City and Country

This Thanksgiving weekend marks the start of school holidays for the kids and teachers here in Denmark. The kids are warming up their thumbs for some anticipated screen action so I will take great joy in disappointing them with blackouts. You may not know this, but Mette is teaching English for a few hours per week at the elementary school so the holiday affects her also.

Friday night was "Culture Night" in Copenhagen where all the doors on art galleries, museums, dance studios, churches and historical buildings are thrown open and the public is admitted for free. Almost all the squares have tents set up with music and drink so the entire city and surrounding areas converge on the downtown. The night was mild and the sidewalks were packed with people and bikes. It was a really cool experience. We went to a big art gallery where one of the rooms had a 20' ring filled with 3" of sand and horse footprints in a figure 8. It was moving - I wept with the rapture.

The very next day we launched into a countryside bike ride around our area. The farmland and forests are covered in trails that are excellent for biking or hiking. The Danes really take advantage of the outdoors. On our 26 km journey we ran into bird watchers, falconers, horse riders, skeet shooters, hunting dog trials, radio controlled airplane enthusiasts, runners, bikers and farmers. I couldn't help but think the RC airplanes and the skeet shooters should join up or maybe the bird watchers, falconers and hunting dogs. There would be some great efficiencies in the club system.

On Thanksgiving Sunday we were invited to the house of another Canadian (Jeff) and his Danish wife (Louisa). They used to live in Vancouver and have been here for about 2 years now. They have kids in Maja and Tom's school. We also met up with another Mette who is married to an American (Kevin) and they've lived here for about 15 years. Louisa's sister and kid were also there so we numbered 16 in total. Louisa roasted a turkey (not so easy to find or finance) and we baked a couple of pumpkin pies - FROM SCRATCH! Baking pumpkin pies is not so easy, so you can imagine the rig pig language coming from me when the basket I was carrying them in broke and they tipped upside down! We scraped off the snails and moss and ate them anyway. It was a fantastic party and we had a lot of laughs and discussions. By the time we left at 1 AM, there were kids lying all over the place like a "kid bomb" had gone off.