Denmark, Part II

Welcome to my home in Denmark - the CABINN, where the slogan is "Sleep Cheap in Luxury."

Our first mission once we got to Denmark was to explore! Although we hadn't slept in 36 hours, we walked to Tivoli Square to look around. There's an amusement park there that has rides that you couldn't pay me to get on! We walked around our first night here and tried to get acclimated to the (literally) foreign surroundings.

Copenhagen has flowers everywhere!

Here's Tivoli Gardens...one of the oldest amusement parks in the world. The word is that Walt Disney came here to look at Tivoli before he designed Disneyland!

City Hall...

Here's a statue of the country's most famous author, Hans Christian Andersen (known as H.C. Andersen in Denmark.) He wrote The Little Mermaid, The Little Matchgirl, and The Ugly Duckling.

There are MANY Danish folks riding bicycles around here! And when they leave them parked outside, they don't even lock them up - people are very trusting in Denmark...

There's water, water everywhere - canals, lakes, rivers (fjords) - it's beautiful!

Today we learned about energy, Denmark-style. We visited the RISO National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy and the Copenhagen Energy and Waterworks Place.

There are gorgeous poppy fields all over that can be seen from the train and shuttle bus as we go from place to place.

Here are our presenters at RISO - Stephanie Ropenus and Leif Sonderberg.

Here's a picture of the wind turbine up close and personal (and on the ground!) It's 40 meters long - much bigger than it looks up there in the air twirling around!

Here's the Director of the Energy and Waterworks Place, Jesper Steenberg, showing how he teaches children about water erosion in Denmark.

We were surprised to see how Jesper teaches the children about the sewer system:

he has them climb down into the "pipes" and look for rats! They also dig their hands into dark places and pull out items that shouldn't be flushed (some were embarrassing items that would wreak havoc with our students but evidently don't bother the Danish ones...)

Here's Jesper showing us how it's done. P.S. We thank Jesper for coming in specially for us - he is currently on paternity leave - for fourteen weeks! Gotta love Denmark!

One activity Jesper told us about was the role-playing the kids do at the Energy and Waterworks Place. We put on some of the hats that the kids wear as they represent the way that different countries use water. Of course, I put on the hat representing the USA - a Yankees hat...hmmm...I guess that's how they think of America.

We rode home from our exciting day in our "bustrafik!"

Later I walked to the mall, a scenic walk by the canal took me to the Fisketorvet Shopping Center right down the street from our hotel. Some musings on that experience:

1. It is unnerving to shop in a foreign country. The price tags make no sense. Even the mall hours posted (9-20) are confusing.

2. Every store plays American music. I shopped to Lady GaGa and Britney Spears. I would have felt like I was at home if I could have read the price tags and didn't have to take ten extra minutes to calculate the difference in currency in my head.

3. I saw stores I recognize: Aldo, H&M, and Pizza House (which looks just like Pizza Hut in my world.)

4. Everyone here speaks English. Because there are so few folks in Denmark (5.4 million), and Danish is so difficult to learn, they know they have to know English in order to communicate with the outside world.

5. Danish folk don't appear to love their water like we love ours. There are beautiful canals, but I haven't seen any kind of personal pleasure boats in the water, just a few cruise boats for tourists. And as I walked to the mall, I was basically alone on the gorgeous walkway that runs beside the water. If that canal were in my town, people would be sitting by it as long as possible (which is a lot in Denmark, by the way. The sun comes up by 3:30 AM and stays up until 10:45 PM.)

6. All women in Denmark wear these cute scarves wrapped around them. The mall was full of them! And I think they identify me as a tourist since I don't have one...because no one has tried to speak in Danish to me. Some guy at the mall stepped in front of me and said, "Oh, sorry" and then continued to speak Danish to his friend. How the heck was he able to determine my heritage so quickly, without missing a beat? I'm going to buy myself a scarf!

Here's an example of the scarves we see everywhere! There are all kinds of websites explaining how to tie them...

Stay tuned for another exciting post from Denmark...this time I'll be sharing our experiences at a Viking Ship Museum and on our trip to Sweden!