Some final thoughts about Denmark

Last Monday, we defended our thesis projects and officially stopped being students. As our time in Denmark draws to a close, we thought that we would write one last blog (ignoring that we haven't written one in 9 months).

We're a bit short on time, so we're just going to reference an email that's been forwarded around recently:

YOU KNOW YOU'VE BEEN IN DENMARK TOO LONG, WHEN:

• You know the meaning of life has something to do with the word "hyggelig".
• You don't think it strange that no one ever comes by to visit without being invited and you never show up at any one's place unannounced either.
• You find yourself lighting candles when you have guests - even if it is brightly sunny outside and 20 degrees.
• You go to the supermarket and buy three good beers and 10 not too good ones.
• You can tell the difference between a Grøn Tuborg and a Carlsberg beer
• You honestly believe that the distance between Copenhagen and Aalborg is long.
• The first thing you do on entering a bank/post office/pharmacy etc. is to look for the queue number machine.
• You accept that you will have to queue to take a queue number.
• When a stranger on the street smiles at you, you assume that: a) he is drunk; b) he is insane; c) he is a foreigner or d) he is all of the above.
• The word "yes" is an intake of breath.
• You can't remember when to say "please" and "excuse me".
• You start to believe that if it weren't for Denmark's efforts, the world would probably collapse pretty soon.
• You can open a beer bottle with almost anything.
  

Coming soon to a town near you

Marieke and Anthony are coming home for the holidays.

We're both leaving Copenhagen on Saturday, December 16. Marieke is headed to Ancaster and Anthony is going to Duncan, BC - his parents' new home.

On January 6, Anthony will fly to Calgary for a few days before joining Marieke in Ontario on January 10. We then plan to visit with as many friends as possible in the Toronto - Kingston - Ottawa - Montreal areas.

On January 23, we both fly to London, England - for another week with friends and family.

If you're going to be in the same area as us and want to meet up, please drop us a line.

Is there anything Google can't do?

We visited Berlin for a weekend in October, and since then we have made several attempts to upload a blog with all our photos. However, the process is long, tedious and crashes pretty often, so we still haven't finished.

So, we were very happy to find another way to post photos - using Google. Now, we can upload our pictures much faster and they are easier to view online. Our Berlin photos can now be found at: www.picasaweb.google.com/mariekeandanthony (along with our other travel photos). We should be much better about keeping this new site updated (at least in theory)...

We do have one story that cannot be told with photos - our dinner at Dunkel restaurant. Cameras are not allowed in the restaurant; not that they could do much anyway. The entire restaurant is pitch black - in fact, Dunkel means darkness.

The concept is to experience dinner as if we were blind. We selected our food from a purposefully vague menu:

• The starter was described as a fruity salad of which "weak ones become strong and shy ones courageous."
• The soup was a crème soup of a vegetable that was planted a lot before the potato spread around the world, sophisticated with long forgotten wild herbs.
• The main course was a recipe of a wheat produce passed down by Japanese monks, excellently combined with a not quite sober cream sauce and mushrooms that borrowed their name from a settled mussel.
• And the dessert was an exotic salad composed of fruits of an evergreen melon tree, oval fruit with large stone, and Chinese gooseberries.

From these vague riddles, and the use of our remaining four senses, we could try to figure out just what we were eating. More of a challenge was figuring out how we could eat it. And whether or not we'd eaten it all.

We also tried to guess the layout of the restaurant. Based on the voices around us , we figured we were in the centre of a large room. However, near the end of the meal, Marieke noticed that she was sitting beside a pillar. Further groping in the dark revealed that it was actually a corner of the room...

August to October (The Lost Chapters 2)

If anyone still checks this site, they might have noticed we haven't posted a single blog in the last two-and-a-half months. We might tell you we've been very busy with school, or that that nothing interesting has happened recently, or that we had a serious case of writer's block. But those would all be lies.

In fact, we haven't written anything for two reasons:

1. After a year in Denmark, things have stopped being quite so new and exciting. We're getting used to Danish life (and weather). We're beginning to accept the high prices, lack of friendliness and foreign language. We're settling in...
2. We're lazy.

Anthony has a particularly easy semester, so he has found a job. From 11pm-1am (Monday to Friday mornings), Anthony delivers newspapers in the local area. This isn't always the best experience (especially in the rain), but it has its benefits: two hours of quiet exercise and a whopping 35$/hour!

With this newfound wealth, we’ve decided to take a few weekend excursions. Two weeks ago, we visited friends in Munich and next weekend, we’re headed to Berlin. Anthony also bought himself a new digital camera and so we’ve got a lot of photos!

To check out where we’ve been, check out our “Travels Blog.”

Roskilde Festival

Roskilde Festival...What a blast! We'd been looking forward to it even before we bought our tickets in March. The festival lasts 8 days, with only 4 days being actual festival days with full music programs and stuff. Since we hadn't shown Etienne and Berns Copenhagen yet we opted to only come for the last 4 days. However, rumour had it that finding camping spots would be difficult if we didn't show up on the first day with everyone else to set up our tents.

So...Etienne arrived at Copenhagen Airport from London on the night of the 25th. After a quick stopover at our place we headed to Roskilde right away to grab our wristbands and wait until the gates opened up. In the morning, after having waited until the crazies had stormed the festival grounds we walked through an already mushrooming fields of tents and set up our tents. Little did we know then we ended up getting an amazing spot - right a the edge of the swimming area!

On Thursday we came back, in time to see Guns N' Roses. Guns N' Roses pulled a no-show for the first hour of their set. After a while people just assumed that they weren't going to show at all and begun yelling "Asshole" at the stage. When they finally did arrive, the first few songs were classics followed by a bunch of terrible, long solos. Partway through a few of us took off and checked out Sigur Ròs (which was an amazing show!).

Friday and Saturday didn't have very many bands playing. We really liked Morrisey, Tool, The Streets, Tool, Thäström, George Clinton Parliament/Funkadelic. Bob Dylan, was a suprising disappointment as he was just too old and had lost all stage presence. Despite being at the festival, we didn't have to miss the World Cup, as they showed the games on a huge screen.

Sunday was definitely the best day at the festival. There were so many good bands that we couldn't even fit them all in. We saw: Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, Placebo, Franz Ferdinand, and the final act, Roger Waters performing Dark Side of the Moon. Roger Waters put on an AMAZING performance! Definitely the highlight of the festival.

Check out the festival website www.roskildefestival.com

Broløbet

At the end of June, we ran Broløbet - a race spanning the Øresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden. It was the last time the race was going to be held so we decided to take advantage of an opportunity to cross the bridge on foot (normally the Øresund is only open to vehicular traffic). Since the entire distance of the race is a half-marathon (21.2 km), we divided the race up so that we each did roughly half of the distance.

The coordination involved for this race is pretty impressive. About 10,000 people participated, about half coming from each side of the bridge (Copenhagen and Malmö). For this they had two seperate registration centres and buses shuttling all the runners to the starting point. In addition, about 500 people were running the race as a relay so buses had to be coordinated to shuttle second leg runners to the halfway point and pick up the first leg relay runners from the halfway point to bring them to the finish line. On top of all this they had to close down a lane of traffic on the bridge and section off the rest of the course.

To see pictures and how we did in the race, check out www.broloppet.com.

Vi er forlovet

By now you probably already have heard:

MARIEKE AND ANTHONY ARE ENGAGED

(more details in the blog below)

A commemorative photo (as in Amelie)

The location: Basilique to Sacre Coeur, at sunrise, with a view of Paris

A reenactment...

Life in Denmark (the Lost Chapters)

So…After not having written a blog for months, we decided that we HAD to sit down and do one since most people have probably already given up on regularly checking this site. So much has happened in the last few months but we’ve had fewer opportunities to write blogs. Or rather, one of us would say “I’m going to write a blog today” but somehow it just never materialized. Anyway, it’s been two months and plenty has happened.

April was a pretty hectic month. Anthony went to England for Easter. He visited with relatives and family friends and had a really good time. Meanwhile, Marieke stayed in Copenhagen in a desperate attempt to salvage her first year project (having already kicked out one group member, she could then focus on coaxing the other member to actually do some work). The week didn’t turn out to be that terrible, since a friend of hers from the Queen’s Triathlon Club visited for 5 days from Maastricht (in the Netherlands).

Then, we both went into intense work mode, attempting to get our projects done. Anthony’s projects involved never-ending programming in Matlab to create a simulation of a wind turbine in changing winds. Marieke’s project had become a seemingly never-ending writing and revision process – investigating the computer industry’s preparations to phase-out several toxic chemicals from their production lines. Marieke made contact with an industry expert from the USA who was coming to Copenhagen for a conference. He provided valuable insights, and got Marieke into the conference, which ended up saving her project.

May was just a continuation of the hecticness. We were both finishing our projects and Anthony was starting exams. Despite the craziness, we did get our first taste of Danish summer weather and Danes coming out of hibernation. It was insane. If you think that Canadians love the summer, then you’ve never met a Dane. They literally go into social hibernation during the winter to the point where no one makes eye contact. Once the weather warms up, the neighbours, who you thought were completely rude and inhuman in the winter suddenly start saying “hej”. It’s still usually not much more than “Hej”, because after all they are Danish.

We planned a weekend trip to Paris for “Anthony’s birthday”. We stayed in this really inexpensive, cute hotel called Hôtel Bonséjour in the district of Montmartre. We did the obligatory site seeing: Notre Dame, Eiffel Tour, the Sewers Museum, the Louvre etc. and we also had the chance to meet up with some family friends of Anthony’s for lunch. We ended up staying with them for the whole afternoon and were able to practice our French.

On the Sunday morning Anthony and I went to go watch the sunrise from the top of Montmartre at the Basilique du Sacré Coeur. This was where Anthony proposed! Marieke finally realized why Anthony had been so adamant to go to Paris, while our projects were still not finished (May 14 represents 50 months as a couple). He had been planning this for months and had the ring custom-made by a jeweller in Florence (Marieke’s high-school friend Paula). We spent the rest of the day touring Montmartre to see all of the locations from the film Amélie (which we saw on our first date): the grocer near Amélie’s home, the café where she works, the adult video store where Nino works, the Metro station where they meet and the photo booth where Nino loses his album.

We haven’t yet set a date for the wedding, but it will at least wait until we return to Canada. In the meantime, we invite all of our friends and family to come celebrate our engagement with us (the party will last from now until August 2007).

June has been pretty interesting so far. We are now completely done our projects and exams and did well for our first year. This has definitely become the month of guests. Janice was on a three week break from work and visited us twice on her way to Munich, Budapest, Belgrade, Vienna and Prague. Berns and Etienne are both coming with us to Roskilde Festival. Berns has travel plans before and after the festival to visit friends in Prague and Munich, while Etienne is coming with us for the first four days of our three-week Scandinavia tour. With Etienne we’ll be leaving the day after the festival and taking a night train to Oslo. From there we’ll be seeing the fjords around the Bergen area. When Etienne flies out of Oslo, we’ll be continuing north through Norway and traveling through Finland, Sweden and possibly some of the Baltic countries.

We’ll be back in Denmark in August and we’re thinking of going on a long bike ride to Legoland. Marieke’s family is also coming to visit, as well as Alex and Emily. So, our next blog posting may not be for a while…