitchen after cooking. It's really because a lot of the produce is sold like this:

I think I prefer Norweigan

It's been four months since I started going to Danish classes - at first the progress was amazing! Every week I'd pick up a few new sentences and often impress Chris with all my new vocabulary... Now I've hit a plateau, and I have realized just how hard this language really is - it's not complicated in terms of grammar but it has no logic or real structure. My Ellen Degeneres look-a-like teacher is great, she tries to correct us as much as possible, but she can only do so much. On another note, the one thing that still gets me here is the TV schedule. Programing begins here at any time - Ellen is on at 12:15, David Letterman is on at 8:45 my new favourite Canadian show Departures is on at 11:50. It's so funny to see the random programing but the best thing is that commercials are removed from the shows so there are no interruptions! There are German channels, Finnish Channels but my favorite is Norweigan! It's a really close language to Danish except it's much easier to understand! Okay, enough ranting... I am totally procrastinating studying for my test tomorrow....

The COP15 Post

It was really great to have something aside from Danish class to focus on leading up to the holidays. I volunteered with the english newspaper here and learned a thing or two. The publishing world intrigues me... especially in a foreign country. It's funny to compare the headlines in North America versus the headlines here. I find the danish media has less focus on the doom and gloom. And no one really cares about gossip... Who's Tiger Woods?

During the whole N1H1 scandal, the local scandal here was that all æbleskriver come from the same place! Æbleskriver is a fried dough dessert that all the groceries stores brand as their own during Christmas.

Here are some pics of my experience with the COP15. We had great bikes where we would put our papers each day and get out to the street, hand them out shouting "Get your english news, here!" It was inevitable that people would stop to chat with us, let us know what they were thinking and sometimes tell a little too much...

This is me on my bike on our way to one of the big protests. Check out the police officer with his pipe! We had to stop and grab a picture. And just for you Christine, "Hopenhagen" below!

This is not Denmark

Frozen lakes and bays... riding my bike has proved to be a bit of a challenge these days, when every few days we get a blanket of fresh snow!

Oh, what a night!

I've missed writing. Usually I go about my day and say to myself, "I should write about this on my blog". Then I think I'm such a good blogger, keeping my readers in mind ALL the time. For the last few weeks I fell out of routine. We had our first scheduled visitors, my brother and his fiancé Laura. We joked that they had this trip planned even before Chris & I confirmed we were moving here. I have always experienced the process of going to another country to visit family since we have always been sprawled across different countries but this was the first time I've been abroad and had family visit me. IT WAS SOOOO MUCH FUN! We laughed, we cried (due to laughter) and then laughed some more. Raul, how come are you so funny??!! It must be the stress of the engineering world that must have made you such a clown. In good planning practice, we had a full day by day itinerary scheduled. Some things we got to, others we didn't, simply because we were exhausted (from walking and the cold weather). Chris' brother Matt and girlfriend Marie were also able to join us so we had a full group. Copenhagen is extremely easy to tour with a group - especially in the middle of winter when tourism is low. Finding a table in a cafe was never an issue. Overall, I think they were all able to get a good vibe of what this city is all about - quaint, chilled and very pretty - graffiti and all.

Highlights definitely include new years eve. We had everyone over at our place for dinner. See:




But I think what everyone will remember are the fireworks. You see, there doesn't seem to be any regulations for fireworks in Denmark in terms of where you can set them off. So what you get is people setting them off EVERYWHERE!! Out of balconies, between cars on the roads, on the sidewalks, etc. If they all worked as they are supposed to this would be not be a problem but since they sometimes malfunction... well let me tell you - I am pretty sure we will all remember getting shot at by fireworks! One of the fireworks we lit in the park decided to explode sideways and made us run for cover! I have not run so fast since grade 6 track and field! I also haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Luckily Matt had picked up some safety googles for all of us so I think we were relatively safe. Aside from the risk of being burned! We headed into the city centre (cautiously) to see what was going on. I have never seen anything like it! Fireworks everywhere! A bar tender told us that the Danish spend 30 million krones on fireworks each new years. We sure saw it - from the pier - we had a 360 view of the city and it was amazing!

Can't wait to get the pics Matt (our photographer) took - stay tuned!

Also, very glad to report that the days seem to be getting longer already! It's almost 4pm and it's not dark yet!! So much daylight to look forward to in the coming months!!!

Merry Christmas! Feliz Navidad! Glædlig Jul!

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!! Really looking forward to Christmas Eve dinner, Chris is cooking up a storm in the kitchen: traditional Danish dinner, roasted duck with prunes and apples, cooked red cabbage and sweet potatoes. Rice pudding for dessert. We've had an amazing year of new adventures and many changes so we have much to celebrate this Christmas. We miss our family and friends but have some great visitors coming in the next few days so they will keep us busy and bring the "hygge" to us.

MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Taking my new role seriously

I made myself laugh today... really laugh. I asked Chris to pick up a mop on his way home last night because I felt that our vacuum was just not picking up the dust. Granted, I am new at this, I've never been a stay at home kind of girl... so today, I unwrapped the mop... and began looking for instructions! How do I use this thing? Have I really never used a mop before? I found this hard to believe... but it's true - I've never mopped and I don't know how to. I will google it.

In the kitchen I have made much progress. I joked with Christine that I started calling myself Martha. My not so ginger bread cookies where a hit! Next time I go home to Canada I will be sure to bring back some molasses so I can make the proper kind . I made the Danish version, honey cookies. Check them out:



We are getting ready for the holidays, the tree is up (and it has real candles) and my advent calendar is more than half way eaten (organic fair trade chocolate, thank you Chris!) and there is snow on the ground. It's also really cold out - my bike will stay exactly where it is today. I think I will take the bus to my Jule party tonight.

Countdown to Jul

The Danish celebrate the days of advent leading to Christmas (Jul) and yesterday was the beginning of the first week of advent. What I have enjoyed the most so far are the candles! They are everywhere. They sell them like water at every super market and they have a number system - so you have a candle you burn each week leading to Christmas, you can also have a long candle that is marked like a ruler with 24 days that burns each day of December, you also put candles on your Christmas tree. I have yet to light any of these, but I did ask Chris to pick up a fire extinguisher on his way home today just to be prepared. These folk love light - which is just as well because it's 8 am as I write this and the sun hasn't even come up yet! Even our residential street gets dolled up, have a look:






We went last night to watch the lighting of the Christmas tree downtown, we were warned that it was a kids event but it was still cute. For several minutes we were trying to figure out what the purpose of having people dressed up as pandas with flames on their heads, dancing around the Christmas tree. Then we made the connection: COP 15!! Talk about continuing to send the message to all ages. The mayor then spoke about how this city will soon play host... I was so proud of myself for understanding what she said! Enjoy the video, and Chris' commentary!!

Equality gone wrong???

Since I arrived, I've been scouting networking groups in order to find people with common goals and interest. School has been the best place to meet people because we are all in a similar situation, our spouse works here and we (mainly women) are trying to find our niche. I've attended a couple of really great expat seminars that have given me lots of ideas on how to approach the job search and what to expect out of this new culture and life style. I am still trying to get used to the fact that here, men find it okay to yell at women. On several occasions, I have seen (and thankfully NOT experienced) this in action. Coming out of the grocery store one day, this lady brushed up against a child with her bike - I guess she didn't see the little girl but the girl's father looked like he was ready to hit the poor lady on her bike! He strongly cussed at her, loudly and come face to face with her. I thought they were going to fight. Another time a man cut off a bike while he was driving, so the cyclist (a woman) yelled at him. He immediately got out of his car and approached the lady, yelling and screaming at her, in her face, at the top of his lungs! I found this a little strange and when I asked one of my fellow expats she said, "It's simply their freedom of expression and equality". She also proceeded to tell me that along with this sense of equality, one must expect no special favours or treatments from anyone. She experienced this when one day she went to her local bakery to order a few dozen sandwiches for a meeting. She asked if she could get a discount and the baker turned very sour and went on to ask her why she would ever expect a discount and why she thought she was so special... the baker went on to argue that if the old age pensioner that buys a sandwich once a week has to pay full price than everyone has to pay full price.

After having this conversation I realized I have a lot to learn about this country! And apparently it takes a while. Chris has a colleague from the States, that has lived here for about 20 years, who says that still to this day, his Danish wife corrects his mannerisms, expressions, body language, etc. Who knew moving to another "Western" country would still leave room for loss in translation!

Danish Level 2

I've been completely ignoring all things non 'dansk' in order to prepare for my level 1 exam last week... and guess what? I passed! It felt good to have that under my wing... so on to level 2. Not much time in between courses though as I started again on Monday but I am giving myself the gift of time by reducing school to only twice a week instead of 4. This will give me more time to dedicate to my extra curriculars :-P

It's been amazing to see just how different our North American expectations are when it comes to shopping. I wanted to treat myself to a haircut the other day, found a place that I'd like to try, called them and found out it takes about 5 weeks to get an appointment!!! (IF you are flexible and can come in any time of the day). Chris and I decided that we would accept the fact that winter will be dark, cold and rainy and a TV would be nice to have. We went to the largest shop in the area to try to get the largest selection only to learn that there is a nation wide shortage of TVs and that only 2 out of the dozens of models are available at this time. Sales guy couldn't say when more stock would come in... We went to buy a lamp for the living room and same thing... they took my details and will call me when the one we chose is available... went to buy a coffee table and same thing... maybe they will make more before Christmas but maybe not.... he couldn't say when they'd have more... are you seeing the pattern? I felt like saying, what do you mean you are not able to sell me what you sell? And the overall impression I get from people is 'Oh well'. The other day I asked a store keeper about her rain coats, she had a small but nice selection. When I asked her about them she said "Oh, these, we'll I think they are too expensive, I am not going to sell them anymore."

On a nature related note, we recently went to the Deer Park. It's called that because back in the day it used to be used as a hunting ground (how sad!) but now it's a pretty park with hundreds of deer! They are all over the place, just chillin'.

Check them out:

The beach is also very close by: