Pictures, 2011

Trieste, Itay, July 2011

Toledo, Spain, October 2011

Farewell to Copenhagen – and this Blog

It’s been noted that this blog just sort of stops with no proper sign-off, so I’ll take the occasion of a recent two-week trip back to Copenhagen to upload a few final pictures and bring things to a proper close.
It was not particularly strange to be back in Copenhagen after five months. We have the good fortune to feel at home in two different countries. The sound of the Danish language is strangely familiar and comfortable, even though I still can’t understand what people are saying. With luck there will be further trips when we can renew our acquaintence with this wonderful city.
I wonder what will become of this blog—how long it will remain on the web, and what future readers there might be. Unlike a bundle of old letters sitting in a drawer, it will not yellow or turn brittle with age. Probably in a few years google will send me an email telling me the site will be deleted unless I wish to pay $25 a year to maintain it. I’ll probably decline.

See ya, Hans.

Isn't it Good?

We were trying to decide between Iceland and Norway for our final “big” trip in Europe. We decided on Norway because we could rent a car and take all of our camping equipment. We ended up using the sleeping bags exactly once and the tent and other gear not at all. Some places in the world lend themselves to semi-spontaneous camping; Norway isn’t one of them.
We picked up the rental car and headed over to Jutland (the major landmass of Denmark) to take a ferry to Norway. In Jutland we visited Skagen, which is the northernmost point of Denmark that tapers to a tip pointing out into the sea.

Where Denmark ends

Once in Norway we drove around the west coast from Kristiansand in the south up through Stavanger and Bergen and Ålesund as far north as Trondheim. As car trips go this was fantastic, full of scenery and bridges and tunnels and ferries. But I don’t think any of us—especially Louis—was really too keen on anything quite so sedate as sitting in a car looking at scenery.
Scenery’s a strange thing. I’ve got enough grade-A scenery pictures handy to make this blog into a National Geographic article. Think I’m bluffing? Try this on for size:

Weaponized scenery

But scenery should be a condiment, not an main course—it works best as the backdrop of your experiences, and not as the substance of it. Given the aforementioned tunnels, ferries, etc., it can take you six hours in Norway to go 200 kilometers. So we ended up spending too much of our time sitting in the car—or arriving in a town at 6:00 p.m. and then having to leave the next morning at 9:00 a.m. in order to stay on schedule.

Waiting for a ferry

Fortunately we did manage to get out of the car sometimes. First, we signed up for a two-day “Norway in a Nutshell” tour, which is a self-guided itinerary that involves train, bus, and boat and takes you to see a few prominent fjords, waterfalls, etc. We opted for the two-day version instead of the one-day, so we got to spend 24 hours in a little town named Flåm at the head of a fjord, where we rented bikes in the evening and then did a four-hour kajak tour the next day.

Flåm

Later, we stayed three nights in a northern coastal town named Ålesund, which gave us a regional base of operations. Ålesund was rebuilt after it burned down around 1900, and the downtown is a little Art Nouveau diamond:

Ålesund--double-click for larger image

One of our day trips from Ålesund was to the isle of Runde, where we hoped to find puffins. No puffins, unfortunately, but lots of water and mountains and sheep and grass and mud and rock:


(Photography note: I’d left our camera in a hotel back in Denmark and so we bought a new one in Norway. It’s the same basic Sony model but in the three years since I bought the original they’ve added some nice features like this “panorama” setting.)

Norway Churches

Norway is full of strange old wooden churches. The oldest are known as stave churches because of the tongue-in-groove construction method. These are several hundred years old. We started to hunt for these both because they are wonderful to look at and also because they tend to be in interesting out-of-the-way places. Here are some shots of stave churches, inside and out:






Other Buildings

You could fill a photo album just with pictures of interesting buildings in Norway. When you encounter a vista in Norway the first thing you notice are the mountains and clouds and sky. But almost inevitably, after a few seconds, you notice the buildings, because they will build one wherever there are a few square meters of flat ground.




Waterfalls and Fjords

Norway was wet, cold, and expensive. But by god, it was scenic!

Spring Various

I’m clearing the pictures off my camera prior to our trip to Norway starting tomorrow. And so there is a post.

First, a couple of pictures from the NECIS meet at Østerbro Stadion, back on May 29. Louis competed in several track events and also in the high jump, where he finished second in his age bracket (1.44 meters). NECIS is “Northern Europe Council of International Schools.” The schools are from Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, and parts of Germany. Luxembourg is the powerhouse, for some reason. The stadion (or stadium, as we like to say) is just a few blocks from our house. Here’s one picture of Louis running the 400 meters, and another of him showing off some of his medals to his classmates.



Next some home pictures, one of Louis and Jonetta enjoying dinner out in our yard, taken from the second-floor balcony.


And one of Louis trying on the shirt his grandmother sent him for his birthday.


Next a couple of pictures taken while my mom’s cousin Virginia Kraft Payson was visiting us. She stopped in Copenhagen after visiting Norway and before heading to Russia with her husband Dave Cole. Virginia knew my mother back when they were both kids in New York before the war. She took us to dinner three nights running and told us stories about my parents back when.



The next couple of pictures I’ll call “Denmark vignettes.” First, a typical traffic signal with a set of lights devoted specifically to bicycles.


When Danish kids graduate high school they don white caps and ride around in open trucks to celebrate. They circulate around to every kid’s house, whooping and hollering the whole time. So for a couple of days at the end of June you see these trucks everywhere and hear the hollering. Drivers will honk their horns in response. The kids also drink to excess, or at least are reputed to do so. Here’s one vehicle that stopped at our next-door neighbor’s house.


Finally, some pictures from one of our weekend cycling excursions to the nether reaches of Sjælland. We’ve done several of these trips the past two springs. We either start at our house or take an S-train to one of the outlying towns. Typically we covers 35-45 miles over several hours. These pictures are from an excursion we took a couple of weeks ago around the northern reaches of the Roskilde fjord. (They call inlets fjords in Denmark, though they look nothing like their Norwegian counterparts.) Here’s Jonetta coming off the bridge in Frederiksund:


This is Jægerpris, a royal hunting lodge:


We saw this rock in the town of Jægerpris. Is it Viking carving? It sort of looks authentic, but there was no plaque to clarify the matter one way or another.


The bike trail led through the woods for several miles. Along the way is a path to the Kongeegen, or royal oak, which is estimated to be almost 2000 years old—the oldest tree in Northern Europe. Not exactly as statuesque as a Sequoia or Redwood:


Louis taking advantage of one of the few hills in the forest:



On a ferry to Hundested (“dog place”):

Paris, France

We spent the week between Palm Sunday and Easter in Paris. This was my third trip to Paris. The first was in 1979, at the end of my post-college hobo expedition when I discovered just how much time in Europe you could squeeze out of a Euro-rail pass, a youth hostel card, and $1000 (answer: about two months.). I stayed nearly a month in Paris on that occasion. It was the final stage in my journey and it was where I finally learned how to stay still long enough to connect with a few people. Thirty-one years is not an especially long time, but I can only remember a few specifics from that trip. I cannot remember where I stayed, for example. I do remember that my room was infested with mice, and that I was able to deny them entrance by stuffing a rain poncho into the small hole they were using to come and go.

My second trip to Paris was in 1990 and it was my first trip with Jonetta. I have very nice memories of that trip.

This year we arrived on March 27, and the weather was not good but we’re used to that. “April in Paris” is probably only relevant to the latter part of the month. Jonetta found an apartment rental on the Rue de Vielle de Temple, in the Marais, which is a very old quarter in the northeast of the city. The apartment was in a 17th century “hotel,” back when that meant “rich man’s house” rather than “rental accommodation.”



Since Louis is studying French, and had never been to Paris, we were determined to hit all the key sites and attractions. So between the weather and the trekking around to museums and monuments that I’d already visited twice before, I have to admit that this trip had a certain tediousness to it. But there were always surprises and wonders lurking around the corners. The overall effect is kind of hard to describe—an interplay of high expectations being dashed and then low expectation being exceeded. The Marais and all the northeast quadrant of Paris has all sorts of cool stuff. The inner part is the 3rd arrondissment which is one of the oldest sections of Paris. Today it’s a maze of twisty old crooked lanes full of interesting restaurants and shops. It’s like the “old quarter” you find in most European capitals, which is often synonymous with “the Jewish Quarter.” That was true of the Marais as well. Beyond the Marais was the 10th arrondissment, which has no tourist appeal yet is quintessentially Parisian. We went out there a couple of times and always found interesting stuff. Just about any street in Paris is worth a visit.


The typical day was that Jonetta would go out for baguette and croissant in the morning. Then we’d walk for several hours, visiting museums, stores, parks, and neighborhoods, dodging showers. Then we’d get back to the room footsore at four and read for a couple of hours. We had no computer—Louis forgot the power source for his Mac—so we all did a lot of reading, which was cool. Then around 8:00 or 9:00 (whenever it stopped raining) we’d venture out for dinner. Most of the time we ate right in the immediate neighborhood—no lack of options.

In Brasserie Stella. Jonetta and I have fond memories of visiting this neighborhood establishment in 1990--we still have the ashtrays we stole. I remember a big bustling tiled room. Instead we found an intimate wood-paneled room. Probably a case of defective memory.

Part of Marie Antoinette's faux country village on the outskirts of the Versailles estate. The intent was rather benign--to recreate the world of 'real' people. But it just fed the mad rage of the population that would culminate in revolution and execution. The ultimate French tea party.

Parisian sidewalk glyph, in Montmartre. Curbez votre chien

We had lunch here without realizing that it was the cinematic workplace of Amelie, from the unbearably cute movie of the same name.

Louis in the Louvre.