Meeting Old Friends

Five years ago while planning our wedding I stumbled across a website that made planning our wedding 1,000 times less stressful. It was a forum style website that was very active and I met lots of friends on there that were all planning their weddings at the same time as I was. One girl I met, AnnMarie, is responsible for this blog. She started a blog a couple years before I did and it was easy to keep up with her. She told me a few times I needed to start one, and finally one day I did. I think everyone that has ever read this blog has asked me, "Who's AnnMarie?". Especially when for a year or so she was one of the only ones that ever left me comments. :) She lives in Florida, and unfortunately, we have never been out there so I've never met her. But fingers crossed, one day we will!

Another girl I met on UW is, Marianne (Pronounced: Mar-yanna) is Danish. Her and her family were living in New York for the past few months and just got back in December. This past weekend we finally got to meet in person. Marianne, Nis and Viggo live in on the island of Fyn in the town of Odense. It is the 3rd largest town in Denmark but only has a population of around 150,000. Odense is on the island just west of the island Copenhagen is on and it only took 1.5 hour by train to get there.

Our train departed Copenhagen Central Station at 7:00AM. We left Lyngby on the 6:00 train. and we were up about 5:00AM. When we arrived we stopped for some breakfast and found our way to Nis and Mariannes house. Before arriving they offered to let us stay the night with them, but warned us we would be sleeping in the basement with the spiders their storage and the laundry. We were SHOCKED when we saw such a nice little guest room space set up.

Nis and Marianne's adorable house

The Guest Room

We warmed up (which would become a common theme for the weekend) and all went to a little market set up with flowers and fruits and vegetables.

Market

Odense is the hometown of the famous Dane, Hans Christian Andersen, or as he is known in Denmark, "H.C. Andersen". He is best known for "The Little Mermaid", "The Ugly Duckling", "Thumbelina", "The Emperors New Clothes" and many many more. All around town there were statues and plaques of and about H.C. Andersen, and his fairy tales. I thought it was quite funny to see so much about one person in one town. Nis mentioned that there are only a couple statues in town that have nothing to do with him and I assure you there were a whole lot of statues.

The yellow house on the right is where H.C. Andersen was born.
It is now a museum of his life and works.

Steadfast Tin Soldier

This is the stream that H.C. A's mom did laundry in as her job.

The Emperors New Clothes

The Boat from "The Steadfast Tin Soldier"

Marianne and me with a H.C.A statue behind us

Even the street lights for the cross walk were H.C.A.
See his little top hat and cane?

After walking around a bit it was time to go get little Viggo. He had stayed the night with Nis's mom. We picked him up and headed back home to warm up. He was just as adorable looking in person as he is in pictures. After warming up we ate brunch at a really yummy restaurant, walked around the shopping streets, and went home again to warm up...again. Michael and I left after it got dark to see the city all lit up with Christmas lights, then came back we watched Marianne clean the oven (very well too might I add) and Nis fixed us a wonderful dinner. We stayed up talking for quite a while and then we both passed out and had a spider free, wonderful nights sleep.