Hmm, I just decided to start writing these down, but then I got distracted by deleting emails when I picked up my phone and now I've rather forgotten what I was going to write. We are on the train back to Copenhagen from Esbjerg where we have been for 5 days on a sort of school exchange programme. It has been very interesting and not quite as scary as I feared. Ooh, I think that leads me to some of my musings...
- I really wasn't especially looking forward to this trip. I felt John was responsible for this and I wasn't doing any Team Doer work to get us there. I know they wasn't a kind wifely thing to do, I am sorry. And especially as we had such a good time and were treated so well by our Danish hosts.
- Train doors open between carriages with a close waft of the hand. Sometimes you need to wait around in different places, but it's so much better than uk doors which seem to open if you sneeze in the vicinity. What a totally cliched thing to include a sneeze. I don't know how embarrassed to be. (I've just watched someone else come through the door and I really do feel 'waft' is a very apt description!)
- I suppose really that's one of the nice things about travelling. Observing the small things like how people get through doors differently. I feel that could be as worthwhile as seeing something like the Sydney Opera House.
- I realise on being here that I really didn't know anything about Denmark, except.... the capital is Copenhagen and they weren't in Eurovison this year and they have an ok sometimes football team with the Schmichaels. Oh and that Danish crime programmes have become popular but I haven't watched any.
- It was interesting to study a map and discover Denmark's geography and how many big islands there are.
- It's a very flat country. I wonder just how flat Holland must be for me to know of that as being flat but not Denmark.
- We broke our weather record here. Well, I guess we really broke it in Fiji with the cyclone, but apart from that we have had better than expected weather everywhere, most notably in Lewis. Here it has been blankets of white clouds, cold and often with drizzle.
- Cousin leant us his book called 'the nearly perfect people' about Scandinavia at the weekend and John had read the Denmark chapter within a few days of us being here and had lots of interesting facts from it. I am reading it a bit on the journey back and just come across this phrase that doesn't have anything to do with Denmark on its own, but I feel sums me up pretty well! "I am not a joiner. Some have gone so far as to call me a hermit, which is a little unfair, although it is true that there are few evenings out that can compete with a Larry Sanders box set, a box of Jaffa Cakes and a squashy sofa." Swap that for ER box set and Chocolate Digestives and that's me and I'm all set.
- This was special as it felt like the first 'old place' we had been. I had got quite used to seeing towns celebrating 150 year existence anniversaries and hearing dates in 1800s and 1900s in Uganda, NZ, Australia and USA. Obviously all the places have history before that time, but in terms of settlements and seeing dates, I realise that so much had been relatively recent. This week we were taken to Ribe, Denmark's oldest town with lots of Viking history and more than 1000 years of settlement evidence. I was really struck with what a contrast that was to the rest of our year.
- Most Danish houses appear to have proper rooms in their loft space whereas as wouldn't normally?! And their roofs seem more A-line to me. Makes me think of Mrs Robinson's geography lessons and drawing a Scandinavian House and labelling its features for a cold winter.
- Prams. I was amazed in California to see the variety of buggies. Especially the radical combinations of double buggies, up down, front back... And then in Denmark there was a whole new variety. There were lots of modern but old style prams. Some that four children would sit in. They reminded me of the one mum had for us that is still in the roof.
- Bikes. Great to see so many people cycling. And again what a variety of child carriers. Those that stand out hugely in Oxbridge were quite commonplace here.
I wonder if I will continue this series with life musings?!
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