Week 16

This week, I will have to summarize with one post. I am already quite a bit behind on the writing!

The boys had two field trips to farms this week, which were very fun for them. The first day, they went to the Arla dairy subsidiary nearby. They saw all kinds of dairy cows, and the milking machines. They were particularly fascinated by the milking machines -no one even has to touch the cows, mom!- And came home with lots of stories. They also each got a drawstring backpack with the Arla logo, a ruler with the Arla logo and a cow stencil built in, and an udder cup with cow spots on it. The next day, all of the kids from their class went to another farm nearby. While they were eating lunch, two cows gave birth! That was a bit surprising for our boys. One of the babies had a bit of trouble, and had to have chains put around its feet to be pulled out, the other came easily. The teachers all told me that the boys were quite wide-eyed at the whole experience! I bet they were! They also got to play in tractors and hay stacks at the farms, so all in all had a fantastic time!

 When the weather turned cold, they asked if they could go play outside. They were very amused at the "plate" of ice that had taken hold of the sand toys outside.

 At school they made these hedgehogs out of clay and the outer shells from some of the tree seeds. They were pretty cute. They sold them to the parents at the Julecafe -what a great fundraiser.

 Svea loved the crunchy grass, and was outside chasing the big kids while we were trying to eat breakfast in the morning. I went to get her, but thought the picture was cute and took it first. I figured my legs are still longer so I should be able to keep up.

 Anders was being goofy one afternoon, and put Svea's vest on instead of his own coat. I think the look on Torben's face says it all.

 I finished another novel this week. I didn't really have time for reading (well, I did at the expense of writing my blog posts...) but I had borrowed it from the library and it had to get returned. It was interlibrary loan, so not as easy to renew. It was a great book, made me want to travel to Italy.

On Thursday (American Thanksgiving Day), the boys' school had an Amerikansk Thanksgiving. Jeff made pumpkin pie, stuffing, and cranberry sauce, and their teachers made turkey and mashed potatoes. The kids all got to try all of it. It's fun that they go to a school where they can decide to do this, to share the traditions of our children with the children here, as well as our kids learning the Danish ones. 

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we were able to get the WGN feed of the McDonalds Thanksgiving Day Parade in Chicago in the afternoon, after the boys got home from school. We were excited to see the WIU Marching Leathernecks!

 This Care Bear was Svea's part of the parade. Though she enjoyed watching all of it with me.

 Although it was Thanksgiving, that's not really a holiday here, so this is what we had for dinner. Fish with yellow sauce, bean salad, cabbage, poached eggs with tomato and bacon, and frikadeller -pork meatballs. It was all delicious, but definitely looked a little different from what we normally would have for Thanksgiving!

 Elfie found us! I think he was glad that we are much closer to the North Pole here, and he gets to spend a bit more time with Santa since he doesn't have to fly as far. The boys were very excited to wake up Friday morning and see Elfie looking down at the table while they ate their breakfast.

 And, this week I finished the Nanowrimo project! It took a long time, and a lot of time that I probably should have been doing other things, but I wrote a 50,043 word novel during the month of November. It was a fun challenge! I haven't actually read what I wrote. It might be incredibly horrible! But I finished it, and that was the goal.

 And this was nearing the end of our week. Svea has taken up colouring whenever she gets a chance. We bought her a princess color book a couple of weeks ago, and she seems to be really enjoying that.

Fifteenth Weekend

Well, I am certainly behind a bit on writing about our adventures! The fifteenth weekend of our trip, the weekend of November 22, we had Friendsgiving. Many of Jeff's friends from long ago when he was a student in Denmark came to visit- from Aarhus and Copenhagen, mostly. We had most of the typical American Thanksgiving foods -Turkey, cranberry sauce, green beans, corn, sweet potato casserole, gravy, rolls, mashed potatoes. The turkey cooked much faster than we anticipated! And we were told that the green beans were very trendy -crispy ones! We decided to opt out of the green bean casserole, and just went for green beans instead.

Saturday morning before the guests arrived, Anders and Torben and I went over to the folk school library to set up and decorate the tables. I gave the boys the candles (unlit), several tablecloths, a bucket of pine cones and dried chestnuts, glasses, plates, and utensils, and asked them to make it look nice. This was what they came up with!

 We set out the famous folk school songbooks on the tables, as well, so that we could sing a few songs. While the boys were decorating the tables, I was practicing to see if I could learn them well enough to play on the piano. We ended up singing only one. I think I didn't get enough practice time.

 It was very nice and cozy to have the 22 of us seated around a U-shaped set of tables. The children were placed at the ends so that when they all went to bed, the grownups could just continue conversation without shuffling around too much.

 By candle light, the room looked even more cozy. "Hygge" (hoo-ga, roughly) is the word here, and it's a feeling as well as an ambiance. It was such a great space to have our dinner, and the children all played really well together.

 A few pictures below are from the preparations, which began a few days before everyone arrived. Jeff did almost all of the cooking and baking. This is the crust he made for the pumpkin cheesecake. It was fantastic! I was glad there was a bit leftover so I could eat it the next day as well.

 Cooking the cheesecake in a waterbath ensured even cooking with no cracks. It was perfect!

 We had to rearrange the shelves for a couple of days to accommodate three turkeys for all of us! They thawed nicely, though.

 The gorgeous pumpkin cheesecake. It was so hard not to dig into it when it came out of the oven like this!

 Ah, and the pumpkin pie! Also turned out terrific. Jeff made the crust on this as well, and vowed to buy it in the future.

 It was fun to watch the boys come up with a way to set and decorate the tables. I gave them no instruction other than "set the tables and put out decorations" so I really enjoyed watching them do that. Anders primarily took charge of the plates and cups and utensils. Torben took care of the decorations. I don't remember if they discussed each taking part of it, or if it is something of the unspoken language between them that they just know what to do and do it. My grandma has remarked before that Jeff and I often do this -a project gets done with each of us doing different parts of it, even though we didn't decide beforehand who would do what. Maybe the kids picked it up.

 I thought it looked very fall like, and festive, the way Torben decided to put out pine cones and surround them with chestnuts. It sort of looked like a lot of little campfires on the tables!

 And here is the completed tablescape.

 I thought I would try making giblet gravy, so while Jeff was over at the folk school kitchen cooking most of the dinner, I boiled the daylights out of the neck and giblet bag, along with some salt, pepper, and sage. After a couple hours of cooking, the house smelled fantastic! I took the necks out of the water to cut them, and Anders and I were too grossed out and decided to toss them instead. I did manage to chop up all the other parts (mostly) and sauteed them in a pan with butter and onion, then put them in this bowl while I did the thickening of the gravy. By the time it was time to put the giblets back in (per the recipe I found from Paula Dean on Pinterest -yay Pinterest!) Anders and I again agreed that we just couldn't put this stuff in there and eat it. So we left the giblets out. The gravy was very good without the chunks.

 Svea was the youngest kid there, and enjoyed sitting at the piano for much of the evening. She can't hit the keys very hard, so it was pretty quiet playing. She was content, and everyone else could still talk!

We had a fantastic time. Some of these people Jeff hadn't seen in twenty years! So everyone's lives are very different now from when they knew each other before. They started arriving in the early afternoon, and we had crackers and cheese and vegetables out for people to munch on. We ate the full Thanksgiving meal around 7, and the kids played until about 9:30 when they started going to bed. The folk school library has six guest rooms in it, so it worked out really well that there were rooms for all of the families to stay. The students from the folk school were still out of the country on their various trips, so it was basically empty except for us. We hired one of the headmaster's daughters to watch out kids, so about 10 she and I walked the kids home to put them to bed, and then I went back to join the grownups for a while. I turned in for the night around 11:30, when some of the other spouses also left. Jeff got home just before 4am. 

The air turned very cold over night! The grass was frozen and crunchy, and we woke up to snow! It was beautiful, just a light blanket covering the grass and trees. 

We were up again at 8, and went to the folk school to have breakfast with our friends as well. Jeff made an American breakfast, too, for fun. We had American (small and fluffy) pancakes, bacon, yogurt and toppings, and fruit. It was delicious! Then Jeff gave them all a tour of the folk school before they had to start heading back home. It was a few hours' drive for most of them, and apparently Copenhagen got almost a foot of snow. 

It was a very fun, and very busy weekend. They all said they'd love to come back in the spring for a BBQ outside, too. So we will start the planning of that as well. 

Fourteenth Weekend

Well, seeing as it's now almost the fifteenth weekend, I thought I should take time away from my novel-writing and get back to the blog for a while! It's funny to feel guilty about not doing something that is entirely my choice to do or not do. I'm slightly ahead of the word count for this time of the month, with 11 days left to go now, so I feel it's ok to take a bit of a break. Yesterday I took a break too, to read some more of the Frances Mayes book I requested via inter-library loan. Because it's from a different library, not the one here in town, I can't renew it as easily and it's due next week. So I've got several ongoing things I'm trying to get done this month!

Our fourteenth weekend was mostly calm and quiet. It started off as usual with Disney Sjov on Friday evening, complete with the huge beanbag and popcorn. I wonder what Friday night tradition we will have at home. I love that we start each weekend this way!

We decided to go to Ribe to the grocery store, as it's quite a bit bigger than the ABC here and has a selection of things in addition to food. We bought a small, live Christmas tree for 60Kr. It's only about 2 feet tall. The tag says it is ten years old already. It's fun, though, and cute. Several weeks ago, when searching for chestnuts, we found a sort of (really!) tacky candle ring with two fake apples (there are spaces for four) and a burgandy and gold ribbon on the plastic greenery. Torben thought it was a good topper for the tree, so there it sits.

 I bought several decorations at the recycle shop; I may have too many for this little tree! We are not going to decorate it until after December 1, though, just on principle. Walking home the other evening from dinner, in the dark, we saw that someone had their tree lit in their living room on the other side of the field. It was beautiful. But it still seems early. Maybe because November is dark and cold, Christmas season begins earlier so there is some brightness to look forward to.

We laughed when I asked Jeff to read the directions for me on the tree. On most packages, there are symbols for Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, etc. and I cannot read any of them very well -though I can figure out ingredient lists on foods, more or less- so I asked Jeff what this said. He got about half-way through reading the description before I realized that Great Britain was one of the languages on the pot. Sigh. I guess I could have figured out how to take care of the tree myself!

The students from the folk school are all away on various trips around the world right now, though the group of refugees were staying in Denmark and going on different tours here. Friday evening, they were in charge of dinner. The cooks had said at lunch -which was only about 15 people- that there would be fixings for making sandwiches for dinner, and the guys asked if they could cook instead.

We arrived at dinner to find the tables set -rather than the wheeled carts of plates sitting next to the foods-

There weren't many of us, so this made more sense than dragging out all of the plates and utensils, and it also looked really nice. It made the dinner even more special, especially considering there were so few of us. I think there were eleven or twelve total. They made rice, and a beef-in-yogurt dish, as well as falafel and salads. It was all very good! They even put everything in the serving dishes before putting it out on the table. Many times, when a meal is more informal and there aren't as many people, the baking dishes find there way out to the serving station instead.

Then we cleaned the house! How exciting! It was nice, though, to have everything put away, the floors swept, vacuumed, and mopped, and everything looking pristine. It sets a good tone for everything else when you have a nice deep clean, in addition to the everyday picking up. The boys were even on board with the plan, and Svea can usually be convinced to put things away if you're putting them away also. She is at that fun age now where she's getting particular about things getting put in their place.

The boys' Danish is just taking off now. It's fun to hear them talking so much, in complete sentences and using the correct grammar forms. I can't always understand them when they talk to me, and sometimes when I tell them to do something they say they won't do it until I tell them in Danish. I wish I picked it up as easily as they did. I try to listen at meals, and when the television is on, but I haven't been to any language classes. They're a ways away, and in the evenings, so it just didn't work out. Just last week Torben really started speaking in full sentences, and answering people when they asked him things in Danish. It's so fun to see. Svea is talking all the time now, too, though it's mostly in English. This makes sense since she spends the day with me. She has mastered "nej!" though, and uses it frequently.

It's just about lunch time now, though it looks like 4pm outside. Probably at 4pm it will be mostly dark. The rain seems to have settled in for the duration of the week. It feels cold in the mornings when we go somewhere, and the wind is crazy. I'm constantly amazed at how fast the clouds go by overhead, or how often it rains sideways because the winds are so strong. It's nice sitting inside with candles and cozy clothes and socks, watching it out the windows.

Fiskelasagne

We have had many, many delightful meals here in Denmark -some of them familiar and others quite different. Most of what we eat at the folk school is delicious. Several times, we've experienced various lasagna recipes. A few vegetarian ones with eggplant or zucchini as the base, a more typical one with tomato sauce and ground beef, another vegetarian one with just cheese and tomatoes, a bacon, pork, and mushroom one with a white, creamy cheese sauce. All have been delightful. So imagine our surprise this week when we arrived at lunch for another lasagna and heard the cook listing off what was for lunch, and her words included "fiskelasagne." My Danish is not very good -understandably, since I am not taking classes because they are far away- but even I know the word "fisk", and I don't believe it should ever be in the same sentence as "lasagna", and yet it was. When you scooped a mouthful of delicious lasagna onto your fork, instead of meeting beef, or zucchini, or tomato, or eggplant, or pork, you see a large chunk of white cod. We ate it. It was best if you removed the fish first, and ate that separate from the lasagna.

Dinner was amazing. There were pork ribs, fried potatoes, tomato and red onion and feta salad with balsamic (leftover from lunch, we ate a lot of it then too). Svea went to town on a pork rib! I think she ate more than I did. The rest of us chowed down on the potatoes, which were more amazing than french fries. They were a take on oven fries, but somehow even more good than that. Ah, redemption.

Jeff was invited to speak at the boys' school yesterday morning to talk a little bit about what it's like to be a kid in the USA. They are learning about the USA right now, so it was fun for the boys to get to share a bit of what it's like for them. Jeff made the rookie mistake of mentioning to the group of 3, 4, and 5 year olds that we had two dogs and a cat...thus prompting all of the children (there are 26 if everyone is there) to talk about what pets they have at home, and some to say "well, I used to have a cat, but it died" and things of that nature. Other than that, it went well. The kids had fun, and the teachers were glad to have Jeff come talk for a bit to the kids. The boys also had swimming in the afternoon. They enjoy that quite a bit. Every other Thursday they get to go for a while during the day and play in the shallow pool next to the larger one at the community center.

I am rather behind with writing about our adventures this month, since I'm spending most of my writing time working on the nanowrimo project. I have over 21,000 words now, and am still on track to finish before November 30. So that is fun. I read a book by the creator of the project, and it mentioned how in the second week you often get bored with the writing, and I have definitely experienced that. The best remedy is just to keep writing, or throw some sort of wrench into the plot to shake things up a bit and see how the characters come out on the other side. As long as I stay on track, I will be able to finish it. Then I can get back to my blogging about our adventures, my knitting projects, and my reading!

I will have to think of another project for December -well, maybe. Perhaps December's project will be Christmas. The boys and I are going to try to make a lot of the ornaments for the tree we will get. It will be a small one, but I really do want to have one. I want to get a few of the traditional Danish ornaments for the tree that we can take home with us also, but mostly we will make them. I like the idea of a homespun Christmas. We are even going to use old knitted socks for stockings. I think I am going to doctor them up a bit, maybe add the kids' initials or something. Yes, it seems that December's project will be Christmas.

For now, it's about time to get ready for lunch. Many of the students have left already on their long trips of the semester -some to Istanbul, some to South Africa, some to Georgia, some to Ghana. It will be a quiet week here next week. But I do hope that because most people are gone, we don't end up with fiskelasagne leftovers...

Thirteenth Weekend

For this weekend, we stayed around close to home mostly. But, Jeff has invited several friends to Rødding for an American Thanksgiving meal later this month, so we did leave town in search of some turkeys. He had seen them at the local ABC supermarket where we buy most of our groceries, and they were approximately $4 per pound, which seemed like kind of a lot. He asked one of the cooks, and she said that sounded about right to her. But we did want to go check at a larger store to see if the price was any better. Saturday after lunch, we headed to the Kolding Storcenter to go to Bilka. It's something like deciding to go to the Mall of America on a Saturday afternoon (i.e. a crazy madhouse). We ended up being in the supermarket -the Bilka- for over an hour, spent about 800Kr, and discovered that the turkeys were more expensive, and smaller, than the ones here in town. It seemed all the families in the store who had children with them had at least one child crying or whining, no one seemed to be paying attention to where they were walking or who else might be in the path they were headed. Total chaos. We found a few things that are not available at our little store (obviously, since we spent over a hundred dollars), and delightfully there is a Starbucks right outside the door of the store. So I got a delicious Christmas Blend coffee in one of those "scandalous" red holiday cups. It was about $5, and worth every penny.

I'm thinking of putting the cup on our Christmas tree. I can't believe all the hype around these cups, but I think it will look very festive with my other handmade Christmas ornaments this year.

On Pinterest I found some photos of paper ornaments, and the boys and I tried out a few.

Now they are hanging from the swirly branches with the other decorations the kids have made this fall. It's really fun having that to hang things on. I think I might try to figure out something like that at home as well. The boys really like it too, and have started finding their own ways to hang their art on it when they get home from school. Now we've got some pumpkins, a couple of ghosts, a few drawings, as well as the leaves and chestnuts we had before.

We were amused when we arrived at the mall (the largest in Denmark, supposedly) to see a drive-through Carl's Jr. right by one of the entrances. The full restaurant was in the food court inside, but there was indeed a drive through window outside. We didn't buy any hand-breaded chicken strips, but we looked to see if they were available on the menu, and they were.

Someday maybe we will go back there on a day that isn't a Saturday afternoon, to see what else they have there. We were sort of "done" by the time we finished our grocery shopping that we just headed back home. We did notice several signs for their Black Friday all-day sales. That seems kind of interesting, since they don't do Thanksgiving here like we do back home. Jeff says the Black Friday thing is new here too.

What I cannot believe is all the beautiful flowers still in bloom in November! Svea and I took the long way back from lunch and walked past the garden at the folk school. These pink ones were still very much alive and beautiful.

 There are a few of these yellow ones in the back yard as well. They almost look fake they are still in such pristine condition! Beautiful!

 The walking paths through the garden were a bit tight for the stroller, but we tried anyway. Svea liked being able to reach out and touch the flowers, saying "ooh, pretty!"

 It's nice when the kids start to get old enough to make their own snacks...but they sometimes get carried away! Torben wanted one of these amazing rolls with havarti, and didn't want to wait for help. So, he skipped cutting the roll or the cheese, skipped the toaster, and just put the remaining 1/4 of the havarti on the bottom of his roll. I stopped him just before he took a bite, and helped him cut some. That's about four servings of cheese -at least.

 Svea's first "big kid" drawing. I think I will bring it home and put it in her frame which currently sits empty on the wall. She loves purple!

 I like the idea of hygge ("hoo-ga", more or less) and we have a few candles in the center of the table that we light when we're going to be sitting here for a while. The kids like it too, though Svea says "hot?" and tries to blow them out all the time.

 One of our weekend purchases was a set of two microfiber cleaning cloths. I sewed one of them into a bag filled with rice to make a heating pad. I'm going to sew up the other one too. Warm rice packs are so nice on sore muscles, or when it's cold outside. I kept the one end, that I used to flip it inside out and fill it with rice, sort of messy in the finishing so that I can pretty easily unstitch that part to bring them back home. It seems silly to fill our suitcase weight with rice! These are washcloth size, and folded in half make a perfect size.

Since I decided to participate in national novel writing month this November, I've been spending a lot of my "free" time writing, but still feel behind. Sunday afternoon while Svea was sleeping, Jeff took the boys over to the folks school -they wanted to ride their bikes/scooter anyway- for a hot chocolate so I could have some time to write. They ended up over in the workshop making designs with the perler beads as well -and ran into Thøger as well. I think it was one of their most perfect afternoons. Anders asked us to get him some of those perler beads for his birthday.

A few days ago, Jeff and I were enjoying the gorgeous weather -it's been about 14 degrees, close to 60- and talking about how people kept saying November was the worst month here as far as weather goes, and if that was the truth, if this was how it got, then we could surely handle it! The next day the wind and grey and mist came. Ah. "This is the November I remember" Jeff said. Even though the temperature hasn't gone down much, it was still 13 this morning when we took the kids to school- the wind and rain make it feel cold. I can see why hygge is so important. You just want to curl up inside with a book and a blanket, light some candles, and be with the people who are important to you. Yesterday, I skipped writing entirely and just piled a bunch of pillows in the corner of the couch, made some hot chocolate, got a blanket, and read my novel "Bella Tuscany" the entire time Svea was asleep. It seemed like a good choice, even though I also felt like I was getting behind in the writing both for my blog and for the nanowrimo project. Funny how I feel sort of obligated to those things, even though they are completely my choice and I'm not doing them for anyone except myself! I still feel badly when I don't do them. But it was nice to sit and read. And today I am back at the table, with a couple of candles burning, catching up on the writing.

We've eaten more meals at home the last week or so than we typically do. There were several fancy meals at the folk school, and our kids don't really do fancy meals, and last night they were having some sort of party with yellow pea soup and boiled pork, so we opted out. Jeff saw on the students' facebook group that they were all meeting at 7 to go to the Burger Barn, so, apparently they weren't that impressed with it either. Today he is taking his Immigration class on a walking tour in a nearby town, and won't be around for lunch, so Svea and I are going to stay home too. I think we will have grilled cheese.

Flensburg Germany Bus Trip

On November 4, the students from the folk school were going on another bus trip, this time south a ways to Flensburg Germany. The kids had done so well when we went on the first bus trip of the Jutland area, that we decided to go along on this one as well. The folk school kids had some meetings scheduled at a high school in Flensburg, so we would have a few hours to just walk around and see things that interested us while they were in those meetings.

It was about an hour on the bus to get there, and we immediately started on a walking (maybe running!) tour of the harbour and the city. I had looked at the weather beforehand, but didn't take into account that it always feels colder by the water than the actual temperature is, and hadn't brought along warm enough clothes for any of us. We'd walked from the bus to the sidewalk by the fjord, and already Anders was shivering and I was cold, and Svea was crying. Whew, I thought, this was going to be an incredibly long day! We weren't scheduled to get back on the bus again for about 5 hours! We started walking, though, and as we got into town it didn't feel quite as cold, plus, we were moving quickly through the streets so that helped warm us up.

Our first stop was the large Danish library, and we all went inside -most to use the bathroom. Outside the library the streets were narrow and crowded, and there were shoes hanging from the wires overhead. The story goes, apparently long ago the shoes were hung on the old cable car lines to indicate that these were the locations of stores for questionable substances that the people coming in off the boats could find. It looks fun, though, seeing all the wires of running shoes crossing over the streets above you.

We walked through the walking street fairly quickly -it seems Mads as a tour guide is always walking at a near-run - but saw several places that we wanted to remember so we could come back later when the students were in their meetings.

This picture doesn't quite do the hill justice, but we went up to that building on top of the hill. It was about half stairs and half ramps, so Svea got a few chariot rides as Jeff and one of the other teachers carried her in the stroller up the steps. She thought it was pretty great! The view of the harbour was neat from up there, and would have been better later in the afternoon after the fog had lifted. I'd forgotten how foggy harbours are during the morning!

Up behind that building is a large cemetery with very old stones, several hundred years old, and also this giant statue that's pretty significant in Denmark's history from when this part of the country belonged to them.

By 10:45 we'd all made it up to the high school, and stopped to eat our lunches in the dining room area there. It was early, but everyone was hungry so we all ate. Then it was our free time while the students had their meetings. We left the school, thinking we were taking the way back down the hill to the walking street where the shops were -afterall, if you're on top of a hill, and the streets are heading down, you're going in the right direction. We saw quite a bit of graffiti on the walls of the streets as we walked, and not many people around. It just didn't feel quite right. I did see an amazing little house stuck in a corner with a tiny little courtyard out front with a metal bistro table. It was picturesque like what you'd see in a fairytale, or a romantic comedy. I really wanted to take a picture of it, but there was a man -a neighbor I think- outside and he was walking very close behind us. I kept waiting for him to go inside one of the houses, but he didn't. And then we were too far past the house to get a photo. I will have to try to remember it instead. Even if we returned to Flensburg again -as I suspect we might for the Christmas market- I don't think I'd find it again!

We were a bit turned around by the time we reached the bottom of the hill, and it took a while to get oriented again. We were about four blocks farther down the city than we thought we were, but quickly made our way back to the walking streets we intended to go to. The kids didn't quite understand that we were going there just to walk. They kept asking if we were there yet, and where we were going. We saw a "Everything for 1 Euro" store, and decided to go inside. If nothing else, we could warm up for a bit -though for the most part we weren't feeling too cold anymore. It was a fairly large store, and had more things than I'd expected to see there. We ended up buying some skeins of yarn -they were cheaper than at the recycle shop!-, two hot wheels, some chocolate coins the boys had been asking for since they'd seen them weeks ago, and a calendar of postcards of Germany. Ten Euro. It wasn't such a bad deal.

The bustle of the walking streets was kind of fun. There were a lot of people, but it didn't feel overly crowded. And the shops were small and close together -it seemed one building ran into the next, with very few side streets to break them up. It was nice that we didn't really have to look out for cars, though, except for the occasional delivery truck.

 When we first arrived on the walking street, we could hear music. Then we saw this woman sitting on a stool playing an accordion. Reminded me of the street musicians we heard all the time in Chicago -though those were almost always guitars or buckets, rather than accordions. But still, it was fun.

 In the afternoon, after the students were done with their meetings, we got back on the bus and drove about a half an hour to Schleiswig to see the ruins of the wall that was used back in the war. It used to be 5m tall and 2m thick, and they had cleared all the trees and brush for several kilometers, so they could easily see the enemy coming.

 This picture is the "after" of the one that follows it. Imagine, though, that instead of two boys standing on the edges of that wet stump, there are three children standing there -the smallest one trying to be just like her big brothers.

Just as I was saying "be careful, that is very slippery when it's wet!" Svea disappeared inside the hole in the stump. If you look closely in this bottom one, where just Anders is standing, you can see her hand and forearm reaching out from the center of it. She didn't get hurt, but she was rather irritated about it. Jeff took the picture as I was walking to pick her up. The hole wasn't that deep, but she's still small. That was the end of climbing on stumps for today.

 Torben felt on top of the world, climbing to the tops of these hills. You really could see for miles!

 Here, me and all three kids discus how it's fun to be on top of the hills, but they need to be careful of the edges because the grass is slippery and wet and it's sort of a long way down. The one we're standing on had wooden stairs built into one side so visitors could climb to the top.

 Our kids, as well as several of the students, were really interested in testing their skills of climbing without the aid of steps, though.

 It was about 4:00 in the afternoon when we were here, so the sun was beginning to set. I love this picture of Torben looking out into the world.

 Well, my picture order got a little messed up here! But it was all the same day and it's difficult to move them around, so I'll just go with it. Here is Svea's chariot ride up the steps to that large museum. Jeff and Jakob picked up the stroller and carried her. She thought that was fantastic!

 The high school we visited was a Danish one, even though it's in Germany. Apparently this dining hall area is strictly a Danish invention -there are no such communal places in a typical German school. I thought it was interesting that there were a few random book cases attached to the walls. I'm not sure if they were there so kids could just pick up something to read if they were sitting there, or if it was some sort of exchange "take a book, leave a book" sort of thing, or what. There were only about three shelves, and this was the only one that was full. The cushions on the bench seats against the walls were interesting -there were poles bolted to the bricks, and the poles were threaded through pockets in the cushions, thus keeping them in place. Quite ingenious, really. It was a nice place to stop and eat for a little while.

 This was sort of an interesting fountain we encountered while we were trying to meander our way back to the walking street. The boys asked if it was a fish hatchery, and, really, it looks a lot like the salmon runs I remember from elementary school. Maybe that's where they got the idea. There were no fish it in now.

 I just loved the stone archways in this building. At the far end, just outside of the picture, was a little shop selling backpacks and bags. But on this end, it looks like it could be a tunnel to anywhere.

 We passed this church just at noon, and the bells rang loud and clear. There were also signs for a performance of Dvorak's Requiem coming soon.

 This sign made us laugh, to remember the conversation my mom had on the phone with some of the women from Mexico, when she mentioned over and over "Grande Fiesta!" We decided that "Bergfest" must be somewhat the same.

 Shortly before we left, we decided to walk into the mall rather than along the streets -the kids needed a bathroom before getting back on the bus- and came across the T.K. Maxx store. In Europe, apparently, it's TK rather than TJ -supposedly because there is another store with TJ as the beginning of the name and it would be too confusing- and it took most of my willpower to not go in. I did look through the windows, though. It looks just exactly the same as they do back home -even the stuff inside was the same. That made it a little easier, since I know my suitcases can't carry things from there, and I can most likely find the same things once I get home.

Anders really liked this waterwheel outside the mall.

This scarf was the only thing -other than our purchases at the "Everything for 1 Euro" store and a few postcards- we bought on our trip. I thought it was very pretty, and it was relatively inexpensive also. 

 And here we end the blog post about our trip with Torben climbing the hills once again. He's always been a climber!