Enjablog

We started off Wednesday morning going into historic Mystic. Given how much there was to see at the Seaport, we decided not to try to hurry through and just visited the gift shop for some presents for our family and friends and walked around a bit to see what there was in the area.

I ended up buying this awesome whale bottle opener for Ian, which I thought there would be a possibility he’d hate. You know, because it’s a little hideous. But I went ahead and bought it because *I* thought it was awesome. In retrospect, I think the Bloggess is having a big influence on my life of late (reference: Zombie speech that came out the same week I got the announcement for Survive Alexandria and her anniversary present for her husband). Anyway, Ian’s coming around. I’m sure he’ll cherish it when I’m dead.

We ended up leaving Mystic mid-morning, so it was too early to try Mystic Pizza before we left. It was ok though, since neither of us had even heard of the movie until we told people we were visiting Connecticut.

Next up: USS Nautilus! This was Yenny’s first time on a submarine. So fun! The Nautilus, for some reason, had been filled with Navy mannequins. They were kind of creepy and scared us a few times when we peeked around a corner only to find a mannequin hiding in a bunk or eating a mashed potato sandwich. (I’m not sure if those were standard rations; there was no placard addressing that question.) From there, we made our way through the sub museum and played around on the weapons they left lying around outside.

We swung by the Coast Guard Academy on our way out of town and stopped in at the New London Post Office to drop off some postcards. Apparently, we’re a dying breed. They ran out of postcard stamps at the desk and had to go rummage through the safe in the back to find enough stamps for me.

On the drive back up to Hartford, we passed a correctional facility, which we had passed a handful of times in the past 24 hours going back and forth from the casino and looking for lodging. Yenny was really intrigued by this, but there was a sign that clearly directed people not to stop near there, so we couldn’t take pictures. I got this blurry video instead:

During the rest of the hour to Hartford, I read through the tourist booklet we picked up at the airport. Included in the Hartford landmarks was a Trash Museum. We decided this was a definite destination for us. While doing some research on my phone to find out their hours, entry fees, etc. I discovered that there was also a Garbage Museum in Stratford, but they got shut down last week. I guess people weren’t as interested in garbage as they were in trash.

As it turned out, the Trash Museum was their main recycling facility. There was a viewing area where you could see the tipping pit, the conveyors that sorted the different materials, and some of the finished bales. They also had cameras throughout the facility so you could see from the viewing area what was going on in other areas. We had perfect timing and got there just in time to see 2 trucks unloading in the tipping pit.

We might have spent a lot of time there, so we didn’t have time to tour the Mark Twain House or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house. I had no idea they were neighbors! We did have enough time to go walk around the area and drive through downtown Hartford before heading to the airport.

And, in case we missed it, the airport was kind enough to have a Lego replica of the Mark Twain House.

While reading up on Connecticut, Yenny and I found out about a Connecticut Hot Dog Tour. Capitol Lunch was in New Britain on our way out of Bristol, so we stopped in there for hot dogs with some of their famous sauce (you can buy it by the pint!). Their hot dogs were more like the European style with a stronger casing and the sauce was good, but not all that different from a chili dog.

From there, we decided to head toward the casinos and find a place to stay for the night. Then we saw a sign that said something about a beach, so we made a detour. We didn’t actually find any public beach area, but heading toward the water, we saw a house for sale and stopped to take a look.

Had a pretty nice front yard:

We got back on the road only to stop a few minutes later at the Hoxie Scenic Overlook:

Once we got closer to the Mohegan Sun casinos, we started calling hotels. Turned out a lot of places in the area were just getting power back. The Stop & Shop was all out of perishables and ice. The casinos (and their expensive hotels) had power, but none of the nearby hotels had power/rooms available. After calling around a bit, we decided to backtrack and head toward Mystic to stay the night. They had hotels with power, but the rest of the town was still in the dark.

We decided to eat in town before heading back to the casino. Yenny suggested finding a place with lobster rolls, since neither of us had ever had one before and we’ve been hearing a lot about them recently. The Sea View Snack Bar sounded promising, so we stopped to check it out. Not only did they have lobster rolls, but they also offered scallop rolls! I preferred the scallop roll, though that could just be because I have a thing for tartar sauce, but they were both very good. Not chase a DC food truck down good, but enjoyable. *cough*Katie*cough* ;)

We spent the rest of the evening at the Mohegan Sun. I wandered around a bit exploring the building while Yenny gambled. There were 3 casino areas, waterfalls, restaurants, and shops in the middle region. Set off from the central area were a convention center, an arena, and a hotel. After I circled the area, I tried my hand at video poker. Not much better odds than the slot machines, but made a whole lot more sense to me. I lost $17.46 over the course of about 2 hours. Not my best, but I got my entertainment value out of it, so I’m ok with that.

A couple months ago, Yenny found a cheap airfare deal and we decided to take a trip somewhere neither of us had ever visited before. Of the destinations offered, Connecticut was at the top of both our lists as unvisited (which I later realized was untrue for me) and unlikely to have other opportunity to be there in the foreseeable future.

We left early Tuesday morning, only to receive a call at the airport letting us know that the B & B we had a reservation with had no power and the phone lines were out. We’d have to find somewhere else to stay. After calling around and getting [accidentally] hung up on a couple times, we decided to take a page out of Sonny’s book and just go on with our trip assuming everything would work out.

We headed straight for Bristol after picking up our rental car. First stop: ESPN Plaza. This turned out to be a bust. Despite our research, it turns out it’s not open to the public and you have to contact someone in advance to go on a guided tour.

Undeterred, we moved on to the next destination on the list only to be distracted by this… skyline:

After driving around for a bit, we circled our way toward the building and discovered it was the Otis Elevator Research Center. At which point, we further noticed that this building has no windows. There are some vents along the side of the building, but the front and back was practically all solid concrete.

We hung out there for probably an unreasonable amount of time before heading over to the Clock Museum. We got there just before noon, so the woman at the information desk recommended we visit the tower clocks first. Great suggestion! It was interesting to stand in a room full of antique clocks ringing for the better part of 10 minutes. (Since not all the clocks were set exactly right.) I tried to catch some of it on video, but I don’t think the recording captures the full effect of the various clocks and the on-going resonating that came from some of the chimes.

After the clocks, we drove farther into town to see the Carousel Museum. Extra bonus? Combined with the Carousel Museum were a Museum of Fire History and a Greek Culture exhibit.

I went to Seattle this fall and visited Pike Place Market. I had never heard of it before this trip, but had a bunch of people recommend it as a must-visit tourist attraction. I don’t know that my pictures really convey the craziness of this area. It’s like an open-air market with hundreds of stores/vendors and goes underground at least 4 floors.

I was trying to find one particular bakery and wandered down 3 floors before I decided I needed to just ask someone. There aren’t really any maps or anything and the adjacent stores don’t have consecutive numbers (or even addresses with the same number of digits). I stopped when I got 3 floors underground, but it looked like there were still more floors below those.

And a street performer who sounded like he was a regular in that area:

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.

The next morning we got off to a nice, lazy start. Cassia and Julia slept in, so the rest of us had breakfast (muesli, 3 different kinds of milk products, fruit, eggs, fresh breads, and 2 different jams). Talking with Sune’s father before breakfast, it seems that they’re not always so fancy. This was mostly for us; they usually have cereal and fruit for breakfast.

While everyone else took some down time after breakfast, Sune took me next door to show me around the dairy farm his parents used to own. They retired last year, moving into the retirement house his grandfather built on an adjacent lot. The farm was sold to a neighboring farmer they’ve known for decades, so it was ok for us to just go poking around.

Cassia and Sune were married in the church opposite the farmhouse, but had their reception in the garden. Ian and I missed their wedding, so it was cool to see where they had all the festivities.

After we investigated all the changes to the farm over the past few years, Sune took me to see the waterwheel nearby.

By the time we got back, everyone was ready to head out to Flensborg, Germany. Julia got to stay with the grandparents for the afternoon, while we did some site-seeing. We stopped by a beach, the cathedral, had lunch at a cafe, and found a cute little rum shop.

After some window shopping, we decided it was time to head back. We stopped by a store right before the border to pick up some supplies — alcohol is much cheaper in Germany than in Denmark. We had a quick dinner with Sune’s parents before heading back to Copenhagen.

We made a trip to visit Sune’s parents in the rural mainland of Denmark. Along the way, we passed Middelfart, the town where Ian’s grandmother grew up. We didn’t stop, but I was able to get a picture of the sign on our way past.

We made it to Sune’s parents’ in time for lunch: a mix of traditional Danish sandwich makings, new potatoes dug up that morning, and scrambled eggs.

From there, we left for an afternoon in Ribe. This was another town dating back to the Viking Age. We visited the Cathedral, went up the tower to see the town, and also saw the totem pole marking the flood lines from the many times the city had flooded. Ribe also has a viking museum, but we ended up saving that for next time since we would have had to rush through to see everything before they closed.

We stopped in a cafe for some coffee (hot chocolate for me!) and people-watching. The cafe was in a really old building with doorways that have long since settled, so I took some pictures inside before picking a table outside to enjoy the weather.

When we got back, we had an Independence Day snack. Nanna got out the American flag from Cassia and Sune’s wedding (they merged 3 nationalities and many more languages at their wedding) and we had fresh bruschetta and champagne.

Nanna cooked up a wonderful meal for us for dinner: roast beef, ham, duck, 2 different kinds of potatoes, asparagus, cauliflower, and fresh breads. We discussed what we saw in Ribe (though, I’m sure she’s been there dozens of times) and our plans for the next day. For dessert, we had fruit and ymer, a Danish soured milk product that is a cross between yogurt and buttermilk. Nice, refeshing end to a filling meal.

After dinner, I took a walk around Skodborg. I brought some carrots with me to feed the neighbor’s horses, saving some for when I finished my walk as well. I wandered up the block trying to get a better view of the windmills. I ended up following the sunset until I got out to a main road and figured that was as much as there was to see in that direction.

I turned back and took pictures of the interesting flowers people had in their gardens. I also really enjoyed the variety in the houses. A lot of the houses had a year written on the side indicating when it was built. Most noteworthy: there were no cookie cutter, model homes here!

I walked up to the school, passing the grocery store, the building formerly serving as the train station, and the cellphone/internet place. The sports fields by the school had a gate closed and locked in front of them… but no fence. So if you wanted to use the field, you could just walk around.

I walked back to finish spoiling the horses and they ran right up expectantly. One of them even neighed loud enough when he saw me that Ian heard him from inside the house.

As I was heading inside, I heard some rustling in the gravel near me. I looked around… and waited… and finally saw these little frogs crossing the path. Cute, but the horse seemed uninterested. So, finally headed in for the night.

We spent a day in Roskilde, a city dating back to the Viking Age. The Roskilde Festival was in town this weekend, but was sold out, and, kinda wasn’t where my interests were.

We visited the Roskilde Cathedral, built in the 12th and 13th centuries. Royal tombs spanning over a millennium are buried here. The architecture here is very interesting because royalty was buried here over many centuries, so as additional wings were needed, they were built and decorated in the style of the time, incorporating Gothic and Romanesque features.

The Viking Ship Museum, Vikingeskibsmuseet, was one of my favorite museums to visit. We started in the reconstruction exhibit, where they show how they resurrected the ships that were deliberately sunk in the waterway to prevent enemy attack by sea. These ships were later replicated and on display in the harbor.

In the outdoor area, they had displays about Viking ship design and construction, explaining the Nordic clinker-building method. They also had a row of trees, representing each type that might have been used for shipbuilding. The harbor had about a dozen replicas on display on the water. And they also had some tours available where you actually go out on a viking ship that the participants have to row.

Inside the main museum building, they had the original ships that were resurrected from the fjord and exhibits on the history of war at sea. They also had an exhibit on Havingsten fra Glendalough (Sea Stallion), a 30-m warship found in the fjord. The ship was replicated and set out on a 45-day journey from Roskilde to Dublin, documented by Timewatch. The purpose was to “test and document the seaworthiness, speed and manoeuvrability of the ship on the rough open sea and in coastal waters with treacherous currents.”

We got back pretty late in the afternoon, so had some down time before heading to Nyhavn (New Harbor) in downtown Copenhagen to see some of the nightlife.

Our first day back in Copenhagen, Ian was finally able to get to a gym. While he, Cassia, and Julia were off doing their thing, I went for a run to explore the city. I didn’t have my camera on me but I did record my route afterward:

I got a little turned around because I turned early on one street to avoid construction, and then turned the wrong way when I got back to the cross street I meant to turn on. Fortunately, I brought my map with me! I would’ve been hosed if I had relied on Ian and my algorithm for getting back (go down [street we can't pronounce, a.k.a. "Main St"], turn right at [other street we can't pronounce, a.k.a. "7-Eleven St"]). Oh, and there were three 7-Elevens that I saw on Main St. Not sure how many more there were if I had explored in the other direction.

Melissa (Ian’s cousin) & Fredrick arrived soon after everyone got back and cleaned up. They were in town for the day on their way to their week-long travels across Europe. We all headed out for lunch at Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus.

After lunch, Ian and I headed back to do some laundry and take naps while everyone else went out to do some shopping. Front-loading washing machines are fantastic. Definitely want a front-loader when I need to buy one.

We spent the evening in Tivoli doing some site-seeing and watching the free Friday night concert (Fredagsrock). Dicte, a favorite of Sune’s, was playing that night.

We spent our last morning in Iceland visiting the Cathedral that you can see from across the city.  Looked around inside, went up in the tower for an overhead view of the city, and then out front to the statue of Leif Erikson.

It started to rain, so we took a car tour of the Southwestern coast. 

We made a stop to feed Julia and were attacked by some birds while we hung around outside and eventually just took cover in the car until we were all ready to go.

Made it to the airport with a slight delay in the flight and were back in Copenhagen that night.  Had Danish hot dogs for dinner, which had toppings similar to Icelandic toppings, plus pickles, but the hot dog were really narrow, and was about twice as long as the bun.

After finding out it would take 90 minutes to drive to a town that could get us on a 4-hour, ~15km, bus ride to get to a location that would allow us to hike 2 hours to get close-ish to Eyjafjallajökull (which is covered by a glacier, so you can’t see much anyway), we decided we should do something else the next day. Oh, and it’d be super expensive.

Reykjadalur was recommended to us by the night clerk at the hotel. He told us it was a favorite of locals, so we gave it a try. We hiked out about an hour and got to a hot river where we could take a dip. Over the years, people have piled rocks strategically along the river to create dams where little pools could form, decreasing in temperature moving downstream.

Ian and I wandered around a bit and found where 2 rivers interesected to feed the stream. One was a hot river and one was cold, so you could stand in the pool with your feet in water differing by ~60 degrees.

When we got back to town, we decided this was a good day to try some Icelandic hotdogs. After some effort, we were able to find Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, the most popular eatery in Iceland.

The casing was much more elastic than American hotdogs, more like sausage casings, but were similar in flavor to hotdogs. The big difference was the toppings available. They had ketchup, sweet mustard, fried onion, raw onion and remolaði, a mayonnaise-based sauce with sweet relish.

After hotdogs, the group split up for the afternoon. Cassia, Sune, and Julia went shopping in search of an elusive Icelandic sweater. I headed over to the National Museum for free Wednesdays! And Ian got some quiet time back at the hotel.

The National Museum was mostly history of Icelandic culture. Each time period had a main display that showed an artifact that played a significant role in their history. Since I had only an hour before they closed, the people at the info desk recommended I focus on those and look more in depth at the exhibits for the time periods around the items that caught my interest. Definitely worked as a good strategy for me.

After the museum, I finished up my postcards and headed into downtown Reykjavik to get them mailed off. The people at the post office were very friendly and told me a bit about their postal system. They have teams of carriers for each region, typically delivering mail within 3 days of send date. The rural carriers deliver mostly to intersections, so all residents on a rural road would have to go to the junction to collect their mail.  Occasionally, routes will be closed due to weather, but most of the year, they are able to access the populated areas.

The international stamps I bought for outside the EU were pretty cute too. I got frogs and waterfalls — and they were old-timey where you have to moisten the stamp before it will adhere.  I then got into a linguistics discussion with the other teller and a French woman until the post office closed.

I spent the next hour slowly making my way back to the hotel, taking pictures of pretty much anything that caught my interest.  Some of the buildings and statues only had placards in Icelandic, so I looked them up later.

I made a stop in the Kraun Design Gallery because they had a picture of yarn outside and I wanted to know what it was.  They had a photo exhibit of Iceland’s role in WWII, a yarn exhibit that was closed for the day, and a super-expensive arty store.

After that, met up with everyone else to have dinner at Fish Market.  The food was fantastic, but the visit was a bit odd.  We didn’t have a reservation, so they said that we could have a table, but would have to be done in an hour and a half for a reservation that was scheduled.  We agreed to the terms, were seated, and put our orders in.  We got our appetizers relatively quickly, but then waited an hour before our waitress came to tell us our entrees were getting started.  This was about 10 minutes before our deadline, but the restaurant was still relatively empty.    We explained the agreement to the waitress who was completely uninterested.  The hostess eventually came out and let us know that we were not going to be held to the deadline.

We spent the day at Landmannalaugar. There were hot springs and interesting landscapes, but more bugs! Again, they didn’t do anything to us, but they kept swarming our faces and getting in our ears and noses.

We had dinner at Caruso, an Italian place, following a recommendation in the tour book. I had salted cod there that was seasoned and not overwhelmingly salty. And some really good veggies, which seem to be rare in the country. Food was pretty good and the portions were quite filling. Our waiter here had, what sounded like an American accent, but not quite and we couldn’t figure out what kind of accent he had. So we finally asked him where he was from — LA, but he was picking up an Icelandic accent.

Did some souvenir shopping after dinner and called it a night.  Got some Icelandic wool for the knitters in my family and mittens for myself.  *SO* excited for winter!  The mittens have separate hand and thumb partitions that flip up, so I can type on my phone and keep the rest of my hands warm!