Last Days of Summer?

We are now guest-less once more. We packed quite a lot into the few days that my mum was here (and we were lucky with the weather considering what it was like prior to her arrival, and has been like since her departure!), we had a great time. We did a tour of that old faithful the Frilands Museum, complete with a guide in traditional dress . It was great to learn a bit more about the detail of the houses, how they came to be at the musuem site, and how they lived according to which era. The minuscule beds had always puzzled me, but we learned that they were not in fact Lilliputians in those days, but according to their belief that sleep was in fact dangerous, they slept sitting up. No wonder they didn't live for that long. The huge trough-like things in the kitchens were actually for making rye bread, and the enormous round copper bowl built into the wall in the corner of the kitchen was primarily for brewing beer. We galloped through centuries at high speed, exploring different houses with our guide, and ended up at Village shop from the 1930's, which was like stepping into a Matador set. Then of course we did the trip to the Karen Blixen Musuem which was lovely!

I hadn't imagined that my blog would feature seafood quite so frequently, but on Saturday, as predicted, my husband had to go and investigate the Krebs. He came back with a box full of the live little creatures that looked too cute to cook and eat, but I am sorry to say that we did, by first boiling them in water, beer, herbs and lemon juice. Thank you my little crustacean friends, how delicious you were too! We ate them with rye bread, mayonnaise and salad, all washed down with beer! Well, that is part of the tradition apparently!

That afternoon Mum and I went into town by ourselves (while those left behind were by no means neglected, they had fun at what is quite possibly the smallest circus in the world), where we explored the old town, got lost on the way to Nyhavn, and then went on a canal boat tour. This time we did the 60 minute guided tour and very informative it was too. I had to laugh as we got to the empty stone where the Little Mermaid usually sits (she is currently on holiday in Shanghai if you didn't know, please don't plan your trip to Copenhagen until at least November if that's the only reason you are coming), in her place is a plain white billboard displaying a website of an art installation by Artist Ai Wei Wei (what a great name!) which documents and articulates the movements and changes that occur during the time The Little Mermaid is away, both in Copenhagen and Shanghai. You can read about it here: Visit Copenhagen! I also learned why the Lagkagehuset (Layer Cake House) is called just that, it's because the building it's situated in looks like a layer cake (I find it extraordinary that a) I haven't noticed that before, and b) the fact I remember in most detail is something to do with cake!) I think I will always remember this tour for the mass hysteria that ensued when it started to pour with rain, then around twenty tourists clambered for over sized bin liners with hoods, and struggled to put them on in the midst of the storm. One man (I think he had been in the pub that afternoon) had a huge fight with his, and almost gave up, until his (very sober) wife (whom he had been attempting to maul like a lovesick teenager a few moments earlier) got incredibly cross with him, and got him dressed like a small child. I don't think anyone on the boat remained calm, and fits of giggles kept errupting sporadically from various sections of the boat. Mainly ours.

On Sunday we went to Sweden. We visited Ystad (which is where Wallander is set and filmed in case you watch it)for lunch, and then we drove further down the coast to Ales Stenar, which is pretty impressive as megalithic monuments go. I remember being distinctly unimpressed with the size of Stonehenge the first time I visited it, and the Standing Stones of Carnac to a 13 year old on her French exchange were just incredibly dull, but this is actually ship-shaped, plus it's on the top of some beautiful cliffs overlooking a gorgeous tiny fishing port. The cows who just wander freely in the field around the stones were quite unnerving, but this is going to the top of my list of 'groups of big stones' to date.

We bade a fond farewell to my mum yesterday evening at the airport. Our little girl was very upset, and launched into spectacular dramatic wailing (in the car thankfully!)when she caught sight of Granny waving from the security lounge. I think the combination of a new term at school and saying goodbye was a bit overwhelming for the poor thing on this occasion. However, she made a quick recovery once I found some Polo's in the bottom of my bag, and is looking forward to our next guests in a couple of weeks time!

It's 20.36 and it's starting to get dark. Autumn and Winter are around the corner and it will be dark at 14.30 pm before we know it. I know this because the shops are now full of snowsuits and hats and gloves. Although I will be sad to see the end of summer, I am looking forward to my favourite seasons. Remind me of that when we have another three months of snow wont you?

Isak Dinesen

My mother has always been a big fan of Karen Blixen, so we paid a visit to the Museum in Rungsted Kyst. The Museum is actually based in her family home, a beautiful old former Inn by the sea with impressive gardens. The private rooms are opened on a daily basis, and are kept just as they were then. The screen Karen described to Denys in Out of Africa is by the fire in the parlour, and the rooms are filled with beautiful flowers fresh from the gardens, something she took great delight in (and if I had such fabulous gardens full of them to choose from, I imagine I would be passionate about flower arranging too!). I didn't actually know all that much about Karen Blixen beforehand, but I found it really really interesting (definitely not one to bring children to though! It was lovely to be able to wander through the exhibits without so much as a "I need the toilet" or an "I'm hungry"!). As well as being an accomplished writer, Karen Blixen was a pretty decent artist, and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen. Her paintings are everywhere throughout the house, although she wasn't encouraged to paint by her family, which is a huge shame. Her life was actually quite tragic and I found the whole place moving. She is buried here, underneath a huge beech tree in the gardens. It was quite apparent that the Hollywood film Out of Africa wasn't rated that highly by the Foundation, as it wasn't considered to be true to the book. I am not sure that I will ever be able to watch it again either, if only for the reason that Meryl Streep's Danish accent is (I realise now)just plain hilarious. I wonder what the Danes thought when that first came out?

Afterwards we went for lunch at Fiskerikajen in Rungsted Havn for the most beautifully fresh Stjerneskud (freshly fried place on homemade rye bread with mayonnaise, prawns and lemon - delish when done properly!). We sat overlooking the boats in the harbour. This place makes an English seaside fish and chip shop look so basic. It has an amazing fish-mongers tacked onto the side, complete with racks of freshly hot-smoked salmon. It is still Krebs (crayfish) season at the moment here and they had buckets of them piled outside, no doubt my husband will be back here to investigate in the near future!

Betty Stick

First proper day at school for both of my children today. Yesterday was an introductory day and both enjoyed themselves. I enjoyed my trip to IKEA for lunch ON MY OWN. I am sure the novelty will soon wear off, but having a couple of hours to myself was quite nice.

When we first arrived (almost a year ago!), the nervous early morning drives to school were brightened somewhat by Betty Stick. Betty Stick is the name given to an elderly lady, who every morning usually without fail (come rain or shine or deep snow), walks through the woods that form part of our daily drive. She is called Betty because that's what my children think she is called, and Stick because she walks with two Nordic poles. If we don't see Betty Stick we have a miserable journey as the children worry about where she is, and if she's OK, and why isn't she there for them to wave to in the morning. Betty doesn't wave back, she doesn't see them, and she is too busy walking. Before we leave at some point, I am determined to write Betty a little note (in Danish) from the children, to let her know how much they have enjoyed seeing her each morning. This morning she had a dog, it caused great excitement. We haven't got a name for him yet.

We had a great week in London last week where we celebrated my sister's birthday and my birthday. It was so lovely to catch up with family and a few friends and do a lot of shopping for things we can't get here. While we were there, it was the annual Perseids Meteor shower. In my mother's village light pollution is not really a problem, and the conditions for viewing were ideal. We saw the first meteor (a huge yellow one) just as we left the pub, so we then ventured up to the top of the paddock to see a few more but the trees blocked our view (and it was too dark for my liking, plus the neighbours dogs started barking), so we crept back to the front of the house where we stood with heads tilted skyward and were lucky enough to see a further 11 in an hour. I have never seen them before, and was blown away by their different strengths and colours.

My mother arrives for a few days this evening. I hope the torrential rain we have had here recently (the cause of floods at the weekend and near floods yesterday) can hold off for a few days so we can get out and go exploring sans enfants.

The Round Tower...

My youngest sister has been visiting for a few days this week. On Thursday we ventured into Copenhagen where, after a lovely lunch we decided to climb the Round Tower. You get a fantastic view from the top and the slope to climb the tower and the lack of stairs means it's a novelty for the children who loved running up and down again. Once we got to the top we stood to admire the view. It was a beautiful sunny day and it's very peaceful up there. Well, at least it was until a small child started screaming. Looking around to see what the problem was, I realised it was my small child. With his head stuck through the railings. You always hear about this happening, but I never really thought that it did! The drama lasted for all of five minutes, with me imagining how "thrilled" the Roundtower staff were going to be when the fire brigade had to slice through the antique metal bars with cutting equipment to release him. His sister also started panicking and the people around us began to crowd and stare, when suddenly, just as quickly as it had begun, I managed to manaeouvre his head back through the bars again. Do visit if you get the chance, the view is so beautiful, just don't be tempted to go for a closer look!

As it was my sisters birthday last night we went to Ruby for celebratory drinks. This place is amazing. If you could pick this bar up and put it in London, I wouldn't go as a) it would be too busy and b) it would be overpriced and overhyped, but this has to be my favourite bar in Copenhagen so far. It's in a beautiful old residential apartment overlooking the parliamentary buildings, the staff are super friendly and the cocktails are amazing. If you go, don't tell anyone else about it OK?

Off to London for a week today, can't wait to get home and see the family and stock up on teabags!

Emma xx

Garden Pondering....

Get it? Pondering... Luckily we don't have a pond, being the world's most paranoid mother, I would be a nervous wreck each time my two went outside, but we do have a slightly bigger pond in the form of the huge lake up the road from our house, which has meant that being surrounded by water we have masses of dragonflies in our garden (what is the correct collective noun for a group of dragonflies anyway?), they are huge and beautiful. I love them. I will try to take some pictures of them if I can get one to stay still.

This morning we set to work in the garden to get stuff done while the sun shines. This last week we have had so much rain (a good thing, but which will no doubt thrill my little sister who is arriving on Wednesday, and has made plans that mostly involve the beach!), on Tuesday we had the first real rain storm of the season and it was quite impressive! The ground has been baked hard over several weeks of heat and sun, so the rain didn't soak in. Instead, it ran off the surface of the driveway, sweeping garden debris with it and culminating in a huge waterfall that gushed down the steps leading to the basement at the side of our house. The debris collected, blocked the storm drain and a flood ensued. It was lucky that I noticed this happening, I had opened the door to let a friend in when I heard a funny noise and noticed Victoria Falls behind me. I then had to take immediate action, so I put on my husbands flip flops, rolled up my jeans, and wielding a wooden spoon I waded in and started unblocking. It was revolting, at one point I had a stag beetle crawling up my leg. I am just grateful that my friend arrived in time so that she could keep an eye on the children so that they didn't feel the need to "help" me, but even more so for the fact that we were actually at home, had it been last week when we were away, we would have come home to a real mess.

So back to the garden. Five hours of grass-cutting and weeding later, it's beginning to look very tidy (not that it's usually a mess!). I have noticed how everything is so much bigger here though,it could have been the right conditions for them of course, but the weeds are mutant-like they are so big. Gardening if anything, does give you time to think and reflect, and it made me think of my paternal grandmother who died in July last year. As a strong Yorkshire woman she was a real character. In my early teenage years we used to clash enormously, something I obviously regret now. As we both got older, we understood each other a lot more, but I will always remember some of the classic moments such as the family holiday to Greece when I was a teenager. We went out for a meal all together one evening and the waiter asked what I would like to order so I enquired as to whether they had any vegetarian options. My grandmother piped up with "She's not vegetarian, she's just awkward" in her loudest voice. I was livid. It makes my sisters and I howl with laughter now when we remember that comment, along with thousands of others. She was very beautiful in her youth, my grandparents' wedding photograph is just amazing. Her dress was made out of parachute silk, one of the few materials available then just after the war. Shortly before she died she received a medal as official recognition for her services as a Land Girl during WWII. The photographs we have of her time in service will always be really special to me, she looked so happy and it's how I choose to remember her. She would have laughed at my efforts earlier today and told me to "put your back into it lass", I could hear her saying it! It's such a shame she isn't around to visit us here. I miss her.

Five hours is more than enough hard graft for me, I am going to make the most of the rest of the sunshine and watch my husband's attempts at building a swing for the children.

Skagen

We decided before we moved here that what little spare time we had we would use to explore Scandinavia, and last week we began to do just that! Our first proper trip away from Copenhagen was great, Skagen is just beautiful. Famous for its special light that has attracted artist's for hundreds of years, it is situated on the very northern tip of Jutland and is the most northerly point of Denmark. Its beaches stretch for miles and totally live up to a child's ideal of what a beach should be like, with shells galore and various interesting sea-creatures to investigate.
We booked the holiday in what seemed like the depths of winter, so had quite forgotten exactly what lay in store, so we were pleasantly surprised that the cottage that was waiting for us was actually really nice, and only 500 metres walk from the beach. We spent the week enjoying the sunshine and exploring what Skagen and Nord Jylland has to offer(which is quite a lot!). As well as the fabulous beaches, (which I know I keep going on about, but these are some of the best beaches I have ever seen, and best of all they were almost completely empty, have you ever seen a picture of some English beaches at the height of summer? You are totally spoilt for choice here and the dunes surrounding them are just as stunning) we visited the Tilsandede Kirke (the church buried in sand), and partook in the Danish tradition of visiting Grenen so that we could stand with feet in two different seas, quite a strange sight! It was probably the only time we encountered a big crowd of people during our entire trip! We took the lazy route and got the Sandormen,a tractor-pulled coach up to the tip and back again. With a tractor mad three year old we wouldn't have had an option even if we had wanted to walk...

Being married to a food enthusiast, we searched out local food where and when we could. There's obviously lots of seafood to be had, and we found one particularly good fishmonger in Hirtshalls, a place also famous for its North Sea Aquarium. My husband asked if they had any sea bass and they weren't quite sure what it was, so I helpfully directed them to the huge poster of fish species on the wall. My eyesight is obviously failing me, as I thought I had read sea bass as the English name for a fish underneath a picture, but I obviously hadn't looked at the picture properly, you can just imagine the hilarity(!) when it turned out to be a Klumpfiske, aka a Sun Fish. I couldn't have eaten a whole one anyway, and later we saw several in the Aquarium itself and they are just too cute to eat. If I had room for a big aquarium in our house, that would be my pet fish of choice. We had monk fish instead which I felt really guilty about afterwards as we shouldn't be eating those either. We also found plenty of good fresh local prawns and languoustines (which we cooked on the barbecue) and managed to eat out at a few restaurants too. My only complaint would be the lack of variety, the menus are almost identical in each one. I quite often thank my lucky stars that my children will eat most things, so we aren't limited to only choosing things from the children's section of a menu, but seriously the children's menu in every place was plaice fillet with potatoes or typical Danish fishcakes, hardly an inspiring selection! As well as an extension to their menu selection, I would also recommend that a couple of the restaurants in Skagen Harbour have a look at their customer relation skills. Just because you have a good location and have a reputation for being the best, does not mean you can ignore customers, keep them waiting and then be rude to them! I would however recommend the Pakhuset for simple good food, and good service (and a great display of figureheads from local boats). The best place we ate at was actually a tiny place called the Det Bette Olhus in Ålbæk near to where we stayed. The food was really lovely and fresh, and it boasted a massive selection of beers from all over the world (plus really kind and lovely service to boot). The other best meal we had was dinner on our last night, a bbq on the beach with meat from the local butcher. Shame it was blowing a gale that evening, but it was lovely all the same, until the end of the evening when my other half was disposing with the disposable bbq, and I stood on the sand where it had been cooking. Never do that, it hurts a lot! It was a great holiday, the best we have had as a family so far. It could have come directly from the pages of an Enid Blyton book, with plenty of sun, lots of ice creams and long days spent on the beach. The only thing missing was lashings of ginger beer!

Constant Sunshine (and Suffocating Heat)!

The weather decided for us that Breakfast at the beach was in order this morning! We made a hasty picnic (plus all important flask of tea), and left home just before 8.30. The light was beautiful, the temperature perfect and we had a lovely couple of hours before we left to go back home at 10.30, just as it was getting busy and too hot! The weather has been spectacular for the last two weeks, perfect for my in-laws who have actually returned to Florida with a tan! We managed to pack an awful lot in while they were here. The various trips of course included our favourite Frilands Museet,where the children learned how to spin wool and Tadci earned his picnic lugging them around in a wooden cart. Numerous picnics on the beach, followed by copious amounts of ice cream (and coke floats!), the obligatory Tivoli, and Sweden for a day where we searched out Swedish meatballs in Lund(and a giant in the vaults of the Cathedral - although we couldn't find him!), and stocked up on BBQ food at the supermarket! Then the grand castle tour, when we packed in three in a day,Krongborg slot (aka Elsinore - who also has another much more impressive giant in it's vaults, but we will visit him another day), Fredensborg, the Queen's summer residence where we explored the gardens (only open to the public in July - get off the grass!!), and Frederiksborg in Hillerod which is my favourite, it's stunningly beautiful and quite the wedding conveyor-belt at weekends. We also did a central Copenhagen canal boat trip which we haven't done before, it was lovely but the day was so stiflingly hot, I am looking forward to doing it again on a cooler day. My In-laws also very kindly babysat one evening, and as the weather was too warm to sit in a formal restaurant, we decided to be tourists for the evening and go to Tivoli, where we ate at Grøften, one of the oldest and most traditional restaurants in Tivoli, it's a bit of an institution. We dined on Danish asparagus and fjord rejer (tiny fresh water shrimp),

and shared a lovely bottle of La Motte Wine from Franschoek where we got married many moons ago, it was a great evening (later in the week we bought a tub of the tiny fjord rejer and made our guests work for their supper, although they are very fiddly to peel, the shrimps are really sweet,and only available for a couple of months over the summer so well worth trying if you can)! It's definitely a restaurant that's been added to our list of places to take guests, the food is good, and the atmosphere's great!

A quiet week at home awaits before we go to Skagen next weekend.