Leeeaaving on a Jet Plane....don't know when we'll be back again

We have our tickets! We skip this joint on November 29th at 6:00PM.
We have a layover in Chicago and then straight onto Copenhagen. We arrive in Copenhagen at about 1:30PM on November 30th.

I'm not positive that it has hit either of us that we are going, and staying... We realize we are going back soon and the fact that we will be in a hotel for a while, won't make it easy to realize that we aren't coming back. That being said, with each passing day we find ourselves more and more excited. Christmas time was our FAVORITE time of the year there even despite the cold and dark days. It was so festive, charming, and warm feeling. Klaus invited us to his home in Jutland (Mainland Denmark....Copenhagen is on an island) to spend Christmas with his family. We are looking forward to a traditional Danish Christmas. Their big day is Christmas Eve. I think it will be a lot of fun and Klaus seems excited to be bringing us home. We have meet his mother and sister and really enjoyed them both, but we are anxious to finally meet his dad.

My best friend from high school and her boyfriend are in town right now (Melissa and Frank).
They got in last night and it was nice to sit around and catch up with her and meet him. (Amanda, he seems like a really great and nice guy so far! But the weekend is young ;) )
We are going with them to the big ol NASCAR race tomorrow along with Melissa's parents which we are also increadibly excited to see. Growing up their family was like my second family so I always enjoy being with them. We are interested to see what NASCAR is all about. Should be an expirence.....

Lyngby Flats!!!

So Lyngby it is. Both of the flats we were shown were amazing and spacious (for Danish standards). The rent on them were about the same and the size was just 1 square meter difference. They were located about a 2 minute walk apart...if that. Both had their pros and cons, # 1 had a HUGE balcony and a sunroom, was located on the top floor,only had one bedroom but a huge living/dining area #2 had just gotten both the bathroom and kitchen redone and were both BEAUTIFUL (by far the nicest bathroom and kitchen we saw), but no balcony or washer and located on the first floor. The very first flat we went to had a hippo sitting on a table. I laughed, showed Michael and said, if that's not a big giant sign, I don't know what is....and it was, because in the end we picked flat #1.

Sooo.. before I show you the one we picked, I'm going to show you the runner up! We would have been completely happy at this flat, it would have been perfect for us also...

The Building

Beautiful Beautiful Beautiful KitchenVery Nice Bathroom

Bedroom 1

Bedroom 2

Living Room with lovely big windows

So, Assuming everything works out with our contract for this place, this is where we will be living. Only one catch, we can't move in till January 1st. Which actually works out perfectly for a couple reasons. One being that we won't get our furniture for about a month so we would be living in a hotel anyways, and second, it will save us one months rent. Texas Instruments will put us up for one month after we move and in that one month, also pay for all our food weather it be eating somewhere or our groceries. Can't beat that!

OUR FUTURE HOME!!!

Our Building

Entry way
BathroomBathroom

Bedroom (with door to balcony)

Kitchen (LOVE the tilted window)

Kitchen

Dining Room/Living Room Area

Dining Room/Living Room Area

Dining Room/Living Room Area

Balcony (it stetches to the wall behind Michael and is VERY big)The sunroom which will be lovely in the winter!!

Sunroom

Sunroom windows

The Building again

Flemming is working on our contract as I type, if all goes well with that and he feels that everything looks good in it then that will be our new home starting January 1st. (he is basically there to protect us and said he would never advise us to sign something that he wasn't 100% confident about) After we looked at all the places and Flemming dropped us back off at the hotel, we went upstairs and while we knew we would pick one of those two flats, it took us about 10 minutes to realize that flat #1 was way too good to pass up. Him and the other guy showing that particular flat said that it was a very special place and Flemming said in his few years of doing this, he had never seen anything like it before on the market. So in the end, the hippo spoke. I knew it was a sign!! :)

PS thanks for being patient while I got these up.

Hendrix

Today is the one year anniversary of when we had to put Hendrix down. Neither of us can believe that he has been physically out of out lives for an entire year already. It honestly finally feels like just yesterday. Some of the year went by so increadibly slow and then some of it went fast, but when said and done, it is amazing how quick a year goes. It is kinda sad that we can't even remember or imagine having him in Dallas with us. I suppose since he was only here 2 months of the almost 15 we have been here, it WOULD be hard to imagine him here. Even after a year though, we both still often miss him. .

Onto something else. No worries, Lyngby Apartments coming up tomorrow. I have had some problems with blogger and getting pictures up and today I was running around the Metroplex with Fayne helping her teach her Tai Chi classes... (which was a ton of fun!!) So tomorrow morning I should have the rest of that stuff online.. so sorry for the delay. We've been busy!

Hunting for Houses

First thing to know about looking for a place to live is that it is much more difficult to do in Denmark then it is in the States. The housing in Denmark is sparse and it can be very difficult to find housing that suites both your needs and budget. The apartments are not owned in a complex as they are in the states, but individuals usually own the individual apartment or flat and the individuals rent them out. Currently there are a decent amount of places on the market (but compared to American standards, still very very little availability) but they go very quickly. We were working with a relocation agent from "House of Relocation" His name is Flemming and was so incredibly helpful and friendly. Prior to arriving we gave him some ideas of what we were looking for and he came up with a list of 6 places to show us. Michael will be working in a town called, Lyngby and all the places we looked at were very easy to get to from Lyngby. I mentioned it before, but I'll mention it again. It is the town that the University is located that Michael got his masters degree from. We spent a decent amount of time in Lyngby last time we lived there and even got our wedding rings from this town. :) The entire 15 months we lived there before we kept saying how cool it would be to live in Lyngby and knew deep down that if Flemming was able to find something in Lyngby, we would probably take it. I am going to post pictures of all the flats, not so much so you can tell us that we were dumb for passing up the places that we did, but more that we thought it might be interesting for you to see very typical Danish apartments.

Flemming showed up to our hotel and gave us a list of places and we were thrilled to see that he found not 1 but 2 places in Lyngby. (When Klaus was house hunting with the same guy, he wasn't able to find anything in Lyngby for Klaus only 2 months ago) So our day started in Lyngby where he showed us both places, that we both loved equally for different reasons, and they were only about a block or two away from each other. The other 4 were scattered throughout Copenhagen.

#1
"Mary and Jasons" Hellerup Apartment Building

One was in Hellerup right by the sea in what looked like an old boarding school building apartment had a TON of character (When we left this place both of us immidiately said that if Mary and Jason were looking for somewhere to live, they would have picked this place in a heartbeat. It would have ranked really high on our list as well (it is VERY close to Lyngby) but it didn't have an oven, or a space to put an oven...which actually presented a HUGE problem. Also it didn't have a balcony and the bathroom, which we could have done again, was the same as our first flat in Copenhagen. The bathroom is the shower....Basically just a shower head on the wall and a drain on the floor. We did it before and could do it again, but we were trying to avoid that if at all possible.

View From Dining Room

Living room looking into bedroom, hallway and dining room

Detailed ceiling

Bedroom

Osterbro

Two of them were in the Osterbro Area of Copenhagen which is a VERY popular and desired place to live. There are lakes and parks, and cafes scattered everywhere around. (Remember when we were on the Danish National News when the war started and we were walking around a lake? That segment was done in the Osterbro Area) Both of these flats were furnished. (the rest we looked at were unfurnished) This area is very convenient to both Lyngby and Central Copenhagen

#2
Osterbro A
Furnished Flat

This apartment would have suited us nicely. It was furnished with decent furniture. There was a great little hidden downstairs area that could be used for a office or an extra bedroom. The bathroom again was one that there wasn't a separate shower. There was no washing machine in this one, which we could do without because we did last time, but if we could avoid it, that would have been great. (There was a laundry room in the building though) The major pro of this one is that we wouldn't have to transport our furniture. But after we saw it, and thought of a place without our stuff, we realized, we really did want to take all our furniture after all!

The Apartment Building
The flat we looked at was on the first floor where the white curtains are

A little downstairs office areaKitchen

Bathroom, again the bathroom is the shower, see the shower curtains hanging?

Dining Room (remember we would have gotten all the furniture in here as well)
Sunken living room

#3
Osterbro B
(Furnished Flat)


This Flat was by far the cheapest and once we got there we found out why. Apparently they are going to start construction on both the basement of the building and the top floor of the building so it would be loud and not so pretty for a while. That was a big turn off from this place. The kitchen was newly renovated and across the street from a big park. This one didn't come with much furniture, but some. This one was also about 30 square meters smaller then the rest we looked at. This Apartment had 2 balconies, one on the front and one on the back but both were pretty teeny tiny.

This was the entry way

Living Room

Living Room

New Kitchen

Kitchen

#4
Amager

The last one was on the island of Amager which is walking distance to the heart of downtown Copenhagen and you could see the spires of the Copenhagen skyline from the kitchen windows. This would have been a cool place to live if we actually did stuff on a nightly basis or enjoyed big city living. This would have been the equivalent of living actually IN Dallas and not in the suburbs. The kitchen and bathroom's were newly renovated and very nice. We liked the inside of the flat, but really didn't care for this general area. The outside of the building seemed pretty run down and there was a lot of construction everywhere around. Getting to the main train station, while not too far, it was further then we had desired. Also this would have been about a 30-45 minute commute for Michael each way when you calculate walking to the station, getting on the train, going up to Lyngby and then walking to work from there. While his commute now is about 45 minute- 1 hour depending on the day, we are trying to cut that way back

The view from the big room (view reminded me of Mary Poppins)Brand New Kitchen

Hallway

Thankfully it was mostly an easy decision for us. While we really liked all the places we were shown, but we, without a doubt, HAD to pick one of the two places in Lyngby for several reason. Michael could walk to work from both of them. Because our priorities are strange, we already knew and loved that there was a gym about the same walking distance from both of the flats as we have now in our apartment in Plano. The movie theatre we use to go to was directly behind them both as was the Lyngby Storecenter (which is similar to a mall). So pretty much, from these two locations we have access to EVERYTHING we could possibly need, and we are already so incredibly familiar with the area. We already know where the local cheese shop, wine store, grocery stores, cafes, department store, movie theatre, hotel, train station, park, giant lake... ect. are all located and won't have to waste our time getting to know where we will be living. This is also the only area we were shown where the main street (Lyngby Hovengade) is still made of that charming cobblestone. So, hands down, it had to be one of the two Lyngby apartments. The big question was... Which one?

Have you noticed you haven't seen pictures of either of the Lyngby Apartments yet???

Pics

We didn't take a ton of pictures. Mostly because we had seen this stuff so many times, that it never crossed our minds and 2 we are going to be back so soon. But here are a few for fun.

This is where we ate one night (Cap Horn) The food was excellent and the atmosphere was great. This time of year the outdoor cafes almost always have blankets in the chairs for customers to use because it can be a little chilly. Needless to say, we ate outside and I had a blanket wrapped around me the whole time. It was great

The tall building that says "SAS" is the hotel we stayed in, Our room was on the 15th floor which is pretty close to the top. Our room faced the other side. On the ground is the Vesterport Train station and that colorful building is a movie theatre.

Town Hall Square facing towards our hotel. It is the big buildng in the back.

And because we always get "in trouble" with everyone when we don't take picture of ourselves, here you go!!

Michael in Hotel Lobby
Blurry Nichole in Hotel Lobby


Us together in the hotel room

Back Home

I completely ran out of time to keep posting on here while we were gone.

We got up pretty early yesterday morning 4:00am, to get to the airport and catch our 8:00 flight to Zurich. We flew on one of Scandinavian Airlines brand new planes which was dedicated a couple months ago to the newborn prince (and future king) of Denmark.
I was excited when I saw the plane sitting at our terminal because I had read about it. We got on and it was the nicest interior of a plane I have seen in a long time, You could tell it was brand new and very spacey. We didn't realize it till we were up in the air and they were giving us food that we were actually upgraded to business class when we checked in. YEA!! That made us love the "Christian Valdemar Viking" Plane even more! We had a really tight connection in Zurich and the plane started boarding as we were doing our security questions (They have a whole area were you have to go answer about 10-15 questions about your luggage and all sorts of other stuff before you can get on the plane) after we got checked in. I had forgotten that flying back into the united states through a transfer point is such a pain. It seriously feels like you are entering the confinement area of a prison. The security gets so much tighter and the procedures are so much greater, even more so then flighing domestically within the United States. I saw one lady as for a guys recipt to his water that he had purchased inside the terminal after the security check point. Somewhere between Zurich and Dallas we both finally got our Gold Satus on our American Airlines Fequent Fliers Program. It means we will be eligible for automatic upgrades if available and we get to preboard the plane now. Yea!!! We landed at about 3:30 Dallas time, and made it home about 5:30ish and we were in bed at about 7:30 and slept really well, we got up about 6:30 (new 6:30)

I'll be posting again later in the day to tell you about the rest of our trip!!