Happy Solstice

Today is the darkest day of the year.  The official daylight is 6 hours, 56 minutes long.  Sun up at 8:39 am and down at 3:35 pm.  It is dark.  The Danes fight off the dark with light, especially "living lights"  i.e. candles.  Candles are everywhere.  We see them in the windows of beauty salons,  great big candelabras burning away.  Candles and lanterns are outside the doors of shops, the most ordinary taverns and restaurants and often at every cash register in stores like this big department store.

People burn lots of candles in their homes.  One can see the flickering light as we bike home in the dark.

Also in the depths of the dark time, there is Tivoli.  This is the over hundred-fifty-year-old amusement park/ park in downtown Copenhagen.  

At Christmas, they light up the place with incredible colored and white lights.  People flock to the place, riding thrilling roller coasters in the cold and dark  (I can't imagine it), eating out at the many restaurants, drinking down hot-mulled spiced wine, and trying their hand at the games of chance and skill.  It is a pretty magical place this time of year and it does cheer the soul.

So tomorrow the days begin to get longer.  We will still burn the candles for much longer.  They are a source of light, warmth and "hygge", the Danish concept of enjoying the coziness of being together.  We are in the midst of  "hygge" these days.  Hope all is well out there.

Min 60th Fødselsdag (Birthday)

Today was my 60th birthday.  Oh yeah.  I am getting older.  I celebrated by going to Danish class.  But first I was feted with raising of the Danish flag by our friends downstairs.  The Danish flag is used as a symbol of celebrations, more than nationalism.  It is traditional to raise the flag on one's birthday.

 Our old upstairs neighbors dropped some poinsettas off for me to open before breakfast.  I went to school, bringing a Danish pastry called a "Christmas Star" for my classmates.  Then at 12 o'clock on 12/12  ( the symmetry is nice), I joined Nhat, Paal and Mona for a birthday luncheon at Ida Davidsen's.  It is an old-fashioned smørrebrød restaurant.  Smørrebrød is the high art of Danish sandwich making with fine ingredients and sculptured toppings.  And all is accompanied by aquavit and beer.

 We spent 4 hours lingering over all of the above, savoring the flavors of the various sandwiches, skåling one another with our beer and snaps and talking in the cozy small restaurant.  It was a delightful way to celebrate my 60th birthday.

 I should feel kind of old, though this year, living in a small apartment with a minumun of belongings,going to class and spending a few hours every morning with 25 year olds making my mouth and tongue do impossible things trying to speak Danish, and living with skinned knees just like a kid after I dumped my bike on slippery cobblestones and train tracks,  I guess I am not too old.  I miss everyone there but am enjoying this time and celebration here.  Who wouldn't be thrilled to be eating smoked salmon and drinking snaps on  a Monday afternoon.

Life- December 1st

Life has taken on a routine these days.  After breakfast we head out. I bike to school, Nhat bikes the long way to work to get his exercise in for the day (see previous post!).    I have started biking along the main drag to town.  Nhat doesn't like it for there are so many bicyclists and the exquisite choreography demands maximal attention.  First you merge into the bike path and then pedal.  Always looking over your shoulders,  "Can I pass this old man wearing a beret and smoking a pipe?"  "Can I go around this girl not paying attention and talking on her cell phone?"   "Is that some buff young dude bearing down on me and wanting to pass?"  "Oh no, there is a delivery van in the bike path"  and we all must slow down and go single file.

The other day I was able to take advantage of the "Green Wave".  The traffic lights are timed so that a cyclist going 20 km/hr can make each light.  Sometimes it works great.  The other day I put my foot down once in the 15 minute bike commute.  Well, actually twice because a woman 3 bikes ahead stopped suddenly and inexplicably in the path and the 2 behind her and a couple behind me slammed on our brakes, just gently bumping each others wheels.  It is something to experience the peloton that is the bike commute in Copenhagen.

So school has started for me.  I was very worried for when I interviewed for class placement, the not extremely friendly school counselor after reading my little essay and hearing me speak, put me in the class I would have continued to 6 years ago, i.e. level 5.  This is the last level before the exam to prove you have the language skills to become a citizen.  I haven't spoken Danish for 6 years.  However, the first day, I knew I could hold my own and didn't get demoted as I had feared.  We have a wonderful teacher and a fun class.  Two men- Holland and Chile.  Two women from Italy, two from Spain, one from Russia and one from England.  Already 2 others have dropped out.  This is the level where people often stop.  They know enough Danish to get by and they have been here long enough that they need to get jobs.  I thought I was older than most by 25 years but there are some who are 35 years younger than me.  I am definitely the old lady in the class.  I am getting better but what a job to learn a new language, especially one so hard to speak as Danish.  Lots of swallowed words and syllables, gutteral sounds that are really foreign to my throat.  Idioms-  tons of them in every language and how to remember them.  I did learn that "hulter til bulter" is topsy-turvey, helter-skelter.  I hope it comes in handy now and then.

The companionship is quite delightful.  I realized I needed to go to school after a Saturday when I spoke for a maximum of 2 minutes all day to the shop clerk at the grocery store.  I wasn't practicing my Danish and I was pretty lonely.  We have a good time in class and today one of the Italian women offered to take me with her to the Royal Theater to watch a final dress rehearsal of  The Nutcracker.  It was wonderful.  The scenery, the costumes and the dancing were so delightful.  The theater was started in 1748 and the building is from the 1870's.  I only wish I had Clementine there who would have loved the ballet.

It was a fun afternoon but as I made my way around the city and home, with candles burning in windows and Christmas decorations everywhere, I got a little homesick.  Holidays are hard to be away from friends and family, especially here where there is an explosion of "Julehygge" or Christmas coziness.  We miss everyone.

Bike Meets Car

I had a premonition this would happen this year and it did.  On the way to work I entered a roundabout and was going to exit the second outlet, but as I cycled past the first inlet a car that was approaching failed to stop for me (I had the rightaway) and I saw the driver's eyes get bigger and bigger as a car going about 25-30 KM an hour run right into me.  Strange things go through your mind as something like this happens.  Thought one: This is happening.  Thought two: I am on the hood of the car and smashing into the windshield.  Thoughts three, four, and five: Hey, this is kind of like a ride at Tivoli--I am flying through the air--This will not end well.  Thought six was the asphalt is pretty hard and my hip and knee hurt pretty bad.  Thought seven: I wonder if I can get up--no, I should wait awhile.

So I waited, looking at the spiderweb cracks on the windshield, marvelling at the fact that I did that and measuring the distance from me and the car (20-25 feet) and hoping my bike was OK.  It wasn't--both wheels bent up beyond turning or fixing.  Thought about the professor at UW who got killed biking to work years ago.  Thinking, yup what I thought would happen happened and I still have 8 months here.

I crawled over to the middle of the roundabout.  The woman driving got out of her car and came over to me and was very apologetic and wanted so very much for me to get in her car, which I didn't really want to--the thing had just assaulted me for crying out loud.  A young Dane who was cycling by and saw the whole thing happen came running over to help and did all the phone calling necessary to get the police out to take a report and issue a charge of car assault against a bicyclist.

The cops came and took reports from the three of us, although the driver said she didn't speak Danish very well.  She claimed the sun was in her eyes, which it wasn't at the time, it was still behind the raised Metro line berm.  I asked about how I would get my bike repaired so I could commute to work and got the insurance company name and vehicle registration.

By this time my aches and pain had subsided and I shouldered my bike and walked it over to our neighborhood bike repair shop.  Can't fix those wheels, gotta replace them and whatever else is wrecked.  Bought a bus ticket and went to work just happy to be alive and able to keep working on the book.  On the way home at a bus stop someone had scrawled, "Enjoy life while you can," so I had a beer and bump and was so happy to be sitting here with Anne, excited to be able to greet, hold, and love Meredith and Ky's baby when it comes in July, reconnect with with our Skyping grand kids Clementine and Cooper, and enjoy life while I can with Mikkel, Suzie, Meredith, Ky, and our many good friends.  Yikes!  It all sure is tenuous.

  

Budapest

We have been back from a four-day jaunt to Budapest, Hungary for several days, but the in-and-out-quick-trip was pretty great.  We were incessant walkers for those four days and the city lent itself to quick orientation because of the Danube River slicing the town into Buda and Pest and the many bridges providing a set of immediate reference points.  Our modest hotel room provided a good night’s rest, but all the rest of the time we were on an extreme urban hiking course.

 

One day we spent on two free walking tours with young Budapest guides.  The first focused on city architecture (a very eccentric combination of 19^th century Viennese wedding cake excess and spartan, severe Soviet buildings erected in the many bombed out buildings from WW II), statuary (many to the hero martyrs of the 1956 uprising crushed by the Soviets), politics (a little light on the Hungarian fighting on Hitler’s side), and churches, including St. Stephen’s Cathedral where Jesus gets second billing to the Christianizing George Washington of Hungary whose miraculously mummified hand is displayed if you put 200 florins in a slot to illuminate it.  This tour ended up on the castle hill on the Buda side and some of us retired to an austere workers’ cantina anonymously tucked away in a nearby, nondescript building.  The menu was limited, simple, cheap, and served up by the stern, no-nonsense mothers-of-all-lunch ladies.

 

We rushed from that lunch back over to the Pest side to go on a 3-hour communist history tour of the city.  This included more statuary of 1956 martyrs and bullets holes and battle sites from the uprising, but also the few remnants of Soviet statuary left in the city proper (most have been hauled outside the city to a commie statue concentration camp-park).  There is a towering memorial to Soviet WW II soldiers that remains right next to the U.S. embassy.  Rightwing Hungarians recently tried to take it down and it is now surrounded by a protective fence, just like the nearby U.S. embassy.  A statue of Ronald Reagan was erected as a gift from the U.S. within spitting distance of the Soviet memorial and our guide wondered what childish symbolic move came next.

Another day was spent juggling the two extremes of primal terror and primal relaxation.  We spent the morning at the House of Terror, which kind of sounds like a frat house Halloween fundraiser, but is dead serious history.  It is a museum housed in the building the WW II Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross Party used for its secret police and then, in a moment of incredibly bad branding judgment, used as the headquarters for the Hungarian Communist Party secret police.  The outside of the building is ringed with ceramic tributes to the House of Terror’s victims and the exhibit was unlike any museum experience we had ever had. Visitors are first met by an incongruous WWII Soviet tank floating on a bed of water in the atrium.  The exhibit employs heavy, menacing music to set the mood.  Some things are almost pop-art presentation, such as the room that projected the show trial of the 1956 Prime Minister that the Communist Party executed was completely papered in secret police files—the benches, the walls, the ceiling, the desk, everything—a political Christos cover-up installation.  The room dedicated to telling the story of the Soviet’s forcing Hungarians to Siberian labor camps after the war is built like an elongated boxcar with desolate Siberian landscapes flashing by on multiple screens that operate as windows to the clickety-clack of a train traversing tracks.  The visitor’s trip eastward is interrupted by several of the windows shifting to first person accounts of the harrowing experience where most died and never came back.  Then more journey hurtling toward suffering and oblivion.  The grand finale is getting on an excruciatingly slow elevator to hell (prison cells in the basement) and being forced to listen to a detailed description of the process of execution by hanging.  After a three-hour visit you get spit out into the bright light of day, free to live life and make your own voluntary choices.

                                              

Ours was to go soak in one of the many public thermal baths.  This one is a sprawling complex of a score of thermal pools of various temperatures, 6 or so saunas, and three gigantic outdoors pools where older men clustered around chess boards in the pool, the hangers on kibitzing and second guessing the players’ moves.  So three hours of soak and sauna washed away the sense of dread and doom from the House of Horror.

Another morning was spent poking around the Market Hall with its ocean of vegetable stands, butchers, bakeries (90-cent loaves of bread), pickled everything, mushroom stalls, live fish tanks, and enough paprika to set Yankee stadium sneezing.

Update from Budapest

What a fascinating ciy! Yesterday we spent 11hours out and about, 10 of it walking. We took two of the free walking tours. The first was 3 hrs seeing some of the main sights and learning about Hungary's history and culture. Afterward we joined the guides at the worker's canteen for lunch. It was cheap, and totally Soviet era from the completely bare,utilitarian lunch line to the lunch ladies in white uniforms and scowls. Side dishes of pickles (whole plate of them for 15 cents). We then hurried back to the square and went on the free communist tour. Really terrific guide, a young woman who was 17 at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Learned about how Hungary survived that era, saw the bullet holes in the walls of apt buildings from the 1956 uprising, saw the statues, most of which were hauled away from the city to a "memento park". Except for the memorial to Soviet soldiers, right in front of the Am. embassy. In response, America put up a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan, just recently! Off to see the House of Terror, a museum where the Nazis imprisoned and tortured people and then the Communists took it over and did the same. Then some healing time in the thermal pools.

Budapest

A quick post to say that were aren't in Kansas anymore or Copenhagen, at least right now. Found another very reasonable charter so are in Budapest for 4 days. Here's Nhat by the Danube in front of the Parliment building. He thinks the architecture is very wedding cake architecture. Heavy stone buildings. Fabulous carved wooden dooes. We walked for 5 hours today around the city. Lots to see and they have wonderful old Turkish baths, a couple of them from the 1500's. Now recovering with Hungarian beer after seeing the city lit up at night.

Christmas beer

Christmas Beer Night

Last night, the first Friday of November, was J-dag.  It is the release day for Tuborg's Julebryg, their Christmas beer- a stronger, slightly darker beer.  At 8 pm we decided we would go downtown and see what the festivities were all about.  We went to one of the older bars in town (where members of the resistance often met) and minutes before 9 pm, the Tuborg delivery truck drives up in front of the bar, does the countdown to 9 and opens up the liftgate and out comes a troop of costumed Tuborg nisse men and women, playing kazoos, handing out blinking hats and free beers.   They trooped into the bar and the whole bar celebrated the new beer.

We all sang their song to the tune of Jingle Bells about the Julebryg...." if you have Christmas cheer, give your mouth a beer bath..."  It was all pretty hilarious.  We walked down the main pedestrian street and there was a continuous party in and out of the bars.  We walked home and ran into the Tuborg truck 2 more times as they visited numerous bars, greeted joyfully by the patrons (who had already sampled Christmas beer) and watched the celebration before heading to bed, long before the other party goers were finished.  This is more evidence that Danes are the happiest people on earth.

Saturday and my project

This was the view off the deck on Sat. am (you can't see the hospital about 50 yds away) so Nhat and I decided to stay in and work at home.  He read about the German occupation and I continued my work transcribing Nhat's mom's journal from their year in Copenhagen in 1938-39.  Howard got a grant to study here and they hitchhiked to NYC, took a boat to Norway, traveled to Copenhagen and rented a room.  They began to learn Danish and study Søren Kierkegaard at the Royal Library.  

Her journal is full of her impressions of life in this city.  Often she writes about bikes.  The men who bike past with a long ladder in one hand and a pail in the other or the "flock" of bicyclists in the country.  They took weekend outings to Roskilde and the Fredericksborg Castle and described them as we have.  It is fun to hear her voice describing a castle and the ornate chapel which we just saw last weekend.  In fact, her voice is so strong with its rich descriptions, the bursts of enthusiasms, the sharp observations, that I really miss her all over again.  They lived at first with a woman of indeterminate age and had to live under her critical eye.  The first weeks Edna lived there:

Wash day at Fru Pederson's. She gets me up and attempts to get Howie out of bed–by bumping his feet which stick out of the feather bed-patting him–but he keeps his eyes shut. Laundry room–a cement hole with the tub built over a fire hearth hole and a huge chewed up wooden tank. We scrub and scrub–she seizing clothes from me to show how–long sweeps of the hand. Try to save silks, but they are dumped in, smeared with jellied consommé, but I will not rub. Boiled–rubbed again–rinsed–rinsed–tank emptied many times. 

They lived under her watch for 4 months but then moved to a room with a widow with 3 children going to the University. 

The new place warm–a monstrous bed, but oh, so feathery are the 2 eiderdowns–and so white!  Big solid table–bookcase with Ruskin, Shakespeare, Galsworthy, etc.  Det glœde mig meget. ... Dinner at 4 o'clock, with the 3 charming children and the quiet queenly long-black-frocked mother. They are severe about our restrictions and speak Danish–even when we are helpless.

There the widow insisted they only speak Danish but it was a warm apt, with clean sheets (despite the trips to the basement, Fru Pedersen had dingy sheets) and young people with friends and activities.  They lived on very little money and so began Howard's lifelong habit of an on-going pot of soup.

Howie–awfully hungry. Make soup in big black kettle. Throw big bunches of celery–I wash–Howie cuts and throws all in, except the really bad–though I'm afraid his standards are lower as far as bad celery goes. Dump in everything–carrots, potatoes–until the stuff floats boiling on the very edge of the pot. Eat out of one bowl and  Oh, So good!  

Four days later: The soup still is–the celery leaves look like soggy weeds in a sluggish stream–covered with frogs eggs etc. The bone is chewed off quite–

There is much about the rise of Hilter and Nazi Germany.

Geisman tells of a theology professor in Berlin who occasionally addresses audiences in Berlin. Knowing two spies were in the audience one evening he asked them to come up and sit in the two chairs he had placed under the altar–they would hear better. Again he addressed an audience with “Dearly beloved…. and Mr. Police Sargent.” Again he gave a sermon in Copenhagen at the German Lutheran Church. Knowing the violently Nazi embassy would not come, he invited the king and queen and thereby forced them to come and delivered his anti-Nazi speech.

They hear a lot about the Jews being forced out of Germany, not getting work or support, the imprisoned Czechs, Spain falling to the Fascists, etc.  Virulent anti-Semitism.

I have just begun the part where they get on their tandem bike and begin their bike trip from Copenhagen to Rome and back. Through Nazi Germany where they encounter big military parades and Nazi stormtroopers.  Through the Alps where they pedaled up mountains and roared down, once burning out their brakes.  Sleeping in the open, in barns, or at youth hostels.  Cooking potatoes and soup on their camp stove in parks.  More later as I transcribe it.

 I am using a voice recognition software called Dragon Dictation. It is pretty impressive, that it can spit out what I am reading, quite quickly.  Its limitations are quite evident as I go through this for the second time.  Eyed is written "I'd,"  "I 8 breakfast."  Just came across "ProTech Tourettes" for protectorates.  I guess that is a word not much in use anymore.  The funniest one is "We sat eating our lunch by the Windows. We had an Apple for lunch."  Product placement.  It's everywhere.

But after 2-3 hours of reading and pondering over Edna's scrawl and finding the weirdest mistakes in the voice recognition, it was time to brave the elements and get on our bikes.  You didn't think we would pass up the chance to show you more bike pictures?  We biked for 2 hours in the nature preserve.  The fog was delightful.  It made the hi-rise hotel disappear.  Big apt buildings no longer existed.  Just us, a very few other bicyclists and some cows and sheep.  Great day.

Music

I asked Nhat if he wanted to post this on the blog.  He said of course, otherwise it should be called 

Hongs Biking in Denmark.  He was pretty thrilled about it and came home at 1 am, after over 4 hours of music even though the band was still going strong.  It is a great venue, just around the corner.  It is however, his thing.  I no longer want to stand for 4 hours and listen to music.

Last night Nhat went out to Amager Bio, our part of town’s music venue that holds 1200 or so concertgoers.  Seun Kuti and Fela's Egypt 80 were playing their brass-heavy version of Afro-Beat political agit-prop.  What a band—4 percussionists, 5 horns/saxophones, 3 guitarists, 1 keyboard player, and two sinuous back-up singers—a joyous, angry, funky 15 person  band who rocked the place.  Seun is the son of the legendary Afro-Beat pioneer Fela Kuti and the majority of Seun's band Egypt 80 is continuation from his father Fela’s band.  It was one of those nights where I was on the verge of turning in for the night, but had been toying with the idea of going to this concert.  The proximity (3 blocks away) and the nagging thought “I am going to regret letting opportunities go by” made me go out at my bedtime and be enthralled by this terrific band with a message.  See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YED4sf6b9r4

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Move...Notes

Sunday Biking

Regional bike path to Hillerød gets narrow and goes cross country

Biking remains our mode of getting to work and entertainmemnt and diversion.  The colder weather has set in with temperatures dippping down to freezing in the night in places around Denmark.  Biking to work in the AM is chilly and my aging eyes water, pushing through the frigid air that my eyeglasses are spotted like a wineglass in Jetdry commercial.  The combination of brisk winds, cool temps, and locomotion make a windchill believer out of me.

Biking is not just for commuting—we do it for fun too!  Two Sundays ago we rode out to Roskilde on 50 Kms of national bike routes.  In this case they were a combination of bike/pedestrian paths, small streets and rural roads, and separate bike only trails.  South of Copenhagen we pedaled into a marathon race with over a thousand participants.  The race was on a shared bike/walking pathway and the racecourse doubled back on itself creating bike/walking/racing traffic in both directions on a sidewalk-wide path.  It was kind of like a two way Tetris cascade requiring juking and jiving to thread your way through competing currents of people.

Classic mustard-yellow house color along the route

Roskilde has a national cathdral that contains the crypts and remains of almost all of Denmark’s dead royalty.  The cathdral is imposing and the monuments to former Kings, their family, and notable hangers-on ornate and over-the-top in many cases. I was more drawn to the carved heads on the centuries-old armchairs that had been worried smooth by the fidgeting hands of worshippers

 

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We had planned on jumping a train back, but decided to at least start biking back to Copenhagen.  We ran out of gas partway back, but revived ourselves with an apple juice/candybar/potato chip infusion and completed the 80 Km roundtrip just fine.

Yesterday (Sunday) we ventured out to Hillerød (50 Km one way).  It was a fine fall day--sunny, but quite cool.  We had a stiff wind at our backs (the "medvind") and that nixed any ideas about biking back.  This time we weren’t vexed by marathoners, but the Tour de France wannabes in their spandex shorts and Quickdry racing jerseys were out in force.

The historical fix in Hillerød is Frederiksborg, a classic 17th century castle turned into an historical art museum chock full of period paintings of notables, furniture, and elaborate and fanciful architecture and decoration.  The 85 rooms bursting with artifacts bested my inadequate museum stamina and by the end we were doing a quick drive-by.  The children’s exhibit was quite cool—with help kids could remove the finery from the display models and try them on for size.

The bicycle car in the S-train back was packed, but we were happy to stand swaying for a while instead of battling our way through the wind gusts.   As biking is such a part of our lives, you will probably hear more and more about this biking life.  Daily I discover more aspects of this biking culture, but more about that later.    Nhat