Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone. The image if from a picture painted on the wall of our house in Copenhagen. According to the owner, it was painted about 100 years ago by an itinerant painter who did these for cash. It’s nice to pass it on the stairs every day. (You can click on any of the photos to see a really big version.)

We hope to see some of you in Copenhagen next year, after the sun returns.

Here’s Louis with our jultræ.



Nice guitar, eh? Finally, here’s us in October during our London trip:



By the way, we had an earthquake in Copenhagen this morning. A 4.7. Enough to wake most people up. Very rare for these parts. Yeah, sure.

God Save the Queen

Today was the company Christmas party at a place called Sonnerupgård, an estate of some sort about an hour west of Copenhagen. The camera battery was kaput so no pictures, which is maybe OK because they would have been very predictable—green fields, bare trees, weak winter sunlight. The party was in a big old ‘granite barn’ with rough stone walls and a high timbered ceiling. I thought it was at least 200 years old but turns out it was built in the 1870s.

It was a very Danish affair, with little spherical pancakes to start and various kinds of Danish hotdogs (pølser) later on. There was a Danish Santa who marched the younger kid around the Christmas tree for what seemed an hour. People who perform for kids over here are invariably miked up and speaking in high screechy voices. I think I prefer our North American Santas, who mostly keep their mouths shut except for a few Ho Ho Ho’s.

We were invited out into the wet woodlands to ‘chop down’ our own Christmas tree. (Funny how everyone says ‘chop down’ when you inevitably use a saw.) Louis and I took turns with the saw. We then got a ride with our tree on a horse-drawn wagon back to the estate. Later we carried the tree on a bus and two trains, before lugging it a quarter mile from the train station to the house. I think I still can feel a few stray needles down the back of my shirt. Anyway, it was nice to go somewhere different and be outdoors in the daylight. Louis collected a 150 DKK giftcard to the local video chain as his present from Santa (about $30). Not too shabby.

We now have two trips on this horizon: a train journey to Berlin just after Christmas, and a week in Florida at the beginning of February. I’m craving sun because we’ve now reached the darkest part of the year here in Scandinavia. I woke up during the night last night and tried to make out the time on my watch. Seven forty-five? What the? I turned on the light and double-checked. Sure enough. It was fully dark at a quarter to eight in the morning. The sun comes up at 8:20 and it’s pretty bright by around nine and stays that way for a while, but then somewhere around two p.m. it starts to get dim; it’s pitch dark by 4:15.

We’ll be back from Berlin on December 29th—I’m glad we’ll be home for New Years, and here’s why. Our Danish tutor occasionally gives us little lessons in Danish culture along with the language. I don’t know if this is strictly his idea or part of the program, but we enjoy it. The other day he described to us, in loving detail, the tradition of the Queen’s New Year’s Eve speech. Queen Margarethe (the Danish word for ‘queen’ is ‘dronning,’ but that’s not any reflection on her oratorical ability) speaks, in unvarying sequence, about the state of the world, the state of the nation, and the state of the royal family. Then she wishes everyone a happy new year and signs off. According to Michael (our tutor) there isn’t any of the sort of savage lurid mocking scrutiny about the royals that we see in the English media. Of course, I can’t read the tabloids yet, so I don’t know if this is entirely true, but it’s sort of encouraging. I also won’t understand much of the queen’s speech, but I’ll raise a toast regardless.

A final word about Christmas in Denmark—there is none of the cultural relativism about this holiday that we know from the U.S. Christmas is Christmas. Even in Louis’ highly multicultural international school, where there are many Muslim students, it’s Christmas time, not holiday time. I’ve been wondering why things are different here. I think it’s mostly because Denmark has always been a Christian country and nobody’s ever had any basis to challenge that. Somehow, this identity frees them to be very unreligious--because everybody is automatically Christian, it’s not part of anybody’s identity. All in all, the Danes are much less self-conscious about who they are than Americans are. But then, Denmark has never presented itself as a new kind of country with no default religion or ethnic identity. If we Americans often seem petty and sanctimonious, it’s partly because we’re aiming high.

Danish Gothic

Here’s Louis dressed up for our trip to Sweden yesterday. We took the train downtown then bought an international ticket to go to Malmö. The temperature was right around freezing all day and the wind in Malmö was nasty. We enjoyed some Scandinavian fast food and were back on the train in pretty short order. Once back in Copenhagen, we stopped at La Glace, one of the better Konditorei in town, for some pastries and hot drinks. Then Louis got on the bus and Jonetta & I walked the three miles home to atone for some of the calories. The wind wasn’t as bad over here so it was a nice walk, with lots of window shopping. About half of the stores seem to be devoted to footwear—they like their boots over here.

While in Malmö we found a small store carrying nothing but “American specialties” like Pop Tarts and Jello and McIlhenny’s Tabasco Sauce. It was funny, to see all these mundane products reclassified as exotic items. The walls were covered with memorabilia, like old license plates and posters from John Wayne movies. I felt like maybe I should be signing autographs, or yodeling.

The picture at the top shows the architectural style of our neighborhood. Here’s a picture of our actual house:

It isn't very far, looking out from the front or the back, to the next row of houses. A ‘Rear Window’ kind of thing. Last night a neighbor turned on her kitchen light at 5:21 and it woke me up. I looked over and she was preparing food in her kitchen. I watched for a while, not quite sure I was really awake.

I rode my bike to work on Friday but ran into some snow on the way. I pushed on through but found it rather hard going—the snow gets up under the fenders and it gets harder and harder to turn the pedals. There’s also a kind of buzzing noise as the tire treads rub over the packed snow under the fender. Going home at 4:30 (well after dark) there was even more snow and it was really beautiful out—the snow was illuminating the forest. I rode down to Skodsborg train station and took my bike on the train. I had been thinking of riding the whole way but the wheels were pretty much seized up by the time I got to Skodsborg. It was kind of embarrassing on the train as the clumps of snow dropped out onto the floor and started melting.

Here’s our front yard from this morning:

We’re having Thanksgiving with some friends from work on Thursday, then cooking for some other friends on Saturday. So we get one day in between to maybe eat raw spinach and celery or something, just to give the arteries a break. Jonetta found Condensed Milk at an Afghan Grocery near the train station. Not sure what role Condensed Milk plays in Afghani cuisine. We’ll use it for pumpkin pie.

Here’s the dish that I plan on making for Saturday (along with the pie): cubed sweet potatoes broiled in the over with some butter, served over sautéed chopped brussels sprouts. This is a dish that I discovered by accident while combining leftovers last week. (Both original dishes cooked by Jonetta, of course). It was sure tasty.

Autumn items

September felt like October, October like November, and now that it is November it feels and looks like December. The sun is out some, but very low in the sky and yellowish, even at mid-day.

I went up to the Dyrehaven on Sunday. This is a large parkland north of Copenhagen that used to be a royal hunting preserve. It stretches about two miles inland from the coast, and four miles north to south. It’s full of tame deer and a few stags carrying surprisingly big racks of antlers (sorry for the blurry image):



Are there deer in suburban parks in the US? I tend to think people would treat them as free meat.

When you’re in Dyrehaven you can easily imagine that you’re in a Robin Hood movie—it’s sparsely forested and full of big wide old oaks:



Sunday was the running of the Hubertus Hunt, which is a foxhunt only without any foxes—or hunting, for that matter. It’s about 100 people in red coats tally-ho’ing around the Dyrehaven for a couple of hours. I rode up and stood in the mud for 90 minutes to obtain the following action shots:





I was positioned by a water jump. Some of the horses leaped gracefully over a log into the water. Others stepped more carefully. Some refused outright and so the riders would have circle around and try again. After three strikes they’d open a gate by the side and let the poor animal walk through.

There were Red Cross teams on hand, but fortunately nobody fell.

Friday was Halloween and we actually had four or five parties of trick-or-treaters. I’m not sure exactly what they were saying but it wasn’t “trick-or-treat.” They’ve only been celebrating this “American” holiday here for the past 10 or 15 years, so most of the adults are not in favor. The kids seem convinced though, and I don’t think there’s any way to remove a holiday that’s been cemented to the calendar with sugar.

There’s no such thing as Thanksgiving over here, of course. They do seem to be taking to “American football” however. They show two NFL games on TV Sunday nights—one at 7:00 and one at 10:00. The commentators are the same beefy guys you see doing this job in the US, except they’re speaking Danish. Very strange. But football is as much a television show as it is a sport, so it’s not too surprising that it packages up well for foreign consumption. Baseball, however, the Danes find boring and incoherent. Like cricket.

Like a pendulum do

We’re back from four days in London. I’d spent a week there back in 1979, but in imaginative terms, it’s like my second home—the city of Shakespeare and his kings; the city of Micawber and Moll Flanders and Clarissa Dalloway and the 101 Dalmatians.

Since Jonetta and Louis had never been to London, and I hadn’t been there since Johnny was still Rotten, we mostly stuck to the high tourist ground, starting with Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, where we watched a spirited reenactment of Wat Tyler’s rebellion. We exhausted ourselves in the massive Tate Modern museum, and watched 30 minutes of “Burial at Thebes” from the groundling area in the new Globe Theatre. (This was an opera based on a play by Seamus Heaney based in turn on Antigone by Sophocles.)

We saw the Elgin Marbles (the exterior sculptures from the Parthenon which the Brits are holding on to for safekeeping—any century now the Greeks can have them back) and the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. We visited Harrod’s. A lot of walking, a lot of standing and looking.

One of my favorite stops was the house of Samuel Johnson at number 3 Gough Square, a small 18th century enclave hidden away behind the modern facades of the financial district near Fleet Street. We arrived just as the house opened to the public on a smoky Monday morning, and had the place entirely to ourselves.

It was a rather small house, four floors with two rooms per floor. The first dictionary of the English language was written in the attic. Johnson was a man of inexhaustible intellectual energy who didn’t see why he couldn’t absorb and explain everything there was to know about history and ideas and literature. A large homely man prone to distracting facial tics, Johnson was a Tory who instinctively distrusted anything novel or extracurricular—including the political agitations of the American colonists. But he was also a gregarious man with many friends and a great wit.

We were able to emulate Johnson in spending two evenings in pleasant discourse while in London: one with Retini, an old friend of mine from New York who has lived in England for almost 30 years (and has the accent to prove it), the other with Ashley, a fellow Seattlite who has been living a hand-to-mouth student existence commuting from Brixton to Somerset House for the past year.

When I visited London in ’79 it was my first trip outside of North America. It seemed a distant, foreign place. Arriving in London from Copenhagen this year, it almost felt like coming home.

[The post title is from a Roger Miller song, circa 1967:

England swings like a pendulum do

Bobbies on bicycle two by two

Westminster Abbey the Tower of Big Ben

The rosy red cheeks on the little children.

I used to think it was "England swings like a pelican's wings." But that's neither here nor there.]

Stuff

At 7:00 on Friday morning the moving truck arrived. We watched from the upstairs window as a built-in crane swung the container off the truck and onto the ground:

You might imagine that we’d be thrilled to be reunited with the bulk of our worldly goods. Shows what you know. We’ve been dreading this day for weeks.

As we were leaving Seattle we had no idea what kind of home we’d find for ourselves in Denmark. Maybe a house in the country, or maybe an apartment in town. We raced to dispose of as much excess as we could, but as departure day approached, we became distracted. Then the movers showed up and the wrapping began. There were four of them, tall and strong, and they moved through our house with the single-minded tenacity of locusts. They didn’t question, they didn’t reflect, they wrapped: dirty laundry, rocks, newspapers, whatever they found.

Fast-forward almost three months. We have rented a house in the Østerbro neighborhood of north Copenhagen. But it’s a small house—not quite half has big as our Seattle house. And it’s furnished. It was never our intention to rent a furnished house, but we didn’t see any reason to pass on a good deal just because of some minor…redundancies. There was an upside: No lamps or sofa to buy, and the furniture the owners had purchased for the tiny rooms in the house seemed just right. They offered to put some of it in storage, but we hesitated, and then they were gone. To Vietnam, for four years.

So once the lease was signed in mid-September we began to plan. We looked at rentable storage units—too expensive. We created a spreadsheet where we listed every large item we could remember shipping and assigned it to one of the five floors in the house—the attic was our ace in the hole. Worst come to worst, we could even use one of the two bedrooms on the third floor for storage. Just cram it full of stuff.

They unloading went smoothly enough. We took turns walking outside to see how much more was in the truck. What we saw was a wall of boxes and packages, with further rows behind. We looked in vain for the back wall of the truck. With cigarette breaks every 20 minutes, the five movers were done by 12:30. They uncrated a dozen or so paintings, and screwed the legs back onto a table or two, but for the most part they left the unpacking to us. Armed with knives, scissors, and plastic bags, we set to work.

Sixty hours later, we’re more or less done. I thought it would be unpleasant but I was wrong. It was ghastly. How did we come to own this much stuff? I say “we,” but I’m the worst offender. Sixty t-shirts, forty long-sleeve button down shirts, thirty short-sleeve shirts. How exactly did this happen? I guess at some point I just stopped getting rid of old stuff, while I continued acquiring new stuff. In the past it’s been books that have been my undoing, but this time I’d put three-quarters of my books—about 40 boxes--into storage. Ah, but the 500 CDs. And the clothes.

Jonetta had about 10 large boxes marked “kitchen” to deal with. Large as in big enough to hold a full-sized adult. She started in at 9:30 on Saturday morning and was done by 10:00.—p.m. It was like two parallel universes colliding in slow motion. Yankee blender—meet Euro blender. Yellow Ikea plasticware, meet you blue cousins from across the sea. Half-consumed boxes and bags of food were summarily tossed into the garbage. This was their reward for passing successfully through the Panama Canal. But you can’t take chances—rice grains should not be able to move around on their own like that.

Upstairs I was unwrapping what seemed like an endless series of Christmas presents from a lunatic. At the center of a large ball of paper I would find—six pens and a rock! You shouldn’t have. A candle with a plastic holder. Three bags of marbles. Automotive supplies! Too bad we left our cars in the states. Fifteen canvas totes, nine backpacks. Two printers. Enough camping equipment for a six-month expedition to Nepal. A boom-box: useless. A brand-new big-screen TV: also useless (the house comes with four TVs). Notebooks, cassette tapes, computer mice, paper clips, connector cords, wire hangars, wooden hangars, plastic hangars…

We shipped five bicycles from the US. After arriving, Louis and I got new bikes for commuting. The house owners left us four bikes in the front yard. That’s 11 bikes for three people. They will all sit out in the rain all winter unless we find someplace dry to store them. Not likely.

Life is first a process of accumulating, and then a process of getting rid of it all. It’s pathetic to extend the accumulation phase too long—it’s like a granny in a pinafore. When you’re gone, nobody will want your stuff, anyway. Granted, these are special circumstances, but I grow profoundly resentful of the claims that things make on us. I’ve allowed myself to feel too affectionate toward things. Maybe for no other reason than that I’ve owned them for a long time. I have to become ruthless. The darned threadbare towel that my great aunt Margaret repaired was tossed. Sorry.

So, the initial phase is about done. The house has a bit of a museum-like quality to it. There is stuff everywhere. A queen-size mattress and box-spring are lodged in the downstairs hallway because they couldn’t be pushed any further into the house. We await the opportunity to Heimlich them out into a waiting truck. We’re looking for takers. No offers refused, reasonable or otherwise.

First Entry - The daily commute

The ride to work is exactly 10 miles, more or less due north, starting in Osterbro in northern Copenhagen, where our house is, and ending in the countryside about halfway between Skodsborg and Vedbaek. The following pictures were taken on an early September morning.

Here's Hellerup, a town just north of Copenhagen, uncharacteristically deserted. On a sunny Saturday morning, the shoppers elbow you off the sidewalk to get to the display racks.

As you move north, the road meets water--the Oresund, or "Ear Sound," which separates the Danish island of Sjaelland (or Zealand) from Sweden. You can just barely see the Swedish coast in the distance in this picture:

The mid-way point is the town of Klampenborg. I like the way the train station looks:

After Klampenborg, the bike trail separates from the road and follows the train tracks:

From here on it's up and down, past country estates:

and through sections of forest:

Here's a duck pond, with the sea just visible in the background:

Here's my Danish bike, a Kildemoes, with enclosed chain. This should mean that I can ride through the winter without having to do 20 minutes of chain maintenance twice a week.