three places, three days

i always knew i would write another blog post someday.  someday when i wasn't completely worn out by the time the guys were both asleep, or someday when i wasn't starting my homework at 10 p.m.  mondays have the least to offer me, at least in terms of time to do things like homework, as i go from class to active duty motherhood in the span of a 20 minute bike ride.  tuesdays as well, but at least i have wednesdays (and thursdays... so i'm not complaining) to get my danish homework done.  today was a danish holiday (though i can't tell you off the top of my head which one), so the (little) guys and i spent a good portion of the day playing at home, and from the afternoon on, (with the addition of greg), were outside: riding bikes, cleaning up the garden, examining roly-poly bugs, spiders, snails, and ants, eating homemade pizza and fruit salad and artichokes (which are quite good with browned butter, if you're all out of lemons to flavor your butter with).

so you can imagine it was a beautiful day that got warmer and warmer, though perhaps never beyond 60 (though i can't say for sure... at one point, as i became almost too warm for my sweatshirt and wind coat, i worried that perhaps a summer in the u.s. would be too much (did i tell you we're going to the u.s.? many of you know by now.) even though i've felt so surely that i want to soak up all the warmth the midwest has to offer us in june and july).  the temperatures here have been hovering around 50 for awhile now, though we've had some days surpassing that.  a slow spring.  a much different spring than i remember from last year.  last year's was much faster, though in the grand scheme of the world, still lagging somewhat.  and how i remember it, there was much more rain.  much more variation in every single day in terms of what the weather had to bring.  these days, this year, seem much more predictable.  or is it just that i don't notice when a day turns from cloudy to sunny to cloudy to drizzly anymore?  i'm not sure.

anyway, enough speculating about whether the weather's changed or i have.  we had a guest last weekend and i have oh so many photos, so i best get on with it...

on friday, which was also a danish holiday, we toured around roskilde.

we stopped by the domkirke, where granted, not all of denmark's kings and queens are buried, but most, certainly most...

greg, on our spare bike... the steering and one brake went out on it during the ride, but he managed, while i pulled the burley around...

jake and greg near the cathedral...

on the way down to the harbor...

the guys, looking cute...

the littlest man at the viking ship museum...

boats in the harbor...

more cuteness...

saturday
in copenhagen...

on the tour we've found to be reliably tourist-worthy...

with a detour in the park...

past the little mermaid...

and the goddess who turned her four sons into oxen so she could plow up a swath of sweden the size of zealand (the island we live on), (with the king of sweden's consent), pick it up and set it down in its current location...

to amelienborg, where the queen and crown prince reside (separate mansions though)...

to a stop at another park after lunch...

my favorite picture of the bunch...

note the meticulous pruning going on with the trees...

on to nyhavn, with its colorful facades and outdoor cafes...

and parked sailboats and parked bikes...

to the pedestrian street...



and to a new place for us, the round tower, built by christian iv (who i wrote about circa this time last year) in the 1600's.  it is europe's oldest functioning astronomy observatory.

going up....

winding around...

and around...

pausing...

napping...

observing...

can you spot the one who belongs to us?

a close-up...

and down again...

back onto the street...

to the lakes...

'walking' the wire-haired fox terrier...

the swans....

a swan on her nest...

a tiny glimpse of her eggs if you look closely enough...

sunset on the lake...

tree (i guess my commentary's not always very insightful)...

sunday...
greg and henry took jake to the airport early and then used the rest of the time on their clip card to take the train north to klampenborg to the deer garden forest park...




note the guy all in white...

while henry took an early nap, william and i made our way up to meet them...

w. waiting for the train...

and then running to meet greg and henry... but stepping directly into a little stream...

and so replacing his wet sock with a dry mitten...

drying out the shoe...

the park...

hanging out (note the blue mitten sock)...

the park is full of horse-drawn carriages, which henry loved, because he loved the horses.  he found a spot to sit and watch them go by...

waiting...

enthusiastically offering the horse a stick...

william's picture of the alligator he found... can you see its eye?

to an outdoor food place, with all the fun playground equipment banned in the united states (note the teeter-totter (see-saw) in the background)...

eating a very frozen pop...

and, the sort of strange fact about this deer park... it happens to house the world's oldest operating amusement park right in the middle of it... called bakken. it's older than the round tower! at least according to the website. it opened in 1583, though i have to take some issue with their claim that a natural spring and a fabled crockery smashing stall count as the opening of an amusement park (though i suppose the definition of 'amusement park' has evolved over the years...).  in any event, it's there.  william at first said he only wanted to explore around the deer park and look at nature, but upon seeing bakken from afar, changed his mind... so it is where we spent the bulk of our time...

at the entrance...

an excited guy, walking into the park...

popcorn...

ice cream... (i mean, if you're going to go to an amusement park, you might as well get the full experience...)

a puppet show... and yes, you are seeing that right... they hanged one the puppets...

henry was desperate to go on each and every ride, which he could not do because of his littleness, but he was allowed on the race cars as long as greg did the driving...

william on the kangaroos...

all the guys up in the balloons...

the last picture!

william and i also went on a roller coaster.  there were no signs indicating how tall a person had to be to ride, so i asked the guy if william was big enough, and he said, 'if you think so.'  it was much too scary for william, but he was brave enough, though certain to this day that he could have fallen out of it.  as we were getting off the ride, i was almost out when the safety bar came down on my ankle. the kid who was getting into our car after us jumped the gun a bit.  the woman behind me said, 'oh nej' ('oh no') and i immediately started picturing a carnival disaster.  i would have been less worried about being trapped to a roller coaster car by one ankle had i not noticed, when we were beginning our own ride, that the guy in back of us jumped into his car literally one or two seconds before the roller coaster started moving so certainly no one came around checking to notice that he had not put his safety bar down... or apparently that he jumped off the ride as soon as we were back, a second or two before we'd stopped moving.  fortunately, after yelling stop and wait and hey for what felt like a little too long for comfort, the guy noticed i was trapped and hit the button to release all the bars again.  i think, in general, the danes probably rely on common sense a lot more than we do in the u.s., and therefore have (and require) fewer rules and safety checks, but i'm going to come right out and say that carnival rides is maybe one area where a little extra safety never hurt anyone.  but, having had my foot trapped by a roller coaster car, i'm probably a little biased. 

well, that was our adventurous weekend.  monday and tuesday are a blur.  wednesday is almost over.