A Year in Denmark

Today is November 30th. Last year this time, we were arriving in Denmark to start the current chapter of our lives. Can you believe it has been 1 year today? We certainly can't. The year has FLOWN by. For some odd reason I keep thinking we arrived here in February or March and I have to remind myself that we came the last day of November. It has been a wonderful 1st year back in Denmark. We have had a completely different experience than we did in 2002-2003. Which I think it is good because it has provided us with a more well rounded opinion on Denmark and that in turn helped us to understand even deeper what Denmark is, and what it means to be Danish.

We quickly remembered what we fell in love with here and what we missed so terribly. Our friends and family in the states will probably tell you that we hold Denmark on a pedestal. This pedestal is so high that often I think it has become an annoyance. (Seriously though, Denmark REALLY is THAT great!) On the other hand, and as a shock to folks back home, this past year we finally found a few negative things that we hadn't seen before. And while it can be sad to us that we did find these negative things, it actually somehow strengthened our relationship with Denmark. I suppose loving a country is no different than loving another human. Your love is stronger when you learn flaws and love not despite but because of them.

The best way, I can sum up our current feelings about Denmark is to quote something from a book I recently read.

"Chris asked, Do you think he was happy?

Yes, But he was thinking that however much Marek loved it, it could never be his world. Not really. He must have always felt a foreigner there, a person separated from his surroundings, because he had come from somewhere else. "

That actually sounds a little sad. But the point I am making is, we LOVE it here. We LOVE almost everything about life here. But the more we learn, the deeper we get into knowing this country, the more we realize, we will never be Danish. I think if we stayed our whole lives here (Just as Marek did in the above quote), we would become very close, but it will always be obvious us, that we clearly will always be foreigners here. Maybe its because we doubt we will ever find ourselves loving "Anders And"the way the Danes do, we will never master remoulade, I'll never be able to ride a bike in high heels and a skirt/dress and if we can help it lakrids (Salted liquorice) will never enter our mouths again! :o)

I'm so very excited to see what the next year in Denmark brings us and what new adventures we will have and what new things we will learn. I'm excited that this next year we will be able to enjoy Denmark without the language barrier. It is amazing how much you don't learn about a country if you don't speak or understand the language even if they all speak yours. I'm happy to say that we don't have to say, "I don't speak danish" or "I speak a little danish" anymore, and that we can finally say, "I speak bad danish" :)

Some of you will remember that when we moved here last year, we changed the name of this blog from, "Learning to Love Dallas" to "Learning to Love our Lives Abroad" along with changing the appearance of the blog. While I am not changing the name again, I did decide that since you have been looking at the same layout for exactly a year, I'd give it a nice makeover.

L'Anniversaire

My hubby rocks.

December 13th is our 4th anniversary.

Michael is whisking me away on a First Class flight to Paris on December 12th.

We are staying at Hotel Left Bank Saint Germain which sits just off of the Seine River and slightly west of Notre Dame.

We are eyeballing, Le Coupe Chou for our anniversary dinner.

After two nights in Paris we will return on December 14th again on a First Class flight.

We traveled to Paris right after Christmas in 2002 to meet up
with our fun fabulous friend Myra for about 5 days . Since we aren't strangers to lovely and romantic Paris we will be able to enjoy the city for the evening of the 12th and all day on the 13th without the pressures of wanting to see all the Paris highlights. This will be a nice change as it will be the first city we have ever returned to together. (Michael has done Tokyo three times , and I have done Moscow twice)

Prior to previous belief, it doesn't look like we will be making it back home for the Christmas holidays so this will be a little treat for ourselves to heal our holiday homesickness blues as well.

***Now I must have a disclaimer So all our family isn't questioning why we can't come home for the holidays but we can go to Paris for our anniversary. We got a great promotional rate on the hotel room and Paris was one of the 3 cities we could get to for free this month and no, we couldn't have used those miles to get to the states. :o)***

Jul i Lygby

Sunday was "Jul i Lygby" or "Christmas in Lyngby". There was a little parade through town with not 1, not 2 but 3 Santas! By little parade I mean it passed in about 2 minutes, but it last about 45 minutes as it made its way through the 3 big main streets in Lyngby.

The parade ended at the Lyngby Town Hall, where the lighting of the big town Christmas tree took place. It was FREEZING out so we bundled up very well. We had a nice time in our little community and it was fun to see so many happy people out in the streets. Unfortunately our camera and video camera died before the lighting actually happened.

Michael in front of the Post Pub.
We walk by this building every day on our way to the gym.
My main grocery store is located right next to this building

Video of the Little Parade

Me with the Lyngby Christmas tree

We got some Glogg and Æbleskiver's to help get into the Christmas spirit

This picture is taken where the big Christmas tree is. It is just a few minutes walk from our flat. You can see a big black building in the distance in this picture. That building is the same building that you can see from our balcony. Also, to the right in this picture you will see a clock hanging on the wall of the building. Right below that is the store where Michael and I purchased our wedding rings from 5 years ago!

Same black building as seen from the Pate Pad

Friday night we also put up our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree along with the rest of our decorations. It is goofy looking, but he is kinda cute in his own special way.

You might recognize this tree from somewhere.
He is from our balcony.

When Two Blogs Collide

I'm sure everyone has noticed "Kelly and Mads" posting here for the past couple of months. She ran across our blog while searching Google for "Danish Lessons in Dallas". Funny enough, I was actually able to tell her where she could find Danish Lessons in Dallas and she started them! As it turns out, she lives in Allen not far from where we lived, and is getting ready to move to Herning, Denmark in June to be with her (as of this past Friday) husband Mads. The more we wrote the more we realized we had in common. I love that I met another Texan who is in the process of moving to wonderful Denmark and have enjoyed following her story of discovering Denmark as it reminds me of a time when Michael and I were falling in love with the country we have become to adore.

We had planned a few weeks ago to meet up yesterday for lunch in Copenhagen with her daughter Jess and Jess's friend Danielle. We went to a restaurant called, "Riz Raz". I had heard many good things about it from multiple people so we gave it a try. It is a Mediterranean restaurant and everything was vegetarian and very good. We all decided on the buffet and piled our plates full of food.

We had a lovely time and Mads and Kelli were completely adorable together. I honestly thought they seemed as if they had been together for many years (in a good way). Kelli was just as great in person as I imagined that she would be and Mads was fantastic. He stuck both of us as one of those very rare, genuinely nice people. Jess could have been Michelle's (Michaels sister) younger sister. They looked so very much alike and had some of the same mannerisms. It was funny for us to see. Kelli and Jess will not be in Denmark permanently until June, but I am very much looking forward to big move here.

On our way out Kelli and I hopped downstairs to to restrooms and there was a sign on the door that said the womens was out of order, and we had to use the mens. We weren't the only women in there which made it slightly less weird, but it was a little (ok a lot) strange to be not only be in line while men were washing their hands, but also strange to walk out of the stall and have man using the urinal right in front of us. That was a first. I'm glad I had someone there with me to share that story with.

Mads and Kelli

Kelli and Me
It was cold, can you tell?

"We are like Brothers" with matching hair.

Kelli and Mads, it was so great to get to put voices and motion to the pictures and writings.
Tak for en rigtig god eftermiddag! :)

After parting ways with our new friends we walked around Copenhagen for a while looking at many of the shops that were decorated for and selling nothing but Christmas stuff. We also decided we would hop into Tivoli and see what was going on there.

On our way to Tivoli I stopped to get a picture with most famous Dane, Mr. Hans Christian Anderson. He wrote, "The Little Mermaid", "The Ugly Duckling", "Princess and the Pea", "The Emperors New Clothes", "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", and "Thumblina" just to name a few. There is a huge statue of him in Rådhuspladsen just across from Tivoli. And so, I was able to cross number 126 off my list of things to do in Copenhagen before we leave. Take my Picture with the big statue.

Tivoli was CRAZY. The line to get into the park was the longest I have ever seen times 20! Since we have year cards, we got to skip the line and jump inside the park. We only stayed about 15 minutes. It was long enough to walk around a little bit and escape the insanity that was Tivoli.

I found time for one picture

We got home about 5 (after a brief stop at the grocery store because all Thanksgiving leftovers only lasted 1 day) , put on our PJs, made some tea and were lazy the rest of the evening. :)

Our Danish Thanksgiving - Take 1 & Take 2

Our first Danish Thanksgiving was back in 2002. We had only been in Denmark for 5 months and I remember how award it was to be celebrating a very American holiday far far away from the states. We obviously missed having our family with us, but the thing that made it most awkward and almost isolating was the fact that no one else was celebrating with us. Not WITH us, but "with" us. The day before, the stores weren't overly crowded with people getting their last minute supplies, Thanksgiving day the stores were still open and people were still going to work, there were no advertisements for the "Black Friday" sales, and we weren't the least bit scared of going out into public on Black Friday. It made us feel quite alone. Turkey's were expensive and near impossible to find. We had no stuffing, no cranberry sauce, no pumpkin or pecan pie and no cornbread. I had no mixer, and we didn't have an oven, or a stove. We had a hotplate and we had purchased a "toaster oven" size oven. Michael and I are very good at making every situation that we are in, the absolute best we can. We weren't always like that and I think living abroad the first time, quickly taught us that we had no other choice. Personally I think us learning that life lesson at the young age of 22 was quite an impressive feat.

That Thanksgiving Michael took the day off from school (that sounds better then, Michael skipped class). We found a small whole chicken that would fit in our little tiny oven and I mashed my potatoes in a bowl with a big spoon to make mashed potatoes. We actually had a very fun evening, laughing at our pathetic attempt at our first Thanksgiving out of the country.

Happy Thanksgiving 2002

Our Food.
The bowl of red stuff isn't cranberry sauce, It is cherries in a cherry sauce.

Our very un-American, Danish dessert of "Æbleskiver"
Or as most of my friends back home prefer to call them, Pancake Balls.

Take 2.

This year, was much the same, but much different. The sense of being away at Thanksgiving time is without a doubt in my mind, still the hardest time to be outside of the United States, even more so than Christmas. Michael and his group are on a pretty intense deadline right now, so rather then taking the day off he worked from home. He couldn't make himself go to work on Thanksgiving. Can you blame him?

Rather than celebrate alone, we had 4 friends over for Thanksgiving Dinner (a real Thanksgiving dinner, not that pathetic meal we ate 5 years ago).

We started the evening with some mulled wine.
Klaus, Maja and Flemming

Sarah

Sarah brought us some beautiful Mistletoe.

I had planned on ordering a Turkey from the butcher because I have never ever seen a full turkey in the store. Then one magical day about 2 weeks ago, sitting in the edge of the freezer bins at one of my stores were about 20 frozen turkeys!! SWEET! I went back the next day when I had enough hands to carry one home and got one.

For the first time, I had to make the dressing from scratch. I was weary about this because I have eaten Praters dressing for years and Michael since...forever. If you have lived in Lubbock and have had Praters dressing, you will know, there is nothing on this earth that compares. Needless to say, we both held very low expectations on this recipe I found. We were both VERY surprised that it turned out delicious and actually gave Praters dressing a run for its money.

This was my first year to give cranberry sauce a try from scratch. Michael doesn't like cranberry sauce. Doesn't like it homemade, doesn't like it from a can. He will not eat it...end of story. I found some cranberry's and a cool recipe online which I tweaked it a bit. I made it a day ahead of time and when Michael came home I gave him a little taste and he loved it. He then asked "what is that?" HAHA. When I said cranberry sauce he was shocked. He went back for seconds during our Thanksgiving dinner. I guess thats a recipe that will stay with us for quite a while.

We also had green beans, corn bread, mashed potatoes (which were made by my best friend, my kitchen aid mixer), and Pumpkin Soup (which was the only thing I didn't make, I simply heated it up)

Thanksgiving Dinner

Thanksgiving Dinner

Michael cutting the turkey

One of the tv stations here was airing the football games of the day live. So after dinner we retreated to watch some good 'ol fashioned Thanksgiving Football.
This is the Packers/Lions Game

Micahel AND Klaus, teaching the Danes the rules of Football.

I couldn't make pumpkin pie because you can't get Pumkin Puree here. I did find some at an American store in Copenhagen, but it was 50Dkk (10 Dollars) a can!!! I thought we would be fine without the Pumpkin Pie. I was going to make a pecan pie, but I couldn't find any corn syrup or pre-shelled pecans. I figured even if I ran across some corn syrup, I would still have to track down pecans, and I wasn't about to shell all the pecans by hand. So, the day before Thanksgiving I was looking through all my cooking light magazines and found a recipe for a good looking "Ginger Cake" It didn't call for any "hard to find"ingrediant it DID require 1/3 cup of Guinness ...so it won. The cream on top is homemade (no cool whip here). It is whipped cream, sugar and whiskey. Michael made me save the left over cream in case he found something today we could eat it on.

My Ginger Cake

Sarah and Me

Maja and Me

Flemming, Michael and Klaus
(These are the other two designers that Michael works with)

We finished watching the game and our guests left, the Cowboys game came on and we watched some of it as we cleaned up all our dirty dishes. We had a fantastic Thanksgiving full of laughs and good friends.

I hope everyone had a wonderful thanksgiving and took out even just a moment of time to think about all the things you are thankful for this year. For me, I'm thankful for our awesome families, our old friends and our new friends, our good health and for this wonderful experience of living abroad again. And yes, I'm even thankful that I have hands and arms to wash our laundry with :)

This morning, I hung the mistletoe in our doorway
So if you want a kiss from me... now is the time to come over and stand under it! ;)

Mariebjerg Kirkegård

Sunday as we were on our way home from the gym we couldn't help but notice that the weather was, oh so pleasent. It was quite cold but absolutely lovely. The air felt fresh and there was a beautiful thin layer of fog and the clouds were hanging low in the sky. We decided it was the perfect day to go for a walk.

Oddly we decided to walk to "Mariebjerg Kirkegård". It is a big and beautiful cemetery in Gentofte about a 20 minute walk from our place. (Gentofte is one of the two towns we lived in our 1st time around) Now I must say we don't often walk to and around cemetery's for fun, but from time to time, we love to search them out while we are outside of the US. This one in particular was very peaceful and quiet.

The Entrance
The trees were SOOO tall. I should have gotten a picture with one of us standing next to them. The pictures doesn't do the height justice.

One area of the cemetery had these cool unmarked plots. There was a map showing who was buried where. Each octagon had I believe 12 people each buried in them! The plot with all of the flowers on it only had 2 people.

A pretty pathway in the cemetery

We walked around a bit looking at all the marked plots and found some as old as 1889 and some as recent as last month. The four that stuck at the most for us were a husband and wife who both lived well into their 90's. They were buried with who we guessed was their son who died when he was only in his 30s. There were 2 plots we saw for babies. One was 3 months old, the other was 1 month old. The gravestones on both were so simple and beautiful. As we were making our way out, our eyes caught a flickering. There were 5 freshly lit candles inside little lanterns next to a glass box of stuffed animals and a Christmas wreath. The child buried there was only 10 years old. The area the family had decorated was precious.

We then stumbled into an area with big crypts in a almost jungle looking area! (I know, there are no jungles in Denmark) I took pictures of the crypts but it was so dark because of all the tall trees surrounding them, they didn't come out well.

Bad Crypt Picture

We left and enjoyed on our walk back home with our fresh reminder of how precious life is and how the small things we were worried about at the time (What can we do to rent a car for 10 days so Michael can stay in the highest level of membership in Avis), don't matter that much after all. :)

Rewind to November 1st

November 1st for the past couple years has been a bit sad for us in the Pate household.

It was 1999 and we were both 19 and Michael and I had been dating only about 8 months. I missed my dog KC in El Paso from the time I moved away to college and wanted nothing more then a sweet fuzzy thing to snuggle with. So being the sweet guy that he is, when I got back from my Easter trip home to El Paso, Michael gave me a card at the airport with a dog on the front cover along with a cd. The card said, I'm sorry the dog isn't exactly what you wanted. Oh, thats ok Micahel, a picture of a dog will do for now..

I dropped my stuff off at my dorm and when we got back to his place, he opened the door (and I still don't know how this worked out so perfectly) but sitting at the front door to greet us was the cutest, blackest, fluffiest dog I had ever seen! He was a boy dog, I had always said I just wanted female dogs, and thats what Michael meant on the card, "Sorry the dog isn't exactly what you wanted" Awe.

It didn't take us long to name him. We narrowed it down to Stevie (after Stevie Ray Vaughn), and Hendrix (after Jimi Hendrix). It was obvious that he HAD to be "Hendrix", because he was sporting the super cool afro!

He was our first dog that didn't belong to our parents.
He was our first dog that we had together.
He was the first dog we had that made it to be a full grown dog (6 years old)

We had to put down our sweet puppy in 2005, soon after we moved to Allen and I started this blog! If you want the whole story... its all here: (but I'll warn you, it's 5 quite long posts)

http://mnp8.blogspot.com/2005/10/halloween-horrors.html
http://mnp8.blogspot.com/2005/10/pet-hospital-update.html
http://mnp8.blogspot.com/2005/10/monday-puppy-update.html
http://mnp8.blogspot.com/2005/11/bad-gone-horribly-horribly-worse.html
http://mnp8.blogspot.com/2005/11/gotta-get-outta-here.html

I honestly think that loosing Hendrix the way we did and at the time we did was the #1 reason why adjusting to life in the DFW area took such a long time. It took us over a year to get to the point where we could even imagine having another puppy. And now, we have Puppy Fever SOOoooo bad that there are many times I'm afraid one of us is just going to snatch one off of a leash while he is being walked by his owner! Unfortunately,(or fortunately for all the people walking their doggies) our lease is a "no pet" lease. Though personally I think, depending on the dog of course, that dogs are so much less destructive then kids! Why don't people have "no kid" policies? ;o)

Our sweet Hendrix

He thought he was a cat

He loved his uncle Joe

He loved laying on carpet

He loved baths

He loved showing off his "people eyes"

He loved BBQ's

He loved being able to look outside, without being outside

He LOVED his Uncle Joe....did I mention that?

He loved fall weather

He loved Popsicles...and his uncle Joe

He loved to sleep

He loved his mommy

He loved his daddy

And whether or not he knew it, he loved posing for holiday pictures!

Sorry I think I went overboard on the Hendrix pictures, but I couldn't just pick one or two. :)

So, why am I telling you guys all this? Well, the story gets happier. This November 1st, my very very very dear friend of about 13-14 years, Jesse and his sweet wife Mika had a precious little boy. I was so thrilled when I found out he was born on November 1st because I can finally attach something extremely happy to this date. So to Jesse and Mika, Congratulations again. We and I know our friends/family that know you are just so very happy for you both

Welcome to the world little Joshua! We can't wait to meet you.

Baby Joshua

The Happy Family

I absolutely love this picture.
What a wonderful little moment caught on camera.

The Proud Papa