The Weather Report

We've had a blizzard in Denmark. Of course it wasn't quite as powerful as the ones they get in North America, but it was pretty disruptive in its own right. Both public and private transportation stopped working, so this thursday approximately half of the Danish work force stayed home from work, including me.

We'll get back to the weather situation later. Before that, we have a few pictures from when we went to Mads and Alice's place for the annual brunch. In february every year, Mads and Alice invite the people that helped them move in 1997 over for brunch.


This is my mother, Bente, at the brunch. Rushing through the door in the background is Mads. With every passing year, the brunch seems to get more elaborate. This year the spread included: pancakes, melons, tortilla, bacon, four kinds of cheese, pineapple, chorizo, salmon bagels, etc. All very, very delicious.


Tasteful interior decoration at Mads and Alice's place. The blurry figures in the mirror are Anette and Nilas (partly concealed by the candle).



This is Mads and Alice's cat Simba.



We took a cold, cold walk in Dyrehaven. Steinunn attempted to pull a branch off a tree. She didn't succeed.



Here, Steinunn is trying to illustrate what kind of bike she wants.



Now for the weather pictures. Large amounts of snow tend to make bikes obsolete. This is what the bikes outside our window look like during a snow storm. The wheel sticking out of the snow on the far right of the picture belongs to Steinunn's bike.



Wednesday night, the night of the "blizzard", I went out to take pictures. This picture of a frozen car was the only useful shot I got.



The horrid weather seemed to be a welcome excuse for people to walk in the street. I took this picture when I was trying to get to work thursday. There was a strange state of emergency vibe, because people generally ignored conventional traffic regulations. I never actually got to work, because the trains had stopped running.



Piles of snow in front of Pizza Café X (the place where you can get the biggest burger in Roskilde...mmm).



Steinunn posing in front of a pile of snow on Algade, the main shopping street in Roskilde.



A bike and a litter box almost completely buried in snow.



And by the way, I got this nice bouquet of flowers when I started my internship.

Fun in the Snow

As you may or may not know, Denmark is currently in the grips of the worst snow storm in quite a while. Today Steinunn and I made the best of the situation by buying a sled and going to the park. You never get too old for sledding.

We had a lot of fun, and we took a few videos. So this is a good opportunity to put up the first ever video on our blog, courtesy of the magnificent Youtube technology. Press play and enjoy. You may want to press pause immediately and wait for the video to load completely, so you can watch it all in one go.

The video contains three clips. First we have Steinunn's Danish sledding debut, including a near-collision with a mother and child. Then there's me doing my brand new signature sled move: The Spinning Indian. And finally I filmed a sled ride from first person perspective. At the end of the ride I only barely avoided hitting a tree.

Check back tomorrow for more pictures and stories from the Danish winter.

Enjoy the video:

Political Science

Some weeks ago we went to a concert in Gimle, the concert venue located about 20 meters from our house. We had been invited to come and see the place and then listen to faeroese singer songwriter Teitur and this guy Glen Phillips which warmed up for him. Teitur was good, but this guy Glen was a nice surprise :) We ended up buying one of his CD's and after the concert we got it autographed.

One of the songs that he played was a cover version of a Randy Newman song. It's called "Political Science", and the lyrics are fun:

Political Science

No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them

Asia's crowded and Europe's too old
Africa is far too hot
And Canada's too cold
And South America stole our name
Let's drop the big one
There'll be no one left to blame us

We'll save Australia
Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo
We'll build an All American amusement park there
They got surfin', too

Boom goes London and boom Paree
More room for you and more room for me
And every city the whole world round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it will be
We'll set everybody free
You'll wear a Japanese kimono
And there'll be Italian shoes for me

They all hate us anyhow
So let's drop the big one now
Let's drop the big one now

Berlin in words and images

As we promised yesterday, we now bring you pictures of our trip to Berlin. Enjoy!

Steinunn and a plastic cow. A substantial amount of the pictures from Berlin show one of us standing next to plastic animals...


Here's Steinunn in front of the remains of the Gedächtniskirche that was bombed during the 2nd World War.


The bear is apparently the mascot of Berlin. These painted bears were all over the city. We couldn't resist the temptation to take silly pictures.


Mmm...Donuts. But seriously, I would really like it if Dunkin' Donuts came to Denmark. They also have good chocolate muffins, according to Steinunn, but they were too big to eat in one go.


Here we are in the glass dome on top of the Reichstag (the German Parliament). As the picture demonstrates, it was a long way down.


Another picture from the Reichstag. The glass dome was designed by famous architect Sir Arthur Norman Forster.


The Brandenburg Gate... not much to say about it, I guess. It's pretty, though.


The Holocaust Monument. This picture gives you a good idea of how this monument looks. It's a pretty vast area filled with concrete columns of different heights. At the edges of the site they are only ca. 40 centimtres high, but in the middle they can be up to more than 3 metres.


Steinunn, as seen through a window at the Jewish Museum.


On the last day of the trip, we went to the Berlin Zoo. It's very large and has more species than any other zoo in Europe (1500 species in total). We happened to reach the Polar Bear enclosure just as they were being fed. That gave us a good photo opportunity.


This Polar Bear resembles a football goalie quite a lot, but actually he's just eagerly awaiting the delicious dead mice and large chunks of meat that the zoo keeper was throwing.


Teeny, tiny penguins. The one on the left looks quite old (click picture to enlarge).


Ostrich up close and personal.


At the end of a long day, there's nothing more relaxing than hanging out at Dunkin' Donuts drinking coffee and eating Orange/Chocolate Donuts...mmm


This is Steinunn looking tired, in a café on the day of the journey home.


This is Currywurst, a Berlin speciality. It tastes almost as gross as it looks. I got this in a café in the building under the Fernsehturm. Steinunn didn't want to taste...


The tall and kitschy-looking Fernsehturm in East Berlin.


After a few days of American style junk food, we finally found a good place to eat lunch. It's a vegetarian café called Einhorn. We saw at least two of them in Berlin, so try to search for them if you ever go there. The food was very delicious, and the price was reasonable. You can mix'n'match from around 20 dishes, and then you pay a certain amount of Euros per 100 grammes.

We took a walk along the longest remaining chunk of the Berlin Wall. It's approximately 1,3 kilometers long, and we walked the entire length. It was very, very cold that day, so we barely made it...


Steinunn looking out the window from the ferry, as it was leaving Rostock harbour on the way back to Denmark. A beautiful conclusion to a good trip.

What just happened!?

Hello everybody, it's been a while. A month, to be exact. A lot has happened. Søren passed his exams at Journalism with good grades, and Steinunn finally left the child care sector. Yesterday we started a new chapter in both our lives as Søren began his internship as a journalist at Danske Kommuner and Steinunn returned to RUC to continue her studies at Cultural Encounters.
We went to Berlin for a few cold days earlier this month, and will post pictures of that later tonight. Steinunn sister and nephew also came for a visit, and we spent 4 days shopping and playing with baby Breki, who is just the cutest little boy in the whooole world :) We'll also post pictures from that visit later on...
We are back!