Spring Flowers

These little crocus type flowers are sprouting all over the place. They don't even need a cow pie for starter food.

5 Things You Won't Hear Me Say Here

#5: I wonder if that guy would like to sell that old abandoned car for parts?

First of all, there are no abandoned cars. Secondly, nobody in this entire country would consider leaving junk in their yard. Thirdly, I don't have any wrenches.


#4: Gentofte is not that bad.

When I was a kid from Carlyle, it was not acceptable to like neighbouring Arcola or anyone who came from Arcola. This was a problem for me as my Grandparents and many relatives lived in Arcola. (I have since learned that they are fairly normal.) When the Arcola-Kisbey Combines rolled into town to play the Cougars, we were gathered at the entrance to yell and swear and give them a hard time. When the Arcola hockey team came to play my 12 & under team with their star defenseman Dean LeQueyer and his 150 mph slapshot, I had pure hatred (but mostly fear) hidden behind my goalie mask. 
Gentofte is the new Arcola. My brother and sister-in-law live there but I still can't like the place. When the rich-kid Gentofte Stars drive 10 km up to Rungsted to beat our kids 12-0 with their passing and skating and teamwork, it makes me want to go out to the parking lot and break the antenna's off their cars. Not that I would…or did….not ever. 


#3: "Jeg kan tale Dansk"

This one I'm disappointed and sad about. I very often say "Jeg kan ikke tale Dansk" (I can not speak Danish) when people start talking to me in Danish and then they immediately switch to English. I have many good excuses for not getting going on the Danish language, but it was one of my goals and I have to chalk it up as a complete failure. You can talk one on one in English with almost any Dane, but if you want to join a conversation or be included in a group, you MUST have Danish. I am happy I'm here instead of Germany or France where you would not be so lucky to find English speakers, but you can't really join the society without the language.


#2: Hey, that was easy!

Nothing is easy. After acquiring my CPR, I spent a couple of hundred dollars for a medical exam and some paperwork for a temporary drivers licence. Now I find out that I have to do a theoretical and practical tests and those will end up costing upwards of a thousand more dollars that we don't have. Now this is getting ridiculous. I may just have to hole up in a shack in the wilds of Denmark to avoid the government like they do in Idaho.


#1: Keep the change!

Restaurants, cafes, coffee shops and bodega's are stupidly expensive. Even if the waitress has great cleavage and flatters me with a laugh and tells me I have ordered her favorite dish and places a hand on my shoulder when she talks, no tip! 

Aalborg Cup

A cup is a tournament, Aalborg is a town in Northern Jutland and RIK is a group of feisty young pups from Rungsted Ishockey Klubben. All the great hockey nations gathered for an international tournament to take home the Aalborg cup. France, Norway and of course a number of teams from Denmark drove, ferried and cross-country skied to the town of Aalborg for one monumental weekend. The French team (Le Gothique - cool name & logo) from Amiens drove over 12 hours to have their hearts broken. The Norwegian teams from Stavanger ferried across the dangerous North Sea to risk their lives and return with only a couple of victories. But the kids didn't travel this far to win a tournament - they came for the pure fun and enjoyment of hockey. The parents came to win.

International tournament featuring the "Big Three" hockey nations.

Games were played at the GIGANTIUM! Always pronounce this with a Monster Truck voice.

When you go to a tournament here, everything is provided at the rink except the "hotel" which is a classroom in a local school. Yes, I slept on a skinny mattress on the hard concrete floor at my advanced age - no problem. It's just like camping except instead of worrying about bears, I have to worry if one of the kids drew a picture of the Prophet for a school project.

Tom's coach, Alexander, gets everyone to bed, makes sure they brush their teeth and get to sleep and he even serves up the food. He's a young University student who volunteers at the club and has no kids of his own - great guy and the young players really relate to someone who knows as much about internet games as they do.

All meals for all the kids are prepared by tournament volunteers. You can go the whole weekend without spending any more money than entrance fee and overnight stay.

The Rungsted Ishockey Klub. Tom is wearing the toque on the right side of the photo.

I was cursing myself for my bad name memory and confusion until I found out that between parents and kids we had 3 Alexanders, 2 Jans, 2 Jakobs, 2 Sebastions, 2 Oscars, 2 Andreas and a Tom. The Danish book of baby names is 4 pages long.

There is no tiering system in DK, so when you enter a tournament, you can expect to get beaten by the same team that whupped you a month ago in the last tournament. RIK pulled off an unexpected tie against Hvidøvre but ended up with 2 wins, a tie, 3 losses and 2 whupp'ns. The kids had fun, blah blah blah, parents all agreed that our own kid played like an NHL prospect and the rest of the team didn't pass enough.

L'Amiens cool and funky team logo. Puissance, Emotion and Adrenaline. (Puissance? sounds like they need a doctor for that)

Top 5 Things I enjoyed about Nivå in the Winter

As we creep out of winter and start thinking about the spring and summer, I thought it might be good therapy to have a "look back" on the winter and glean some positives from the experience. I'm back behind the wheel with a temporary drivers licence and now Mette is getting retribution by making me drive the kids to all their activities in the evenings (I love it!). I still have to take a Danish drivers test, but I'm an excellent driver.

The town we live in is about 35 km north of Copenhagen. As you drive in along the coast road toward CPH, the houses get very, very expensive. CPH is one of the world's most expensive cities, so you can imagine the cost of a large house on the coast within a short commute of the city center. Our town is close enough to commute from but just out of the really expensive areas. Nothing but pensioners and Syrian refugees out at this postal code.


Here are the Top 5 Things I enjoyed about Nivå in the Winter:

#5: The Gym

Steen at the Nivå Gym

The "Nivå Sport and Motion Center" is more than just a small-town gym. Harald, the uber-fit 60 year old martial arts instructor owns the center and runs it like an average joe gym. There are always folks sitting around the table having a coffee and cake to replace the calories that were burned off. If you get a "Sweatin' with the Seniors" pass, you can come to the gym before 3 PM and get a discount. There is no hardcore electronic pass system to make sure you paid, just Harald who spends his mornings there with his dog offering up advice and new exercises to us. 


#4: Downtime

Not sure that too much downtime is good or bad. I know that if you are working like a plow horse right now, you would love to have a complete day with only a trip to the grocery store on the agenda. That's great but 90 days in a row like that? I almost cleaned the house a couple of times out of boredom! 
I've read a lot of books from the library, rediscovering Grisholm, LeCarre and Alan Furst. We've laughed through all 5 seasons of Modern Family on Netflix and gave Sons of Anarchy a steady run for 2 complete seasons. I even "binge watched" Sons for 8 straight hours on a rainy, windy Monday in January. The family had to put paddles to my chest and slap me back to consciousness when they found me.


#3: The Paper Route

You have no idea how many flyers we get in our mailbox in a week. It is a huge pile of mostly unwanted advertisements led by the grocery stores and furniture stores. Steen is now part of that problem. He delivers flyers to about 100 houses in our neighbourhood and I really  like helping him so we can walk and talk on a rainy Friday afternoon. After work we typically sit by the fire with a Coke and a Tuborg. I like to tell him about delivering the Leader Post back in Carlyle with Gerald Doty who would throw the papers in the garbage on days he didn't feel like doing the route. Gerald ended up in jail during most of his adult life, so I must stress that these are "stories", not "advice".

#2: The Harbour and the Coast

The harbour and coast

If you need to get out for a walk, we almost always cross the road to the coast and the harbour. It's a pretty quiet place in the winter, but the ocean can be really awesome when the wind is howling. Living by the ocean is a huge bonus for us and a very different way of life for a prairie boy. Sometimes, when the wind is really blowing, I like to squint my eyes and imagine the ocean is a Saskatchewan wheat field and Sweden is the trees of Manitoba in the distance. Wait, is that my dog running away?.. or just a seal?

#1: The Ride to School

The Gammel Strandvej. Sweden is just across the sound.

Every school morning I bike with Maja to their school in Humlebæk, about 2 km up the coast. Tom always leaves earlier and Steen travels a different route to his school. We were able to bike to school every day of the winter, in the rain or sometimes even in the rain. Our route passes by some nice homes on the coast and the Øresund is right by our side for most of the trip. Just before the school, we enter the very old and quaint fishing village of Sletten which has a jumble of old cottages and thatched roof houses with a narrow road through it. I'd like to say that I stopped at the harbour for fresh fish in the morning but when your main criterion when buying fish is "does it taste too fishy?", then maybe you should be eating more pork. Do we ask a butcher if his chops taste too porky?

The old fishing village of Sletten

Too be honest, I really struggled to find 5 things that were good about a winter in Nivå (like c'mon, downtime? really?). Denmark, in general, hides inside the house during the winter and waits for spring. Copenhagen is actually a bit further north than Edmonton, but without the cold and snow, you don't get the activities that we might take for granted. Give me a sunny -15 day with fresh snow anytime!

The One Number to Rule Them All

Yeah that's right. I'm now a resident applicant in the country of Denmark! My CPR number has come through after 6 months in the country. Now I will start language lessons and regain my driver's licence. Another interesting aspect is that the government assigns you a family doctor so you are registered with one in your community. What else do you need a CPR number for? 
How about:
Buying a car, getting a bank account, job, library card, medical attention, cell phone, internet, insurance, driver's licence, or even automatic weapons for public meetings.

Awesome sunrise over the Øresund on the ride to school one day.

Winter is pretty much over. It is not warm, but the snow has all disappeared and some little flowers are sprouting in the forest. My spirit has absolutely lifted with the change in weather - actually, we had a reasonable amount of sunshine in Jan and that seemed to turn things around. In the spirit of morbid curiosity, too much data available and too much time, a Copenhagen December is cloudy for 91% of the daylight hours working out to an average of 36 minutes per day of sunshine in that month. Seriously, if I had to make some sort of jailhouse alcohol from pencil sharpener shavings to get through this month, I would.

If flowers could fight, I'd like to see a matchup with a prairie crocus and one of these yellow brutes.

We have just finished a week off from school (Winter Holiday). We could not afford to travel anywhere even though it is pretty cheap to fly in Europe. For the price of a single Edm-Winnipeg round trip ($550), you could fly the entire family to Rome, Barcelona, Lisbon or a number of other destinations that do not have outdoor rinks. Unfortunately, you can either have money or time - not both... (unless, of course, you are a drug dealer or a Danish school teacher).

Today is "Fastelaven" which is kind of a Halloween event that is somehow related to Mardi Gras (Lent). Kids dress up in costumes and go door to door for candies or money. I got mixed up and had them show me their boobs for necklaces. I doubt that I'll make that mistake again!

Fastelaven Boller (buns) with a creme filling and very tasty.

Postscript to the Post from 0807612442:

This will be the first of a new energetic effort to file more frequent posts. Please subscribe or follow Mette's Facebook page. Maybe things will start happening now that I have the NUMBER!!

What's a Christmas without Explosions?

On a date chosen by the first pope to keep the pagan holy days more or less intact, a little baby Jesus was born in the Christian quarter of old Jeruselum (although it may not have been Christian then) and received gifts from Sinterklaas, St Nick and Odin. Meanwhile a Yule Nisse is in the rafters eating rice porridge with a pat of butter on top. Or something like that. Without CocaCola and Canadian Tire to straighten things out for me, it has become rather confusing.

I know I was feeling a bit sorry for myself after 6 weeks of dark, dreary clouds and rain,  but Christmas morning started out with a light snow and then sunshine. We actually ended up with a white Christmas! The traditional Danish Christmas consists of the main Christmas meal on the 24th eve, kids open presents and then on Christmas day is a 5 hour Christmas "lunch". We keep the English tradition of opening presents on Christmas morning and we had the official meal and lunch days before Christmas so we had a day free to take a long walk.

Long walks are what we do over here.  Walks in the forest, along the coast and in the streets of Copenhagen. Without snow, you don't get the winter activities but you can always go for a walk. 

Hike along the snowy north coast

In the forest with some gnarly trees

Horsholm Kirke on a bright sunny day

Copenhagen from the Round Tower observation deck

Kids on the Round Tower

New Year's Eve draws a comparison mainly to the second Desert Storm, Mother of all Privately conducted Explosive Fireworks Festivals. Every man, woman and child over 5 is expected to let off 50 kg of fireworks. Special markets and tents are set up around the countryside to sell fireworks and every grocery store, corner store, cigar store and hardware store stocks up to sell fireworks. For days before and days after NYE, it sounds like a small arms market in Peshawar with all the gunfire and rockets firing off. Midnight on NYE the horizon over our town looked like the battle of Vimy Ridge. I think there is still some war refugees from the Gaza Strip hiding in their basement down the street from us. Emergency rooms get eyeballs and fingers damaged and this year 3 people were killed by some illegal professional fireworks that were ignited by prima cord instead of fuses (0.5 seconds is not long enough to run away).

Our neighbor was igniting fireworks on the street in front of our house a few days before NYE and we, of course, went out to watch. A cluster of small vertical fireworks blew out horizontally and came right up the road towards us exploding in the hedges all around. I grabbed Maja and carried her into our gate while Tom, who had been hiding behind a fence, hunkered down with beautiful purple starbursts exploding 2 meters away! A lot of excitement for our sleepy little street. Who would have thought that an $8 firework assembled by 8 year old kids in an 800 year old factory in China wouldn't have ISO 5001 standards? What?


So with Christmas and New Years over, what is on the horizon? Besides wind, rain and cloud, we have some hockey, we're moving Mette's mom into a Nursing home and we have a trip planned with the Stanley's to Italy in late March. I thought it might be wise to leave town before the Danes celebrate Easter. 

The Danish Christmas Lunch

First of all, let's dispel some discrepancies in translation. This is not actually a Christmas "Lunch". This is a Christmas "Marathon of Excess". The only thing that I've known that actually comes close is Grey Cup Sunday in Fillmore, Saskatchewan. When people tell you to bring your pajamas for Christmas Lunch, you should get a bit suspicious (or excited!). We sat down to food and drinks at 2 pm and didn't come up for air until about 10!

We drove for an hour to Susanne and Jørgen's house in Skibby by the Fjord. Jeanet and Nis came also, so we had 6 adults and 6 kids from 11 to 17 years old. Jeanet and Susanne both came to Canada to study at the same time Mette did. 

The table is set like artwork and the bottles of Akvavit are brought from the freezer and lined up for duty.

The calm before the storm

The food and drink are served in 3 main courses (fish, meat, and cheese/fruit) but with many specific rounds and pauses within each course. Each dish is traditional to the Christmas lunch and are to be expected if you are eating at a friends house, grandma's house or at the annual workplace lunch. In Canada, there are as many different ways to celebrate Christmas as there are families. In Denmark, there is the Danish way and what you lose in variety or surprise, you gain in the unity of sharing traditions with each other.

You start out with pickled herring, but on a hard grain bread (open face) with some fat (that's right - lard) spread on first. On top of the herring is the curried sauce - but that's really only for the light herring. The dark herrings just take raw onions. A cold sip of Akvavit follows each herring dish and if I can recall correctly, it follows just about every second bite you take for the rest of the night. I hold Jørgen and Nis in high respect as beer experts so we had a dozen brands of German, Belgian and Danish beers available to cut the taste of the Akvavit.

The rest of the day goes something like this: Herring-Akvavit-egg&shrimp-Akvavit-pan fried flatfish-Akvavit-beer break-remove plates, bring out new ones-Akvavit-Pork roast-Akvavit-Frikadella (meatballs)-beer-Akvavish-sing shongs-Ashkavish-cold cutsh-Ashvishk-mishkmishmm-something something-pass around boxes all colorful-Skoal!-Jeg ELSKER dig!!!-hug hug-Skoal!-blue cheese or something-Skoal!- dance to the Wii game, it must be broken, can't get any points-pajamas-I'll just lay down here for a bit.

I think that just before the cheese is served is where the old Vikings would make some great decision to head off to Greenland on a raid.

Hey - I got a keg! Wanna come to England?