Finally, Some Things Worth Mentioning!!

Yesterday everything was so boring and today is suddenly exciting!

As it turns out, we will be going somewhere new and cool before we head to Dallas, in 9 days AKA a week from Saturday.

These are the streets we will be wondering

In This City

Any guesses to where it is?

It seems like it is going to be a really cheap trip. The plane, and hotel were REALLY cheap and doesn't seem like anything in the whole country costs just a whole lot. We booked it all last night. I'll be really surprised if anyone notices the city by the pictures. So, where are we going????

*drum roll please*

Tallinn, Estonia!!!
check it out here: http://www.tallinn.info/flash/

I know a few of you are probably saying ... Estonia?? really??why?
Yes! Really! And because we want to and because we can! :)
I love that we can say, Hey, you wanna go to *insert cool European country here* next weekend? Sure! Ok, Lets go! and then a week later, go. Life is good. It makes us feel fancy.

Michael gets a lot of time off for Easter. He will take 2 days off and in total will get 10 days off from work. He gets Wed, Thurs, and Fri. off because they are holidays. We will only be in Estonia for 4 days then back here, but he will enjoy the long break.

Second, Mary and Jason are coming to visit us!! They will be here about exactly one week after we return from Dallas. Our first guests!!! We are SOOOOOO excited!! Jason has never been to Europe before and we are excited to get to be with him when he experiences his first tastes of the continent. Mary has been over here a couple times but has never ventured as far north as Denmark. I'm anxious to see their thoughts and reactions to the country we have come to love so much over the past almost 5 years!! Michael is going to take the week off from work that they are here. We always always always have a fun time with them, and we had such a BLAST in Costa Rica and are still talking about that trip. We are anxious for them to get here!

We have a pretty good feeling that April and May are going to fly by, at least they should be a blast and we are really looking forward to it all.

More Snow!!!

We got some more snow today! Nothing big, nothing stuck, but it was still falling from the sky. The days are quickly getting longer and longer. The sun is rising at about 6am, and setting it seems about 6:30ish. It is kinda funny to see it bright outside at 6:00. Actually we don't see it until about 6:30 when Michael starts hitting the snooze button for the next 45 minutes! We haven't set our clocks back yet. That will happen this weekend for us. At which time, it is going to stay bright even longer! I can hardly wait!! Now if we could just get some spring weather. I'm not expecting it though till mid-late April. You know, about the time we leave for Dallas.

Michael has 3 of his bosses in town right now. One of them had never been to Denmark before and within the being here not long at all, he was already in love with the country and kept telling Michael, "I can see why you wanted to move here" He had only seen the airport, the highway , the walk from the hotel to TI (which is the same walk Michael does every morning) and TI. Its nice to know we aren't crazy and other people find it as charming as we do as quickly as we do. It was almost a nice reassurance for us as that it really is as nice here, as we say it is :)

We STILL have absolutely nothing going on. Saturday Jens and Sarah are having us over for dinner. Jens is the latest student to return to Denmark from Lubbock/Dallas that participated in the TTU/DTU program, and Sarah is his girlfriend. We hung out with them in Dallas a couple times, and they have been over here. It should be fun, and we are looking forward to that, but other then that... we have NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING of interest going on here. I need to find something fun to write about... Keep watching. Ill find something. :)

Finally ... A TRIP!!

So wanna know where we are going???? Get ready....

DALLAS TEXAS U.S.A. !!! hahaha

Not really what we had in mind, but it'll do for now. You might remember waaaaay back when almost a year ago actually, we bought tickets to see "Wicked" for this coming May. Well we have been wanting to see it for a couple years and have been anticipating seeing it for the past year, so we just HAVE to go. So our $175 dollar Wicked Tickets just turned into $675 dollar Wicked tickets. This all actually works out really really well for us. There is an "inner circle meeting" at TI the week before that Michael was asked to be at. So, because of that, his ticket/hotel room/ and rental car will all be paid for. It turns out his chip will be back from production around that time as well so he will be in Dallas to run some tests as well. For me the weekend before Wicked is "World Tai Chi and Qigong Day", So I will get to participate in that with Chris and Fayne. We can see Marys brand new Starbucks Store and I will probably hop over to El Paso for about 4 days. We will be in Dallas 2 whole weeks. Long time! I couldn't get over the fact that my rountrip ticket from Copenhagen to Dallas was only $500 AFTER taxes!!! That is INSANELY cheap. We already have my ticket. Michael has to book his through TI. We will be on different flights, but will get in and leave the same days. No, biggie for us though. But it will be funny to go to the airport together and leave separately and then meet back up across the world!

As for a real trip here in good ol Europe. We have a couple planned all out but because we will be heading to Dallas in a little over a month, escaping elsewhere before then seems a little tight. Maybe something will fall in our laps to work out perfectly. We shall see.

Quack Quack

The other morning we heard a noise at about 6:30am. We thought it was someone already working away with a hammer. No big deal and we ignored it. Then it got really loud and we could tell it was closer. I peeked through the blinds and was surprised to see a duck sitting on our railing. Since we have been waking up to ducks honking away on our balcony and other peoples balconies in the mornings. Usually there are just somewhere between 1 and 5 of them around the area at that time so it's not too bad. When I think of birds that perch, I don't typically think of ducks. I think its funny to look outside and see ducks out there. Something I am not use to that is for sure, or perhaps I am just easily amused!! Sometime I will have to write about the fascination and obsession the Danes have for Donald Duck. It cracks us both up.

I am not sure why all of a sudden we have nothing of interest going on around here. We had a nice relaxing weekend. Well I did :) Saturday morning we headed to Copenhagen for the day had some coffee, had some lunch and just wondered around. Then the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday and most of last night, Michael and his group have been busy busy busy. So he has been at his laptop almost every moment he is home. His group just turned in a chip last night so finally that is all done with. But he still has 2 weeks of hard work ahead of him, just not as bad as this past weekend.

Our new Danish classes are going well and hopefully will continue to do so. I can already tell these classes are going to be more challenging and that the pace is much quicker.Michael and I can carry on a VERY basic conversation with each other, but we know enough that we can stay in conversation for a longer then we thought we would be able to by now and include silly questions and answers, but its a good start.

Us at Nyhavn

We Live Where?

The 3rd most expensive city...IN THE WORLD!!

Thats right, thats where we live. We don't REALLY live inside Copenhagen, but the town we live is one of the more expensive areas to live in and we still basically live in greater Copenhagen.
I always know that Copenhagen comes out pretty high on the list every year, last year it was 6th, but this year jumped up to 3rd right behind Oslo and Paris. While it doesn't surprise me, because I know it is expensive, I was surprised to see in coming in front of London, which came in 4th. With this information, I know Michael and I can live anywhere in the world (besides Oslo and Paris) and the cost of living won't feel as inflated as it would prior to us living here. New York didn't even show up till number 28!!!

My summery so far, Copenhagen is dark, cold, expensive and they take all your money from you in taxes, yet somehow, we still love it and are happy here. Along with the majority of the country... as Denmark this past year was ranked as the worlds happiest country!!

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/10/happiest_countries/index_01.htm?chan=rss_topSlideShows_ssi_5


Michael has been back a whole week now. He is recovered and doing well. I got my haircut this morning, and while it was by far the most expensive haircut I have ever had (again things are $$$ here)...I must say, it is by far the BEST haircut I have ever gotten!! They even gave me a cup of coffee to drink while it was being cut! So that alone was worth the extra money ;) Actually I think most places you get your haircut at here, they give you coffee/tea/cappuccino or whatever. I think thats cool. Other then all that, nothing terribly exciting going on. Just livin' life and enjoy it... :)

Dirty Dancing

Oh my gosh! Have you seen this yet? This is soooo cute!! Why didn't Michael and I think to do this?? Oh ya, because there is no way I would have ever gotten him to agree to do this!!

This Little Mexican is a Tortilla Making Machine!

Remember for Michaels birthday I was wanting to make some homemade tortillas but couldn't find shortening so bought a replacement ingredient? Well I finally gave it a shot and made them, and wow, they turned out pretty good, can hardly even tell its not shortening in them! I couldn't stop eating them so had to wrap them up in cling wrap and shove them in the freezer. So now, NO MORE STORE BOUGHT tortillas for us from here! Thats a reason to celebrate! (Store bought tortillas from here are especially not good and especially not authentic oh, and are expensive too!)

Things here are good. we had a little more snow this morning but nothing like last week. That stuff is all mostly melting due to rain, but there is still a lot of it on the ground. Yesterday I resigned myself from Danish Classes as well. I was starting to feel really guilty about still attending two more classes knowing I was going to quit. I felt like I was leading Marie, Our teacher, on.. :) We start brand new classes next Tuesday and we are both REALLY excited about them. The school is called, "Babel" and is conveniently located in the same building as TI!! How crazy! We will have our lessons in a private room in the lobby of the building. We get to decide when the classes are, and the day can change weekly as we want. Apparently its not only the language that they will be teaching us but also an integration into the culture (which we are pretty familiar with, but will be nice to learn a little more!) Also after taking a test the decided we don't need the full 90 lesson course but that we know enough to enter on the 60 lesson course! We will start with afternoon classes. It will work out perfectly as I will simply meet Michael up at work , we will have our lesson, hit the gym and come home :) Another great thing about this class, is that they will move on when they feel we are ready to and we don't have to worry about keeping up with other people in the class or getting bored by being stuck and not being able to move on. In the class we were in, everyone had different goals and reasons for being in the class and I think it was difficult for the teacher to incorporate all those goals into a single lesson. Thankfully Michael and I have the same goal making the classes more suited for our needs. And the BEST reason these are going to be so much better is they are providing coffee and tea for us! Its the little things that I appreciate the most... Mary can vouch for me on that one. Wow, I didn't mean to talk so much about the Danish classes! But I suppose saves me the trouble of doing so later!

Michael is still doing good. His side trip to Osaka was canceled (which is a good thing) because a design review was postponed at another company for tomorrow which he HAS to be at! Then he can FINALLY come home. During the days I feel like he is just at work. It's so nice to go to the gym during the days, but I can see why its hard for so many people to keep going to the gym without a workout partner... It is definitely NOT as much fun to go everyday alone. And at nights, It gets a little sad to only be cooking dinner for 1, or having to recork the wine at the end of the night because I have no one to help me finish it. *sigh*

Michael Update

Michael made it to Tokyo!! VERY long story short, flights were canceled, others delayed but in the end, he got there. He is still in one piece but was pretty exhausted. I think he is ready to come home! His time in Dallas went well. He stayed incredibly busy but had some time on Saturday to do some shopping for us. He stocked us up on TONS of stuff (some stuff we can get here, but it's SOOOO much cheaper to by in the states) We sent him with an extra large suitcase so he could get it all back. Tuesday - Thursday for Michael are going to be absolutely insane. He has a HUGE meeting everyday. On Thursday he has to be up EARLY EARLY, hop on a train to Osaka with his 4 bosses go to a big 'ol meeting in Osaka, hop back on the train and head back to Tokyo.

As for me, I'm still good :) I had planned on doing some stuff on Saturday, but the weather was still a mess so I just bunkered down in our place all weekend and was a bum. And I won't lie, I liked it. It gave me a chance to finally get all caught up on "Desperate Housewives" Thanks to I-Tunes!

The snow turned to rain and slowly it's starting to melt away. I'm hoping that the weather on Friday is good so Michael can get back here a-ok :)

Yup, thats it from here ...

I'm FREE!!!!

After the gym I dug out Michael's old ski pants, put them on, cracked the door open far enough for my little body to squeeze out of grabbed the shovel and dug and dug till the door could open up all the way.. then.. I MADE A FRIEND!! :) I've named him "Michael 2.0" ... I kid I kid. He has no name... and no mouth because the chocolate chips didn't want to stick well like his eyes did.
It started snowing again and already his nose is building up snow and his eyes are slowly disappearing. :( He will be blind by morning.

Holy Moly!!

Forget the little sideshow I posted here last night, check out what I woke up to!!!

This is as far open as the door would go!! I'm stuck!! But if I can get that door open, I'm totally making a snow man on our balcony.

To get an idea how tall our wall usually isI really wanna get one of our two doors open to get out there and measure that pile of snow on that table.

Man digging out his car

There is still snow falling from the sky. It's not heavy snow right now, but its tiny flakes that are falling fast. I am not sure I have ever seen this much snow at once. The most snow I had ever seen was the winter we lived here the fist time, but I don't recall it falling this much at once. Wish my brother was here to play in the snow with me! I'd take Michael too, but he takes some convincing to do so. I also wish Michael were here to see it all! Pictures just don't do justice!