Back in business

After almost one and a half month, we finally bring you a new post. We returned from Greece exactly one week ago. We spent two weeks there, which of course meant that we couldn't blog during that period. But before we left, our internet was down for two weeks, so fate has been against blogging lately.

Steinunn is now in Iceland, and at this very moment she is attending her cousin Maggi's wedding. Maggi is getting married to a girl who, incidentally, is also called Steinunn. Congratulations to them!

This post will contain the pictures that we were planning to post earlier, but couldn't because of the faulty internet connection. Later on, we will of course give an in depth, illustrated account of our great trip to Greece.


I'm not even sure how long ago we meant to post this one. It's a picture of a cool package that Steinunn received in the mail from Iceland. It contained a metal shelf shaped like a butterfly wing. It was a gift fron Jénny, on the occasion of Steinunn's bachelor's degree.



On a day in July, we went to the world famous modern art museum Louisiana in Humlebæk with my mother. The main exhibition was about contemporary Chinese art. This golden dinosaur (on the left) was all I got to take a picture of, before a custodian reminded me that photography was not allowed. The exhibition was very interesting, though. I've come to expect that, when visiting Louisiana.


Photography was allowed in the museum's gift store. Steinnunn tried on a furry fox mask. Later on, she regretted not having bought it.



After two hours in the museum, we went to a nearby beach to have lunch and to relax in the sun. The picture shows my feet as I was walking on a thin wooden ledge in the water. It was surprisingly hard to balance while taking this shot.



The view from the beach in Humlebæk. The island that you can sort of make out on the right side of the picture is Hven (a part of Sweden).



Me and my mother looking out to sea. Notice how pale I was then. That has changed dramatically after two weeks on a sun-scorched Greek island.



My mother dipping her feet in the lukewarm water.



Later, we went to see the school that I attended until I was 15. It's called Humlebæk Lille Skole. A lot has changed since i left in 1998, but these swings were still in place, albeit in renovated versions. Steinunn tried them out.



The school also got a climbing wall. I imagine that it is a lot of fun for the kids, but I could practically reach the top while standing on the ground.

I'll be back soon with pictures from Greece. We took more than a thousand, so there will be plenty to write about.

Technological Advances

Maybe this is a weird thing to blog about, but here goes. Today, I picked up our latest technological gadget at the post office. It's a so-called travel disk that you can use to bring large amounts of data along with you.

That description doesn't really make the thing sound all that interesting, but the catch is that we can use it to store pictures on from our cameras. This will come in handy in Greece, because the memory cards in our cameras can only hold around 4oo pictures at a time. Needless to say, that won't be enough for a two week trip (when we went to the carnival, I shot almost 400 pictures in one day).

The memory cards from our cameras plug directly into this thing, so there's no need for a computer to transfer the pictures. We ordered 100 Gb harddisk, but oddly enough a 120 Gb version arrived in the mail. I'm not going to complain about that.

120 Gigabytes of memory means that the disk can contain roughly 60.000 pictures in a decent resolution. That will of course be more than enough. We won't have to worry a bit about running out of space. And we can just sort all the pictures when we come home, instead of having to delete on the go in order to free up space.

Here's a picture of it.

I'm not going to claim that this thing is beautiful, but at least it's very handy. I seem to recall that the first computer my family got in 1993 had 16 Megabytes of memory. That means that it would be able to store a grand total of eight pictures from a modern digital camera. Furthermore, that old computer was huge. This device fits in the palm of my hand and holds approximately 8000 times as many pictures (o, brave new world!).

Ok, enough techno-babble for now. Drive safely...

Sun and Showers

At 2 pm today, I picked up Steinunn from work. The hostel where she works had set up a small bar just outside the entrance, because there was a festival of sorts at the harbour. The area around the hostel was bustling with people. A few tents had been erected: One was a pirate-themed bar, and the other was designed for dancing.


When I arrived, around 50 people were square dancing outside the tent. This is their ringleader.


The fun stopped when it suddenly started to rain. We scrambled inside the hostel. Some people were clever enough to bring umbrellas.


The rain only lasted for 5 minutes, and the sun came back out soon. Here's a picture of me and Steinunn.


A white duck swimming, and a normal duck trying to sleep.


This is a little baby swan. Its parents weren't too keen on me trying to get close enough to take pictures, but they stopped hissing after a while.


I guess this swan was trying to hide.


Here are some purty flowers.


We wrap this post up with a series of pictures of Steinunn's death-defying leap across a 30 cm creek (Click the picture to see a larger version). Yikes.

Done!

Ahhhhhh summer vacation :) Finally!
Exam went quite well, me and Donghai were able to answer most questions, although I think we both kind of began to sweat when we got questions about our theory, as our theory was the weakest link, and they knew it... But it went well and we were told that the project was well thought out and obvious that we had spent a lot of time on it and learned a lot from it. Which is true. I knew almost nothing about the politics and situation in Latin America and the Caribbean. But now I know! And have a B.A. degree to prove it! Finally, FINALLY my B.a. degree is in the bag... After taking the step back when I dropped out of English seconds away from the B.a. I finally have this bloody degree. The Masters will be easy peasy after this ;)


Søren brought me an armful of flowers to celebrate my day, and later on we're checking out the Indian place in town :) Happy days!

Summer vacation... so close!

On Tuesday I have my project exam and after that I am free for the summer. YAY! Free from school that is, work I still have to do. But only in July :) August will be completely stress free and work free. The plan for August is to enjoy life, get tanned and eat a lot of good food. And that's how things will be :) We have been looking at pictures and videos from the hotel and town we will be staying at in Paros, Greece and it looks amazing. The hotel looks beautiful, the beach nice and clean and the ocean actually seems warm (!!). Can't wait go go! Only 6 weeks now...

oh... another thing. We have booked a trip to Amsterdam in October for 4 days. We got this super good deal at sterling.dk and actually only paid 800dkr for the flight for both of us. Søren will therfore celebrate his 25th birthday in Amsterdam. Not bad, eh!?

Giant Bunny

It's cute, but slightly scary. It's a giant rabbit that I came across on the net. I didn't know that rabbits could grow to be quite this big. It looks slightly surreal, and I can't completely rule out that the picture has been photoshopped. See for yourself:

Copenhagen Carnival

This weekend we went to see the 26th annual carnival in Copenhagen. It was colourful, loud, but also quite wet. The parade started at Kongens Nytorv and ended at Rådhuspladsen. It took about 3 hours to cover this 1, stretch. The parade allegedly contained 2000 dancers, drummers, etc. Here are some pictures.





Shoulder pads are in again.


Little drummer boy.


I call this piece "Angry man with Whistle".


After the parade, the carnival continued in Fælledparken. The rain doused the mood quite a bit, though. These seats should be full of spectators for the drum shows, but no one wants to sit around in the drizzle.


Lying in the grass in blaring sun is somehow more fun than standing under a tree trying to avoid getting wet. We did still had a good time together with Anna and Casper, though.


We leave this year's carnival with a picture of a kid with a big, bright-coloured rain coat.

The wonderful life of students.

This is the time of the semester which you wish you could fast forward through. We have 12 days until deadline and heaps to do. Heaps. We will make it through though, it will just require a lot of work and a many sleepless nights (well 12). Today we are reading the very last thing and at least for me, from tomorrow it is only writing. Hope Donghai (my groupmemeber, we are only 2) has it the same. We have gotten good critique from our supervisor, which is kinda what you need at this phase in the project, which is sooo good.
So, paddle on guys!

-Steinunn the stressed

Ice-Bat came home with us...

The weather was surprisingly good yesterday, so we decided to go into Copenhagen. We went to a photo exhibition, had lunch and checked out the stores. The city cetnre was absolotely crowded. Guess more people had the same brilliant idea of how to spend the day.
Anyway, here are some pics from the day.

We have this thing for Uglies. They are funny and cute at the same time. In Copenhagen we found them with 50% off and we couln't resist but to adopt Ice-Bat.

For Christmas last year Søren gave Steinunn one of those elephants. They are handmade from old towels and all have their special features, noone the same. Steinunn's has a green pattern and goes by the name 'Daisy'. Here are her siblings at HAY cph.

Here's a building reflected in a mirror. Nothing fun about it, just a little bit cool.

Home for a few days...

I was feeling the need to see my family, my mountains and taste the Icelandic food, so I went home for a few days earlier this month. And it was just what I needed. It gave me time to charge the batteries for the last stretch of this complicated and confusing semester. Now we only have 19 days until our project deadline, have recovered our lost groupmember from the grips of an unfair situation and will deliver a good project. Things are looking much better now than they have all semester. Plus summer is just a few weeks away with work and vacation. If you don't know allready, I can tell you that we are going with the Icelandic family to an Greek island named Paros. We will spend 2 weeks there and it will actually be the longest consecutive time I have spent with my family for a long time now. So that is really good. Plus I really get to spend time with my baby nephew Breki and get to know him even better.
Of course I took a million pictures when I was in Iceland, and most of them are of Breki :) Here are a few of them.

Here is Breki, seeing things in a different light, and finding it incredibly funny.

I put Breki's stockings on his head instead of his feet, and that too, was incredibly funny. It's very easy to get a smile and a laugh from Breki :)

My parents very own privat spa. Or almost. This pool was opened a few weeks ago, and it is less than 100m from where my parents live. So it's almost private. I intend to spend a lot of time there on my visits from now on...

Breki with his new cup.

A tired Breki, just in from a nap on the balcony (in his pram of course!)

Gletta, the 'AristoCat'. She is warming up to Breki now, but at the beginning she aparently did not like this "sharing" thing.

Fluga, my favorite. She is just so cute and soft. Plus she has never lost her kitten voice. I think it's because she knows what kind of power it gives her. I mean, who can restist a kitty like that with the cute voice. You can't help but run to the kitty candy drawer. And she knows it!

Jenný and Breki

A Walk Around Town

Tonight we went for a one hour stroll around Roskilde. It felt like the beginning of summer. The cherry blossom trees were blooming and the birds were singing. It's going to be around 20 degrees for at least the next five days.

By the way, Steinunn and I have both made MySpace accounts, although were not really sure what to do with them just yet. After hours of trying to come up with decent names that weren't already taken, Steinunn ended up with "my_toast", and I got "purple_pacific". You can visit Steinunn's page here and mine here.

Here are some pictures from our walk (with very brief comments):


We found a new store. It has very cool design items, so it was hard to pull Steinunn away from the window.


A picture from a small football pitch that has net all the way around and above it.


In bloom.


A nice "No Nazis" stencil.


The sunset reflected in a pond in the park. Ducks were abundant.


More pretty flowers.


An old fire hydrant.

Finito!!!

I am DONE with my essay! Finally Finally FINALLY! I've been so sick of it in the last two days... really, really sick of it. But now it's over and done with. It is SENT and out of my hands.
I am now officially "Property of Project" which I can live with...

Essay and Iceland

I wonder why the sun always begins to shine, and the weather is always fantastic when I have an essay due in a few days? The weather here is wonderful, warm and sunny, but I don't get to enjoy it because I have an essay due next week and I gotta work at the hostel this weekend. When I've handed in the essay I am officially the property of my project until it is finished... or almost ;) I am actually packing my books and papers and going to Iceland for a few days in May :) My parents asked me if I could squeeze in a short visit and at first I thought "no, not possible, no time!". But then I thought, "why not? I am just writing at home anyway". So, I'm going home on the 3rd of May and will stay for 5 days. It will be nice to go home for a bit :)It's always nice to come home... hoooooooome :) It's nice either way it is.. going home to Denmark is also very nice. I have TWO homes! Lucky me :)

Comic

Surfing the internet, I stumbled upon a very funny comic. It's called "Cyanide and Happiness" and it's all stick figures. Here's a sample:


Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

The strips are anything from one panel (as above) up to 9 panels, so th form varies quite a bit.

You can see more strips here

Easter Weekend

This weekend, we went for an extended tour of Northern Zealand. Friday we visited my mother in Hornbæk, and we spent Saturday with my dad and others in the summer house in Evetofte. Here are the words and images to describe it all.


Steinunn satisfies her insatiable need for patting kitty cats. This is my mother's neighbour's cat. The neighbour has two cats, but she doesn't seem to be taking very good care of them. They are both very friendly though.


Shadows and easter decorations.


This is my mother's cat Bella. She is not feeling very well. She's lost a lot of weight lately, and therefore my mother took her to the vet. The vet says that Bella has kidney failure, so, regrettably, she will die soon. My mother has decided to put her down to put her out of her misery. We got Bella from my school teacher Irene almost 11 years ago, and she's been a good cat. We'll miss you Bella...


And now for something completely different:

Steinunn and I arrived early at my dad's summer house on Saturday, so I helped with some of the final touches on the outside of the new shed that he is building (by the way we didn't tear down the old shed this weekend as I had expected, so that story will have to wait). In this picture I'm holding a board in place with my head, while my dad is putting the screws in.


Another board is added to the house.


When the rest of the gang had arrived, it was time for chokoladesnegle (chocolate snails). Although the name doesn't really ring well in English, they taste very good.


After cake and coffee, it was time for one of my family's signature "brisk walks on the beach in cold weather" (We also took one of those with my mother on Friday). After making our way along the beach for half a kilometer we went up the dunes to take an inland path on the way back. As these pictures demonstrate, the climb proved to be more difficult than you would expect.


Here, my father is struggling to climb the shifty sand. Dressed in black on the right is Lærke, and Anette, Anette Reenberg, Lars, Henrik and Mads are waiting in the background. Just for the record, I'll give a quick background on who they all are. My sister Anette has already been presented on the blog. Anette Reenberg is my dad's girlfriend. Lars and Henrik are her sons. Lærke is Lars' girlfriend, and Mads is Henrik's friend.


The group is making the final push to the summit of the treacherous dunes.


Back at the summer house, it was time for drinks. My dad, Henrik, Lars and Anette Reenberg went to Australia for Christmas. On their way home, they had a layover in Singapore and they had a Singapore Sling in the hotel where the drink was invented. So of course we had to taste the drink as well. Buying all of the ingredients and differents kinds of liquor for the drinks had cost over 500 kroner according to my information, so it wasn't cheap. In this picture, Henrik is measuring liquor under the strict supervision of my dad. Precision is key.


The result of the long mixing process was tasty (and pretty to look at).


Anette, Lærke and Henrik chatting.


Steinunn and I spent the night in the summer house, because we didn't feel like taking the long ride home in the night. Instead, we went home Sunday morning. Regrettably, my dad and I misread the timetable for the train, so Steinunn and I ended up having to wait at the small, deserted station in Melby for nearly 40 minutes. Judging from the interior of the station, the teenagers in the area spend a lot of their free time writing slogans on the walls. Not a lot for them to do out there in the country, I guess.


This broken watch sums up the experience of waiting at Melby station... time stands still.