Watch out for Me!

Ed pointed this sign out to me the other day.  Definitely much cuter than the silhouettes of children on a yellow-orange diamond :)

Trapholt

There is a little museum near our house that we have been meaning to visit for a couple weekends now.  We finally were able to go for a few hours and decided to buy an annual pass so we can return anytime in the next 365 days.  Museums that have an entrance fee here seem to be expensive, but their annual pass prices usually sound quite reasonable.  As this museum is just 2 miles from our front door, I figured we would probably make it back at least once or twice more 

I proved myself worthy of a season pass with Mt. Vernon didn't I? Three visits in under 6 months!

A section of the museum devoted entirely to danish-designed chairs. My favorite, the ironing board chair

This piano was really cool...unfortunately the picture taker just captured me looking like..I don't know...a cat falling from a tree with its claws out

ahh the sun!  it finally showed its face over the fjord after days of overcast weather

Okay, we may need to go back and visit this section one more time to get the legs properly attached to the chair.  Funny though huh?

Stink Dog

Why is it that every time one's dog goes to the kennel for an overnight stay, they come home smelling like they bathed in urine??

Scout's new bath-time set up.  Yep, that would be a baby tub

"Køben-hagen"

This week, Ed and I went to Copenhagen together for the first time.  We did actually have some 'official' things to do but we mainly toured the famous sights.  It's a beautiful city that appeared to have a lot of construction going on at present.  A couple months ago there was a huge rainfall that flooded a lot of basements and buildings around the city.  The clean-up is still happening.  We stayed in a hotel that was near Tivoli, one of the oldest amusement parks in the world.  We didn't go this time, but we will....we better....Ed?  Anyway, we took the train to Copenhagen on Wednesday morning and arrived by 11am.  We went through the walking streets in the downtown area as we made our way to Nyhavn...one of the most famous areas of the city. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

there were so many flower stands on the walking streets with beautiful & interesting flowers..the cabbage flower?

at nyhavn

Surely you've seen this picture somewhere???

 After Nyhavn, we continued down the harbor towards "den lille havfrue", i.e., the little mermaid and said 'hej' to her but not before seeing the soldiers that guard the Amalienborg Palace, where the queen lives.  I was most intrigued with their shadows on the wall....very toy-soldier like.

Up close mermaid with harbor in the background (including navy ship-danish navy)

 'natural habitat' little mermaid

Industrial little mermaid--and here you can get a better idea of her size

 We had a little time left before our meeting so we went to the Danish Resistance Museum.   It is about the Danish resistance to the Nazis during WWII. Denmark is a small country so they had no chance of defending their boarders from the advancing Germans.  Not everyone just sat back though...hence the name--resistance.  It is a nice little museum...not so much stuff that it becomes overwhelming.

With edge (the angular walls are the edges I speak of) & entrance of Kastellet in background. It is one of the best-preserved fortifications in Northern Europe and is both a park and part of the Danish military to this day. I would have loved to have gone for a jog along the top of the walls.

 After our meeting, we returned to our hotel and decided to go into the IceBar.  While in DC, Ed and I talked about places that we wanted to visit in Europe and staying at the IceHotel in Sweden was one of things we discussed..it is ridiculously expensive to stay in a 'cold' room (is cold really the word you use for sleeping a room with ice walls???) so we wanted to at least experience one of their other sites before making any big decisions 

Ed thinks that it looks like we are in an office building..All surfaces behind us were ice though (excluding floor and ceiling)

It was so cold.  Freezing. It was much colder-feeling than the Ice! sculpture show at the Gaylord (if you've ever been?)...though I will say their jackets were much warmer than these ponchos.  So, we only lasted about 20 minutes and as we stepped into the street, it felt warm :)

A glass made out of ice..my lips melted a wavy line in the edge

After another morning of meetings, we made our way back to the train station and came home to pick up the furrbaby from camp.  It's good to be home...

Jelling Stones (pronounced 'yelling', not 'jelling')

Ed and I have finally started to venture outside of the woods surrounding our house and into the rest of Denmark.  First stop, Jelling, Denmark...home to "Denmark's Birth Certificate" in the form of a large rune stone from over 1000 years ago.   I am not going to give a history lesson here but I will say that the history surrounding King Gorm & 'Bluetooth' is quite interesting.  This weekend, we had a streak of solskinsvejr (sunshine weather..one of my favorite danish words) so we decided to set out for a site we had learned about in class.  We left home at around 3 pm and were a bit worried that by the time we arrived, the sun would have already set.   It ended up taking just 35 minutes to get there so we had plenty of time to enjoy the sites while the sun was still out. 

remember this picturesque view for the end of the post...

 So basically (this is highly abbreviated and may or may not be entirely accurate), the 2 mounds that are on either side of the church are a nordic pegan burial site that was built by King Gorm, the first recorded king of Denmark.  His son Herald (Bluetooth) introduced Christianity to Denmark and built the church and added this stone that says

"King Harald bade this monument be made in memory of Gorm his father and Thyra his mother, that Harald who won for himself all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christians"--this is the birth certificate.  Herald left the burial mounds as a tribute to his parents who were possibly buried here.  King Gorm's body was possibly moved from the mound burial chamber to a crypt in the church at some point in time...or not..I was a little unclear on this portion of the history so with that, I will stop. 

There is a 2nd, smaller stone that was from King Gorm himself--a tribute to his wife "King Gorm made this monument in memory of Thyra, his wife, Denmark's adornment" 

View from top of one mound

 

I think this picture shows a pretty good representation of a Danish cemetery. I think they are quite beautiful with all the different bushes, trees and shrubs that seem to divide the burial plots.

I included a shot of the interior which clearly has been updated in recent times.  To celebrate Denmark's millennium, they added some new floors, pews, lights....I personally think the update should have matched what the church may have looked like when built in 1100 A.D. but who am I to question Danish design....

There is a museum across the street that we went to after walking around. Just before we went inside, the weather looked like this:

 

In the time it took us to cross the street, go inside the museum, walk up a flight of stairs and start reading, it became intensely foggy outside. It was literally a matter of minutes. I looked out a window overlooking the church after reaching the main part of the museum and it looked foggy..I thought it was the glass, tinting maybe, until we left and it looked like this

 

 It was unbelievable! I could not get over how foggy it was. Ed gave me the scientific reason that fog can develop so quickly...something about the dew point...but all I could think about was how weird it seemed.  Weird and disorienting.  I even had motion sickness as we headed home...good think the pilot who is not prone to motion sickness in was driving :)

The car is out there somewhere

Remember this shot from the beginning of the post?? night and day difference

Jelling, Denmark

This post is about our own experience here but if you are inspired to visit yourself, the museum did happen to be free...Danish 'tax-kroners' at work??

A problem

Hi my name is Heidi and I have an addiction...to Pastries.  Yes, danish pastries are so ridiculously good.  There is nothing in the States that can compare.  I will have the "coffee with a friend" pastry, the "saturday morning" pastry, the "just because I am walking by" pastry...I have been averaging about 2 1/2 pastries a week!  And I eat them so quickly that I only think to take a picture of them after they are already gone! Thankfully I am only a month into my addiction and have caught it before my jeans to don't button and my boots don't zip...I have decided to limit myself to one a week..the saturday morning pastry with Ed. 

the 'saturday morning' pastry with Ed.  We were bickering as he was taking this picture.  I said that the people in line ahead of us didn't want their picture taken...turns out the man directly in front of me is one of Ed's bosses here in DK.

Volleyball, 10 years later

I think I mentioned this in a Facebook 'status update' but didn't mention it on my blog (probably because I didn't have a picture to include with the post). I, after a 10 year break, am going to start playing volleyball again for a city league here in Kolding.  Correction, I started again last night.  I just want to say this will be a short post because my forearms are killing me.  They are so sore and seriously swollen.  I knew they were larger than normal but didn't realize how bad it was until i took off my watch earlier today and found a massive 'dent' left behind.  And it's not just my arms! I am pretty much sore all over- back, legs, shoulders, you name it.  I can honestly say that today is the first time in my life that I actually feel like I am 'getting older'.  Yes, I realize that my age isn't really considered 'old', but I now can say for a fact, that despite not feeling any older mentally, my body is actually 10 years older than it was when I was diving for a ball at 16.
In other 'news', I purchased the largest mirror that I have ever owned, or seen in a home for that matter, today. I think it is pretty awesome--and not just because every time I am directly in front of it, I can see myself :)    It currently is standing in our bedroom but I believe it is going to move to the living room, where it can be enjoyed by everyone--and maybe make the room slightly brighter in the dark evenings. Ed and I toured a historic home in Franklin TN and it seemed like there were mirrors everywhere, including all over a huge, nearly-to-the ceiling decorative shelf/buffet in the dining room.  The tour guide said that the reason for all the mirrors was because it would reflect the candlelight in the evenings and make it 'twice as bright'. So that is actually my true goal in buying the mirror, though I can now see a full image of myself aging by the day :) 
 If you are interested in seeing a picture of the shelf, follow the link,  the image is 15 of 33.  AND, if you are ever in Franklin and are interested in Civil War history, take the tour of the Lotz House.  I found the tour and history behind the house to be very interesting. I wasn't blogging at the time so didn't write about this but Ed and I will briefly appear in a documentary called Heading Back Home. When we visited the Lotz House, a film crew was filming the tour guide as he was guiding us through the museum and we just so happened to be in at least a shot--our acting debut haha

I'm sorry this isn't a picture of my puffy arms.