Enjablog

Totally forgot to mention how technology saved the day yesterday!

So, the park we went to watch the meteor shower from was about an hour East of Annapolis with no cell signal within a couple miles of it. We were meeting a few people who had also never been to this park before. When Ian and I didn’t find the field we were advised to use on our first pass through the area, we decided to go find the map he looked at online the day before.

We backtracked to the last place we had consistent signal and used my phone’s internet connection to tether the shiny new [hand-me-down] netbook Anna gave me (Ace). We looked up the map, downloaded a local copy of it, and then called the people we were meeting to make sure they had directions to meet us at the site.

A little while later, we were happily star-gazing! I used my compass app to position our blankets in the direction of optimum meteor sightings. And, as it turns out, the sky map app on my phone works without signal/GPS activated! It takes your last known position or you can enter in a position and it’ll show you the stars in the sky from your position.

Technology is the best! :)

Went out last night with a bunch of friends to see the Perseids meteor shower. I haven’t been out to see a meteor shower in years, so it was pretty cool. We had fun staying up, eating snacks, and listening to music waiting for the clouds to move by. Saw about a dozen or so meteors over the course of the night.

I tried a few times to take pictures, but my camera doesn’t have the option to leave the shutter open as long as I needed. This was one of my best pictures. ;)

Got to the airport bright and early to try and get an exit row seat for Ian, but AirFrance was no help. We hung out at the airport until it was time for our first flight to Charles de Gaulle. We got there with little incident, but had a lot of difficulty trying to find a board that would tell us which gate our connection was. We finally had to go to the info desk to ask someone to look it up and tell us.

We made our way to the signs pointing to the terminal we needed… took a shuttle that dropped us off outside some locked doors. After waiting a few minutes for someone inside to notice us, a security guard let us, and our 20 new friends, in. We followed the signs, again, to the direction of our terminal. Only to find that we were now outside the secure area and had to go through security again.

The place was a mad house. They were moving people through pretty quickly, but it was still really crowded. I went through my bag trying to find the liquids I had gotten out since the Copenhagen airport and put them back in my ziplock bag. Found the 1/2 liter bottle of water I refilled past security in Copenhagen, which I needed to be rid of. I wanted to keep the bottle, though, in case I wanted water later. So, I started chugging while taking off my shoes and digging out my laptop… Ian took pity on me and had a swig of water to help me finish it off. Made it through security and booked it over to our gate… which got moved! Fortunately, it only moved a couple gates over and the line was being held up by a big group of American teenagers.

The flight back was pretty uneventful. Each seat had a TV in front of it, so we had our pick of movies and TV shows to watch the entire flight back (watched How to Train Your Dragon, Date Night, Inglorious Bastards, and a couple episodes of the Simpsons). They kept getting interrupted by announcements though, which were incredibly difficult to understand. At one point, I realized I understood more of the French than I did the English. And when I mentioned it to Ian, he didn’t even realize they were speaking English!

Finally made it back to VA! Ian and I very diligently documented all the items we brought back on the customs form, so we would be ready when we arrived. When we got up to the customs agent, he asked us what food we brought back. Various Danish candies, crackers, and other snacks. The guy looked at us like he was trying to stifle a laugh. He waved us past and we were on our way!

Lenny was awesome enough to pick us up from the airport, so we got a chance to stop in and say hi to Steph and the nieces. E2 was so happy to see Ian! And E1 was excited to show me everything that had changed while we were gone. It was nice to see them, but we were tired and so ready to get home. Steph was nice enough to send us home with some fresh fruit though, so at least I didn’t need to worry about scrounging up snacks later.

Headed straight home, lugged all our stuff up to our apartment… and then discovered that we were locked out. While we were gone, we had Steph’s uncle in doing some contracting work for us, so we gave him one of our keys. We gave our other key to Yenny so she could water our plants. We can buzz ourselves into the building with our phones and our front door has a mechanical punch lock that doesn’t require a key, so we figured we could get home and then retrieve the keys from people later. Except that we also have a deadbolt that we don’t use… but after the last time building management locked me out of my apartment, I started carrying that key around just in case. And so that “just in case” key was used and we had no way in.

Tracked people down… The construction guy had the key, which he dropped off in the uncle’s mailbox since the uncle was out of town, and I went to pick it up from his house. And an hour later, we were finally inside our home and everything was as it should be (plus a fancy bathroom!). Until we did our first load of laundry and the washing machine flooded the kitchen again.

Home, sweet home.

Our last full day in Denmark, we spent visiting castles! First stop: the Fredricksborg Castle. There was a castle with a museum inside, but the big draw was the enormous gardens. We spent almost an hour just wandering around looking at the different designs in all the sections of the garden.

Helsingor, Hamlet’s castle, was more of a fighting castle. They had a moat, an embankment, and cannons — like they wanted to keep people out and made sure people knew it. Walking in the main gate, they had speakers embedded in the hills around the cannons and they had horses galloping by with voices yelling in battle. It was a little unexpected.

That night, we had dinner in and enjoyed some of the beers Sune and Ian had picked out earlier in the week. Then had a quiet evening and got packed up to leave in the morning.

Our second to last full day in Copenhagen, we spent site-seeing downtown.  First stop was the Botanical Garden:

From there, we went to check out the Rosenborg Castle, but decided we didn’t want to pay to look inside.  Instead, we took a stroll through the King’s garden.

The National Museum has free admission on Wednesdays, so we stopped in to check out a couple exhibits. We weren’t interested in everything, so it worked out well.

We picked up lunch at a deli with Danish open sandwiches and found a bench to do some people watching. From there, we caught a bus to get to the Carlsberg Brewery. Spent the early afternoon there, enjoyed our beer samples, and then headed back to get ready to go out for dinner.

We had dinner in this nice restaurant outside of Freetown Christiania. They have a casual atmosphere with daily menus incorporating fresh ingredients, so they’re hand-written and different each day. Very good food!

After dinner, we took a walk around Christiania. I’ll stipulate that this area was different. And that was part of the reason Sune wanted to take us there and show us the “funny houses.” There was a main area where they had a wide variety of, um, plants available for sale. It was their own style of botanical garden.

Christiania… is a self-proclaimed autonomous neighbourhood of about 850 residents. From an official point of view, Christiania is regarded as a large commune, but its relation to the authorities has a unique status in being regulated by a special law, the Christiania Law of 1989 which transfers parts of the supervision of the area from the municipality of Copenhagen to the state.

Christiania has been a source of controversy since its creation in a squatted military area in 1971. Its cannabis trade was tolerated by authorities until 2004. Since then, measures for normalising the legal status of the community have led to conflicts, and negotiations are ongoing.

We took a stroll around Christiania, walked up an embankment, and made our way across a bridge and around a trail. I have very few pictures from this part of the day because there were a lot of signs prohibiting cameras in this area and while the enforcement of their rules may have been questionable, it just didn’t seem like a battle I wanted to take on.

After our walk, we made a stop for some coffee and hot chocolate and then headed back for the night.

We saved a day just for shopping. Ian doesn’t really fit clothes in America, so we figured since we were visiting the country with the second tallest population in the world, they might have something for him. After spending an hour going through a department store, we pretty much gave up hope. They did have slim fit shirts and shirts with longer torsos, but they either weren’t broad enough in the shoulders or his arm couldn’t fit through the sleeves.

So we spent the rest of the morning walking around Copenhagen and window shopping. Well, window shopping until I saw this super cute dress:

On the way back, we stopped by the Copenhagen Cemetary to visit Hans Christian Anderson’s grave. There are many other famous people buried there (Niels Bohr, Caspar Frederik Harsdorff, Søren Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Ørsted just to name a few), but we didn’t go searching around for all of them.

We made a stop at the Post Office and a candy store after that. And then I baby-sat while Ian and Cassia went to the gym. We had a quiet dinner in that evening and got caught up on the World Cup.