Cars Cost Less in Wetaskiwin, But Not Here

Finally, we are the proud owners of a pre-owned Peugeot 307 station wagon built by the Frenchies when they were not on vacation. It took 32 hours of website viewing, 23 hours of dealership tire kicking, 14 hours of phone calls, 9 hours of spreadsheet organization, 3 hours of test drives, 4 hours of mechanical inspections, and 1 CPR number to bring it all together. It's not easy when you have too many choices and too much time. 

Late model Peugeot with early model driver (both grey)

Cars are expensive here. Everyone tells you that: friends, dealers, insurance agents, kids on bikes. There is a massive tax on new cars here (180%)! If you wanted to purchase a new BMW 320i, it would cost you $94k CAD + taxes = $263k! No sneaking off to Germany to purchase one right from the Motor Works either; the tax is applied at registration. After that, there is a yearly "green tax" that you will pay based on the fuel consumption of your car. It could be as much as $2000 (or more) if you choose a bit of a guzzler. These high prices are reflected all the way down to the used cars, so you can expect to pay a lot more for a car here than you would back in the Land of Bitumen.

It sounds outrageous to pay this kind of taxation, but if you re-frame it, you are really talking about a "user pay" system that all fiscal conservatives love to love. An awful lot of your income tax goes to road repair and construction but we all own cars, so that is the expectation. There are neighbourhoods in Copenhagen that have 18% car ownership. They want their taxes going to mass transit and bike lanes. If you can afford a car here, you can afford the user-pay tax. There are arguments to raise the taxes even higher to reduce car ownership. Rush hour is a real gong-show in Copenhagen.

Fuel costs about $2.30 CAD per litre and $2.00 CAD per litre for diesel. Since diesels get better mileage (more energy per litre), we bought a diesel. Diesels are not fond of short daily trips, but I think we will blow out the soot by ripping shitters in the high school parking lot. 

Since people pay such a high price for a new car, they REALLY take care of them. We looked at cars with more than 250,000 km that looked like they just rolled off the showroom floor. Heaven forbid if you have ash residue in the ashtray or cigarette lighter! No way I'm buying that run-down piece of crap. I'm going to have to protect our car's interior by layering it with garbage and pop bottles. I can't risk the depreciation.

Wayne is Watching

Is Wayne Gretzky trying to contact me or is it just sausages? You decide.

They Nailed the Dishwasher but Epic Fail on the Fridge

We've been here for 14 days and guess how many times I've been grocery shopping? No…no…and no….the correct answer is 14 times! Now I'm like you and love grocery shopping (except for the part where you make a list, go to the store, fill your cart, pay for it, load it into your car and then put it away). We tend to think the Europeans love to shop for supper at the market on the way home from the metro: you might picture some French guy sniffing a baguette and pinching some tomatoes to see what he might enjoy with a splash of Bordeaux tonight. But the truth is that we are not talking about a cultural difference, the difference is caused by an APPLIANCE!

The refrigerators here were designed by little old ladies who might like a tiny spot of jam to go with their homemade scones. Our fridge back in Edm has its own address and property tax bill. We once hung a hindquarter of beef to age in it and still had room for the 5-gallon pail of mayo from Costco! When we shopped for milk, we bought 4 - 4 liter jugs for a week of consumption. They don't sell 4 litre jugs here! They don't even sell 2 litre jugs! We need to buy - (all my engineering friends have already cranked this out on their HP calculators) - 16 separate litres of milk if we wanted to stock up. Of course we don't - we just go shopping every day.

Don't even think about leaving the house without your bag full of bags! There is no such thing as a cheap plastic shopping bag. If you forget your bags you must pay for the good kind  made from strong plastic and then you can add these to your bag full of bags. You look like a real amateur when half your grocery bill is for the bags to carry it home.

Rick proudly displays his "bag of bags" including his favorite Netto bag

The grocery stores are rather small but at least half the floor space is filled with beer and wine. This is a good thing. Less food choice, more booze choice. In a country where everything is quite expensive, the beer is cheap! 40 DKK = $8 CAD = 6 cans of tasty beer. It's even cheaper if you buy a plastic returnable crate with 30 bottles (which, of course, I do).

So if half your fridge is full of cheap beer and your fridge is half the size of a Coleman cooler, this leaves room for about 2 litres of milk; exactly what we consume in a day. Wait…gotta zip off to Netto….I think I just heard the kids making chocolate milk!

Morning Rambling

My life has a purpose: to get a car. That means that I should be scanning ads for something that we want to go look at but the choices and possibilities are too unlimited and so it is easier to sit in the viewing room upstairs looking at the harbor talking to you.

Second floor sitting room

Nivå Harbour

A day starts in our house just like a day at your house; with lots of yelling at kids to get mobilized! The routine starts as alarm, pee, coffee, yell, coffee, news, yell, yell, porridge, yell, yell, yell, jackets on!, wait lunch isn't made, promises to go to bed earlier, to shower more, to brush teeth without being told, to sit straight, yell, yell, too late to walk to school, get in car, minutes to go, none to spare. So much for the idyllic bike ride laughing and waving at other cyclists on the way. It's more like Mr Magoo hunched behind the wheel of the car yelling "Out of the way, moron!" to a grandma on her bike heading out for a bit of groceries.

Steen is at his third day of school and Maja and Tom are just starting today. Mette is with the younger kids in school this morning so I have a few hours of freedom (except for the car thing I mentioned earlier).

I jogged home from Steen's school along the Gammlestrandvej (Old Beach Road) with thatched roof houses on one side and the Sound separating the barbarian, warlike Swedes from the peaceful Danes on the other side. The sun is finally shining today so the water is sparkling and calm. 

After the jog comes a complete workout, shower, massage, paint a picture, build a miniature boat with some string and dowel, then learn Danish and send some  money to Africa. The little flags are flapping on the sailboats so maybe I'll watch that for a while before I get to those other things.

I'll show you a few pics of our house and garden in Nivå:

Front yard of our house 

Back of house

Back yard

The Second Post is really the First

It took a lot of physical labour, but we had the house, garage and yard ready without a hitch: unless, of course, you consider a punctured gas line in the backyard or a blown head gasket in the Volvo a "hitch". We had SO much help from friends, it was incredible! Thank you all for that.
The Edmonton/Vancouver/Houston/Munich/Copenhagen flight was enjoyable and lots of fun. Tom was puking on the Vancouver leg and then walking through all the airports with a barf bag held to his mouth as we hustled from security to gate. Mette spent the 8h Houston/Munich leg in an outraged huff because all the 3-seat empty sections were taken by other travellers before we could grab them: but they didn't follow the rules and sit in their own seats until the plane took off! Damn them all to hell! We lost one of our large bags but that actually wasn't a bad thing. We JUST managed to squeeze everyone into our Audi rental (what a nice car) with kids sitting on suitcases and Mette with her feet up on the dash and a bag on the front floor. We would not have been able to take the lost bag with us.

Our house in Niva (pronounced Nivo because the "a" has a dot above it) is in a great location near the harbour and a forest with mountain biking trails. Yes, mountain biking trails.  I haven't been on the trails yet, but I guess there is some elevation changes. The house has enough furniture to ensure that we don't have have to drop thousands on couches and tables etc. Here's the best part: we arrived in time for a little street party where we met everyone and now we have friends in the hood. We live in a little triangular plot of land with 18 houses on it and they plan a summer party every year (in the summer!). A tent was set up in the driveway right next to our house and we had lots of laughs and a bit of alcohol. Or was it a bit of laughs and a lot of alcohol? I can't remember.

Well, I don't want to make the posts too long and boring, so I'll discuss some other topics later. Today is Steen's first day of school! Tom has already played hockey a couple of times and we are on the intense hunt for a car. Sounds pretty mundane, but not in DK!!!

You must have a number!

Picture anything that you might do as a citizen rather than a tourist. You might want to get a cell phone or open a bank account. Some folks would like to buy a car or get a library card. "I would like to sell you that" says the vendor, but can I have your CPR number? This number is a bit like our SIN number but waaayyyy more intrusive. Mette still has a CPR number but it is inactive. You need to first go to the City Hall in your Kommune (District) to get one. No problem – we’ll be in and out, get to a cell phone store and purchase a phone and broadband access. Wait, we do have a problem: they will mail us the number when it is activated. We could get it by email, but you need a CPR number to get email access to city hall. So now we wait. In a week we should get our CPR number followed by phone and broadband. Oh, by the way, broadband wait time is 2 weeks. Yes, it does not matter if your house is already wired for internet. Two weeks is the wait time!

They really don’t want you to have a car. Yes, all the roads are paved and there are great highways and bridges snaking all over the countryside, but if you dare to get a car, they will come down on you like the old cannons of Helsingor on a smugglers ship sneaking through the Sound. First of all, you will need a CPR number. Then you will pay through the nose, then you will pay taxes, then you will pay a yearly tax, then you can get insurance (you will need a CPR number for that). Gas is $2.00 per liter. Ahh, now I see why there are so many bicycles!

Speaking of taxes, anyone with a screen who could potentially watch gov’t funded Dansk Radio (same as CBC but no commercials) will pay $200 per six months so DR can be paid for. This includes cell phone users because they can potentially watch DR.

But it is not all numbers and taxes. This morning I sit at my computer looking at the ochre walls and red tile roof of the house across from the thick hedge outside the dining room window. The sky is clear and sharp. Today we will take the kids to the school and get our bearings on the educational system. Tom’s first hockey practice is this afternoon and maybe an IKEA visit is in the books to stock up the kitchen. More updates later of course!

View of Fleming's house from our front window