Sitting here having breakfast looking out over my next-door neighbour's lake when it suddenly struck me how odd that sounds. Imagine actually owning a lake...
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Room with a view
Sitting here having breakfast looking out over my next-door neighbour's lake when it suddenly struck me how odd that sounds. Imagine actually owning a lake...
Thursday, November 28, 2019
Undertakers and national driving differences
I've always driven abroad - already in 1987-88 I shared a car with my German flatmate and again in Germany the following year, so I have never really paid much attention to national differences when it came to driving habits (other than which side of the road I was meant to be driving on or which side of the car I was meant to be sitting in!)... Obviously driving in Germany was always a wee bit different, given they have speed-limitless roads, so I quickly learned to pay much more attention in my mirrors to the speed something was coming up the outside lane for overtaking purposes, but other than that I never really analysed it...
Now I'm mainly driving in Denmark, but have nipped back to Scotland two or three times for a week. I have now noticed one colossal difference between the two sets of drivers and that is undertaking on motorways. Unless traffic is more or less at a standstill, usually because of roadworks, because the roads are definitely less busy here, no one ever undertakes you here. Although I would obviously not recommend it, you could, to all intents and purposes, move from the middle lane of a motorway into the slow lane without looking. So, back in Glasgow last weekend I tested my theory that Scots were much more a breed of undertakers than Danes - my god - even between Crookfur and Glasgow centre (a less than 10km stretch) I lost count of the number of cars that shot up my left hand side (no I wasn't going under the speed limit like an annoying snail) - they were simply being chancers who could not be bothered popping out two lanes and back two. So, all in all driving in Scotland is harder and more stressful than here - you certainly need to be more alert.
It's actually interesting to look at national differences. I have many years of experience of driving in France, Italy, Germany and a bit in Spain, Switzerland and Luxembourg, but had very little experience of Scandinavia till this year. I've always found France and Italy similar to home so they have never fazed me. Nothing much stood out in Spain, Switzerland or Luxembourg either. The main German difference is that outer motorway lane when the speed limit goes altogether and the Audis and BMWs shoot past at 150kmph+ - you just stay out of that unless you've hired something much more powerful than I tend to be able to afford to own!
Over the October week, I took my car to the Netherlands for the first time. I've only ever used public transport there before. It is altogether different. It is such a small country but with a huge amount of traffic on the motorways, and once you get into the cities, bikes and trams are thrown into the mix. The roundabouts really should be taught to foreigners before they attempt them. I think more Dutch would be run over by the annual tourists if it wasn't for the sheer number of bikes that pass you like an impenetrable wall. I think I'd call it a high-concentration drive. The distances between cars is less than half what we're used to in Scotland, they drive at 130kmph (81mph) even when it is highly congested, jumping in and out smoothly in a hair-raising fashion. It almost looks like they are knitting some elaborate pattern with their cars in a fast and well-choreographed manner. It definitely isn't somewhere I would like to drive if I was overly tired or had less driving experience.
Finally, as I've mentioned before, living somewhere where there are very few potholes is nice. I feel like I can pay attention to driving rather than scanning the road surface, but the thing I miss most from home is cat's eyes. Living beyond where the Glasgow lampposts light the motorway, these wonderful little reflectors made driving clear and easy. Here, I often drive to Copenhagen, Billund or the German border at night in the dark and their absence is painful. In driving rain and mist it is significantly harder to see the boundary between lanes. They really don't know what they are missing. It is as different as driving a country lane in the dark and driving down an airport runway. Come on, Europe, order in some cat's eyes, please!
Now I'm mainly driving in Denmark, but have nipped back to Scotland two or three times for a week. I have now noticed one colossal difference between the two sets of drivers and that is undertaking on motorways. Unless traffic is more or less at a standstill, usually because of roadworks, because the roads are definitely less busy here, no one ever undertakes you here. Although I would obviously not recommend it, you could, to all intents and purposes, move from the middle lane of a motorway into the slow lane without looking. So, back in Glasgow last weekend I tested my theory that Scots were much more a breed of undertakers than Danes - my god - even between Crookfur and Glasgow centre (a less than 10km stretch) I lost count of the number of cars that shot up my left hand side (no I wasn't going under the speed limit like an annoying snail) - they were simply being chancers who could not be bothered popping out two lanes and back two. So, all in all driving in Scotland is harder and more stressful than here - you certainly need to be more alert.
It's actually interesting to look at national differences. I have many years of experience of driving in France, Italy, Germany and a bit in Spain, Switzerland and Luxembourg, but had very little experience of Scandinavia till this year. I've always found France and Italy similar to home so they have never fazed me. Nothing much stood out in Spain, Switzerland or Luxembourg either. The main German difference is that outer motorway lane when the speed limit goes altogether and the Audis and BMWs shoot past at 150kmph+ - you just stay out of that unless you've hired something much more powerful than I tend to be able to afford to own!
Over the October week, I took my car to the Netherlands for the first time. I've only ever used public transport there before. It is altogether different. It is such a small country but with a huge amount of traffic on the motorways, and once you get into the cities, bikes and trams are thrown into the mix. The roundabouts really should be taught to foreigners before they attempt them. I think more Dutch would be run over by the annual tourists if it wasn't for the sheer number of bikes that pass you like an impenetrable wall. I think I'd call it a high-concentration drive. The distances between cars is less than half what we're used to in Scotland, they drive at 130kmph (81mph) even when it is highly congested, jumping in and out smoothly in a hair-raising fashion. It almost looks like they are knitting some elaborate pattern with their cars in a fast and well-choreographed manner. It definitely isn't somewhere I would like to drive if I was overly tired or had less driving experience.
Finally, as I've mentioned before, living somewhere where there are very few potholes is nice. I feel like I can pay attention to driving rather than scanning the road surface, but the thing I miss most from home is cat's eyes. Living beyond where the Glasgow lampposts light the motorway, these wonderful little reflectors made driving clear and easy. Here, I often drive to Copenhagen, Billund or the German border at night in the dark and their absence is painful. In driving rain and mist it is significantly harder to see the boundary between lanes. They really don't know what they are missing. It is as different as driving a country lane in the dark and driving down an airport runway. Come on, Europe, order in some cat's eyes, please!
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Amsterdam flower market
I'm going to have a wee rant - more at myself for being gullible and stupid, in fact, than at the crooks and deceivers, really.
Two autumns ago, I was at a linguistics and lexicography conference in Leiden, in the Netherlands. Noticing it finished at midday, I booked my return flight for about 10pm, so I could have a day wandering around Amsterdam. I found myself, like many tourists, in the flower bulb market, given it was that season. Laden with blue tulips, I headed home, planted them and waited for spring. Spring came and my garden filled with boring, bog-standard red tulips. As the first few opened I was puzzled and then I suddenly realised, with a wry little smile... I had been well and truly hoodwinked. I assumed the business model was: buy in the cheapest, most boring bulbs, package them up as something exotic and expensive, palm it off on the foreign tourists, who won't realise they've been sold a pig in a poke till many months later and many miles away. Part angry, part in awe of their balls, I laughed it off and carried on. Red tulips are better than no tulips, after all.
Last month I was in Amsterdam, and of course it was tulip planting season again. Ok, I thought, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was just an honest error... This time, I bought only one packet of the blue bulbs, and from a different vendor. I have planted them in a specific spot in the garden, away from all the others, so I know where to look in the spring. I won't fully be holding my breath however. To test my theory sooner, they were selling amaryllis bulbs too. Blue or red, they were the same price, so at least I was only being done on description, rather than price, this time! I picked one up. Here is its tag:
And as we run down to Xmas it has been getting taller by the day. Today, it looks like this:
Any bets whether it is going to be red or blue when it opens? 😡
So, in warning, I am likely to conclude in March or April, that Amsterdam flower market is there for the sole purpose of doing the tourists, don't let them get you!
Update: Bastards😕
Two autumns ago, I was at a linguistics and lexicography conference in Leiden, in the Netherlands. Noticing it finished at midday, I booked my return flight for about 10pm, so I could have a day wandering around Amsterdam. I found myself, like many tourists, in the flower bulb market, given it was that season. Laden with blue tulips, I headed home, planted them and waited for spring. Spring came and my garden filled with boring, bog-standard red tulips. As the first few opened I was puzzled and then I suddenly realised, with a wry little smile... I had been well and truly hoodwinked. I assumed the business model was: buy in the cheapest, most boring bulbs, package them up as something exotic and expensive, palm it off on the foreign tourists, who won't realise they've been sold a pig in a poke till many months later and many miles away. Part angry, part in awe of their balls, I laughed it off and carried on. Red tulips are better than no tulips, after all.
Last month I was in Amsterdam, and of course it was tulip planting season again. Ok, I thought, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was just an honest error... This time, I bought only one packet of the blue bulbs, and from a different vendor. I have planted them in a specific spot in the garden, away from all the others, so I know where to look in the spring. I won't fully be holding my breath however. To test my theory sooner, they were selling amaryllis bulbs too. Blue or red, they were the same price, so at least I was only being done on description, rather than price, this time! I picked one up. Here is its tag:
And as we run down to Xmas it has been getting taller by the day. Today, it looks like this:
So, in warning, I am likely to conclude in March or April, that Amsterdam flower market is there for the sole purpose of doing the tourists, don't let them get you!
Update: Bastards😕
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Sausage girls
Anyway, I made this for dinner tonight and Amaia got rather creative with it!😂
You can take the girl out of Scotland, but you'll never take Scotland out of the girl.😂
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Winter illuminations
At first, just after the clocks changed, I thought Danes were all a wee bit over-eager with Xmas. Almost immediately people started filling their gardens with strings of fairy lights wrapped around bushes and up their flag poles. Brightly-lit shapes appeared too - stars, triangles and similar, but there were no Santas, reindeer or snowmen. Their houses on the inside, however, were the same as ever. My next door neighbour, who owns a Xmas tree plantation at the end of our field, had only just started cutting and bagging the bigger ones, and they are still lying awaiting collection or distribution.
There was no obvious Xmas decorating going on on that front. Curious! Danes, on the whole, use real Xmas trees and their houses are warmer and better insulated than Scottish ones, so the real tree doesn't go up till a week to ten days before Xmas (which is Dec 24 here), otherwise it would dry out. Then I realised, it was some sort of informal Scandinavian 'festival of lights' they use from the onset of winter to alleviate the darkness of the short Nordic days. I guess that might be why we have three sockets on the outer walls of our house - so it would be rude to not join in, wouldn't it? So, Thomas has been tasked with hunting down a fairy-light covering for the flag pole while I'm away this weekend 😁
Monday, November 11, 2019
Votes for the under 10s
Conversation with Amaia:Amaia: I think I should be allowed to vote in the general election!
Me: Really, why? You're only 9!
Amaia: Well, because of stupid adults voting for stupid Boris and his nasty friends, I now live in Denmark, so I think I know a bit more than most people what happens when you vote for the wrong people!
Well, you sure can't argue with that logic 😐
Friday, November 08, 2019
Checking it out at ground level
A few months ago on one of my many flights into Denmark, I came in to Billund over Blåvand.
I thought its shape, and obviously very long beach needed further investigation and given it is only 80 minutes drive we took a wander over last week to investigate. It is definitely going to be on our summer 2020 list of places to visit as it is really pretty up close.
Weird
I've been here for many many months now and a strange thing happened to me yesterday...
I had to use money! (Amaia had to take a 100Kr note to school for something). It is odd to be somewhere more than six months and not actually even know what the currency looks like. Apparently it looks like this - very fancy and pretty! Cash is so hard to come by, I actually had to google where the nearest ATM was (fully 5km away!)
One of the things I liked about the UK in comparison with many places I've lived is how little we use cash (I hate handbags and purses with a passion so it suits me well to live somewhere where having only a fiver on me at any given time usually sufficed) but Denmark takes it to a whole new level - even small kids use plastic here - Amaia (9) already has a Visa Debit card, they needed to be 11 in Scotland for those. In shops everything is contactless, like at home but for everything else, everyone uses mobile pay here. You owe money to a friend or want to donate to the school class kitty for something or other, you simply dial in the number - even if it's only 50p. It's great for splitting the cost of a meal out with some mates (or will be at least once I've met some!). That's what everyone uses at car boot sales and roadside stalls too - in rural areas most people have a wee stall at the end of their driveway to sell their surplus potatoes, eggs or apples and it's simply a table with a phone number on it. Some of the more rustic or smaller shops, like the local antique shop here, don't even have a till, they just take mobile pay.
I had to laugh a couple of months ago when Léon and Amaia's string orchestra was performing in a church and they passed round the church's collection plate for donations to the music school afterwards - it was simply a silver tray with a phone number stuck on it!😂 I know I'm not a church-goer but I always imagined a collection plate might actually have some coins or notes on it!
I guess it has its downsides - I expect it would be harder (or at least weirder) to pay someone cash in hand for some gardening or similar and if the country is ever invaded, running some kind of underground resistance might not be all that simple! But, for the handbag haters amongst us, it certainly hits the spot.
I had to use money! (Amaia had to take a 100Kr note to school for something). It is odd to be somewhere more than six months and not actually even know what the currency looks like. Apparently it looks like this - very fancy and pretty! Cash is so hard to come by, I actually had to google where the nearest ATM was (fully 5km away!)
One of the things I liked about the UK in comparison with many places I've lived is how little we use cash (I hate handbags and purses with a passion so it suits me well to live somewhere where having only a fiver on me at any given time usually sufficed) but Denmark takes it to a whole new level - even small kids use plastic here - Amaia (9) already has a Visa Debit card, they needed to be 11 in Scotland for those. In shops everything is contactless, like at home but for everything else, everyone uses mobile pay here. You owe money to a friend or want to donate to the school class kitty for something or other, you simply dial in the number - even if it's only 50p. It's great for splitting the cost of a meal out with some mates (or will be at least once I've met some!). That's what everyone uses at car boot sales and roadside stalls too - in rural areas most people have a wee stall at the end of their driveway to sell their surplus potatoes, eggs or apples and it's simply a table with a phone number on it. Some of the more rustic or smaller shops, like the local antique shop here, don't even have a till, they just take mobile pay.
I had to laugh a couple of months ago when Léon and Amaia's string orchestra was performing in a church and they passed round the church's collection plate for donations to the music school afterwards - it was simply a silver tray with a phone number stuck on it!😂 I know I'm not a church-goer but I always imagined a collection plate might actually have some coins or notes on it!
I guess it has its downsides - I expect it would be harder (or at least weirder) to pay someone cash in hand for some gardening or similar and if the country is ever invaded, running some kind of underground resistance might not be all that simple! But, for the handbag haters amongst us, it certainly hits the spot.
Monday, November 04, 2019
Strange alphabet
Cute conversation with Amaia:
I really like the new light you got me for my room, mum. Can we get a second one next time we're in Ikea, for the other side of my room?
Sure. Can you remember what it's called?
Yeah, I've still got the box. It's called a... a..., emmm, I don't know how you pronounce it. It's written in Swedish. It is spelt S, J, surprised face, P, E, N, N, A!
😂😂😂
Friday, November 01, 2019
Nowhere people
A couple of weeks ago I asked Thomas if Danes did Halloween. Remember, he hasn't lived here since 2001, and his answer was a definite no...
After a shopping trip to Odense last Saturday, I had a sneaking suspicion things had moved on in his home country since he last called it home. Here are Anna and Amaia in the big supermarket, Bilka!
After a shopping trip to Odense last Saturday, I had a sneaking suspicion things had moved on in his home country since he last called it home. Here are Anna and Amaia in the big supermarket, Bilka!
I guess Thomas has become one of those weird stateless people who are neither fully at home here nor in Scotland, and we will soon follow him down that path, of course.
I'm still not sure he was fully convinced, until the neighbour's lit pumpkin turned up on Monday night, followed by another two by the roadside the following day. Yesterday, Léon was invited to a mate's house for afternoon coffee, but he didn't show up home till three hours later, fully made-up with everything short of false eyelashes. He was less sure about the large bag of 50% liquorice sweeties he was clutching when I picked him up, but as I drove through the next village almost every house had pumpkin-lit paths and driveways. We, of course, gave in and stuck a neep at the end of our driveway, as well as one of those alien pumpkin things, which resulted in small children ringing our doorbell and threatening us with 'slik eller ballade' - (sweeties or trouble - I wonder what that could possibly mean!)
Léon did make me laugh... He fully admitted to being a chancer - having gone into the local Co-op, figuring nowhere he knew had more sweets than a corner shop, and trying trick or treat on the check-out operator, who laughed, congratulated him for having balls but told him, sadly her hands were tied! I guess you get nowhere in life, if you don't try!
It is nice to see him having fun though, back home he hasn't been out guising for a couple of years as it was no longer the cool thing to do - here, cool seems to matter a wee bit less than having fun.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Denmark's great for the teeth
Since nursery, birthdays have followed a specific pattern: your child goes off to a softplay, a party hall or their friend's house, they dance or play for a couple of hours and return with a party bag - a few sweets, a balloon, some bubbles, a little gift or similar. Here in Denmark, health and safety hasn't gone in to overdrive yet so on the kids' birthdays they actually (shock, horror) take a cake in to the class and share it with their friends at school and then give the party bags out in class, rather than at the party.
Back in Scotland, the kids used to bring their bag home and take it off to their room. Léon would devour his in seconds, Anna would squirrel hers away and you'd find numerous sweetie bags around her room for months. Amaia was somewhere in the middle. At the side of our new kitchen is a little table - big enough for a family of three or four to have breakfast, but we rarely use it as the dining room is close by and there are more of us. Often I find piles of party bags abandoned on it after school. They lie unopened and untouched for weeks before making their way across to the bin. As far as I can see, they look the same as party bags in Scotland, but there is one difference, I am told... the dreaded Danish obsession with liquorice. All the kids know that the chances are high that at least a couple of the sweets are made of that strong, salty liquorice that Scandies love, but they will be in the bag, lurking, disguised as normal sweets and the risk of accidentally biting into one, is so great that they have all given up even attempting to bite into any sweets at all this side of the north sea - it's been amazing for their teeth.😂
On a similar note, I was in Aldi last weekend and came across this - I can't wait to show them it, just to see the look of horror on their faces!
Back in Scotland, the kids used to bring their bag home and take it off to their room. Léon would devour his in seconds, Anna would squirrel hers away and you'd find numerous sweetie bags around her room for months. Amaia was somewhere in the middle. At the side of our new kitchen is a little table - big enough for a family of three or four to have breakfast, but we rarely use it as the dining room is close by and there are more of us. Often I find piles of party bags abandoned on it after school. They lie unopened and untouched for weeks before making their way across to the bin. As far as I can see, they look the same as party bags in Scotland, but there is one difference, I am told... the dreaded Danish obsession with liquorice. All the kids know that the chances are high that at least a couple of the sweets are made of that strong, salty liquorice that Scandies love, but they will be in the bag, lurking, disguised as normal sweets and the risk of accidentally biting into one, is so great that they have all given up even attempting to bite into any sweets at all this side of the north sea - it's been amazing for their teeth.😂
On a similar note, I was in Aldi last weekend and came across this - I can't wait to show them it, just to see the look of horror on their faces!
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Nowhere to shop
I know I am generally a little ray of sunshine in a grey world, trying always to see the positives whenever possible😂. I almost managed to believe that myself there for a minute. Ok, so I used to blog-rant a lot, but since moving abroad, because moving and starting afresh at my age is extremely hard, I have been trying to keep my spirits up by looking out for all things positive and ways of doing things we in Scotland could potentially learn from. But nothing is of course ever completely rosy and one thing I keep coming back to in my head is shopping. So it is time to get it off my chest...
I should probably have ranted this one last night when I came home from my shopping trip to give you the full force but it took all my effort to scrape my depressed self off the floor after shopping for my evening meal, so I had to wait till I calmed down or cheered up or whatever you want to call it... 😏
So, what's the problem? In a nutshell, Danish supermarkets are shit, no in fact, they are utter shit. I had almost managed to convince myself they were just bad but after a week in the Netherlands, I'm sorry to say they are diabolical, or even Diabolical with a capital D. And, this isn't just me saying so - even the Danish press agrees.
I am 15km from Denmark's 3rd biggest city, so this isn't a rural issue. In Newton Mearns I was also about this distance from the city centre. Between me and Odense there is actually no shortage of supermarkets. So, let's concentrate on a ten minute radius to contain my venom to a manageable size.
Within ten minutes drive of my house, off the top of my head I can think of three Dagli'Brugsen (that's your typical wee Coop like the one opposite my old house, to you and me - only with about 30% of the Scottish product range and overpriced). There is one SuperBrugsen (a triple-sized overpriced version of the usual Coops). There are two Aldis - we have Aldi Nord in Denmark not Aldi Süd as in the UK, Sourthern Germany or Italy (as I'm used to) - it is small, stale, hit and miss on the product front but at least has a better bakery than the Aldi Süd ones (see, I really am still trying positivity!) - again it is half the size of the Newton Mearns one. We have two Nettos - they are basically just about the same as the Aldis in Scotland for size, price and product type, but again the range is only about 50% of our Aldi in Newton Mearns. Then there is Rema 1000, which is more or less the same as Netto and Aldi - again there are two of those within a ten minute range. There is one Fakta. Fakta reminds me a bit of Shoppers' Paradise in the 80s - looks like it is about to go out of business and the sooner someone puts it out its misery the better. If I never set foot inside another Fakta as long as I live, I will be far from devastated. 😁Finally, we have two Menys - they are like wonderful high-class Norwegian delis... the closest thing from home would be Waitrose both for quality and pricing, but yes, they are lovely.
So let's count that up... I have 13 supermarkets within a 6km radius of my house. But, other than Meny, they are all the bloody same - they are all small Coop meets Home Bargains food aisle. There is no medium-sized ASDA/Sainsburys/Tesco equivalent. When my kid comes in from school and says they need wellies tomorrow for a trip, I can't begin to guess which, if any of the 13 will have them. You can't get basic non-food items that I'm used to picking up at ASDA and take for granted like a pack of pants or a woolly hat on a cold morning or a pair of kiddie trainers because someone has lost one at school. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether their current special is or isn't stationery, so if a kid needs a pencil or rubber for the next day, you have no idea where you might pick it up. Last night Léon was on cooking - he asked me to pick up burgers and mushrooms - even that was hard - I had to try three shops before I even found the simplest mushrooms. Aaaarg - seriously?
We do have one wonderful Bilka in Odense which has all these things (it's like a bigger version of Silverburn Tesco, so not for the faint-hearted or anyone over 70!), but it is in South East Odense (35 minutes from here) and I'm in North West Odense, of course! It is the only decent supermarket on the whole of Funen, where you know that whatever you want you can get on the spot - that's really is pretty poor for a population of 500 000 people.
Last week I was in Lidl in Alkmaar (there are three in Alkmaar alone). Even that felt like luxury after a few months here. The product range was so much better - loads of different types of mushrooms, chillis, you name it. And I could barely see one end from the other.
Come on Danes - you earn enough to buy nice things, so could someone stock them? Please! And you really don't need 13 indistinguishable shops all stocking the same crap within a stone's throw of each other!
I should probably have ranted this one last night when I came home from my shopping trip to give you the full force but it took all my effort to scrape my depressed self off the floor after shopping for my evening meal, so I had to wait till I calmed down or cheered up or whatever you want to call it... 😏
So, what's the problem? In a nutshell, Danish supermarkets are shit, no in fact, they are utter shit. I had almost managed to convince myself they were just bad but after a week in the Netherlands, I'm sorry to say they are diabolical, or even Diabolical with a capital D. And, this isn't just me saying so - even the Danish press agrees.
I am 15km from Denmark's 3rd biggest city, so this isn't a rural issue. In Newton Mearns I was also about this distance from the city centre. Between me and Odense there is actually no shortage of supermarkets. So, let's concentrate on a ten minute radius to contain my venom to a manageable size.
Within ten minutes drive of my house, off the top of my head I can think of three Dagli'Brugsen (that's your typical wee Coop like the one opposite my old house, to you and me - only with about 30% of the Scottish product range and overpriced). There is one SuperBrugsen (a triple-sized overpriced version of the usual Coops). There are two Aldis - we have Aldi Nord in Denmark not Aldi Süd as in the UK, Sourthern Germany or Italy (as I'm used to) - it is small, stale, hit and miss on the product front but at least has a better bakery than the Aldi Süd ones (see, I really am still trying positivity!) - again it is half the size of the Newton Mearns one. We have two Nettos - they are basically just about the same as the Aldis in Scotland for size, price and product type, but again the range is only about 50% of our Aldi in Newton Mearns. Then there is Rema 1000, which is more or less the same as Netto and Aldi - again there are two of those within a ten minute range. There is one Fakta. Fakta reminds me a bit of Shoppers' Paradise in the 80s - looks like it is about to go out of business and the sooner someone puts it out its misery the better. If I never set foot inside another Fakta as long as I live, I will be far from devastated. 😁Finally, we have two Menys - they are like wonderful high-class Norwegian delis... the closest thing from home would be Waitrose both for quality and pricing, but yes, they are lovely.
So let's count that up... I have 13 supermarkets within a 6km radius of my house. But, other than Meny, they are all the bloody same - they are all small Coop meets Home Bargains food aisle. There is no medium-sized ASDA/Sainsburys/Tesco equivalent. When my kid comes in from school and says they need wellies tomorrow for a trip, I can't begin to guess which, if any of the 13 will have them. You can't get basic non-food items that I'm used to picking up at ASDA and take for granted like a pack of pants or a woolly hat on a cold morning or a pair of kiddie trainers because someone has lost one at school. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether their current special is or isn't stationery, so if a kid needs a pencil or rubber for the next day, you have no idea where you might pick it up. Last night Léon was on cooking - he asked me to pick up burgers and mushrooms - even that was hard - I had to try three shops before I even found the simplest mushrooms. Aaaarg - seriously?
We do have one wonderful Bilka in Odense which has all these things (it's like a bigger version of Silverburn Tesco, so not for the faint-hearted or anyone over 70!), but it is in South East Odense (35 minutes from here) and I'm in North West Odense, of course! It is the only decent supermarket on the whole of Funen, where you know that whatever you want you can get on the spot - that's really is pretty poor for a population of 500 000 people.
Last week I was in Lidl in Alkmaar (there are three in Alkmaar alone). Even that felt like luxury after a few months here. The product range was so much better - loads of different types of mushrooms, chillis, you name it. And I could barely see one end from the other.
The bottom line is, I hate shopping. I've always hated shopping - whether that is for food, gifts, clothing, stationery, you name it - I want to rush in, pick it up and leave. I want to get it over with. I don't want, like last night, to have to visit three shops that were more or less the same because I need something as exotic as plain, ordinary mushies or some black pepper. It's the 21st century, ffs! I feel like I am back in the late 70s, grrrrr.
This isn't some sort of Scotland is better rant, I'm quite an international shopper - Scotland is better than Denmark on the everyday shop front, but so is the Netherlands, and Germany and France and Italy, to name but a few places where I often find myself in a supermarket. I'm beginning to think Danes are actually all so well off because they can't find anything to spend their decent salaries on - they've all crawled into a depressed hole for want of a choice of a chestnut mushroom or a scotch bonnet!
Come on Danes - you earn enough to buy nice things, so could someone stock them? Please! And you really don't need 13 indistinguishable shops all stocking the same crap within a stone's throw of each other!
Monday, October 21, 2019
Tiled closes
One of the things I love most about Glasgow, from all my years living in the west end, is the tiled closes in the tenements. A quick google image search of Glasgow close tiles throws up these delights.
So, it was with great delight last week, that on a wander round the slightly more residential parts of inner Amsterdam, that I realised they too have a huge wally tile tradition. Here are just some of those I saw.😀
So, it was with great delight last week, that on a wander round the slightly more residential parts of inner Amsterdam, that I realised they too have a huge wally tile tradition. Here are just some of those I saw.😀
Crazy (if impressive) road design
We had been planning to go to Scotland for the October week to catch up with family and friends, but Ryanair decided on a last minute price hike (they had of course sussed Scotland and Denmark had the same school holiday). Funnily enough £2000 for a set of flights that usually come in at less than £500, was a non-starter, but it left us with £500 to spend on petrol and an airbnb. We looked at a less than 8 hour drive radius from our house and then checked where we could meet Lots for the weekend so we still got the family catch-up and were left mainly with Amsterdam and Berlin. Flight times meant Amsterdam was the better option so we set off immediately they got home from school a week ago on Friday. Thomas was going to be working from home some of the week, but it still gave us all some scope for a real holiday, the first week away not visiting family since 2010! How excited were we?!
Traffic conditions when we left meant it should have taken just over seven hours. We set out at just after 3pm. It had been a lovely clear blue-sky morning but as we packed the car what looked like the tail end of a hurricane came in. We should have known when it took 3 and a half hours to reach the German border (which usually comes in at 80 minutes) that we weren't in for the best day. Anyway, this is the route google chose for us...
Traffic conditions when we left meant it should have taken just over seven hours. We set out at just after 3pm. It had been a lovely clear blue-sky morning but as we packed the car what looked like the tail end of a hurricane came in. We should have known when it took 3 and a half hours to reach the German border (which usually comes in at 80 minutes) that we weren't in for the best day. Anyway, this is the route google chose for us...
I drove the first chunk as Thomas was working from his laptop. Modern technology is amazing, isn't it?! When his work day was over, he took over and we continued to swap every couple of hours. After dark we reached this chunk, with me at the wheel.
Now, I had never been to the Netherlands before in a car, I'd previously only flown into Amsterdam and my Dutch geography isn't the best so I was unaware of the afsluitdijk! As I drove over it, my right wheels were half-covered by water and I thought to myself - jeezo, this is quite a storm. The car was pulling to one side and the wipers couldn't deal with the spray (and a new seven-seater Citroën isn't exactly the scabbiest or lightest of vehicles!) Visibility was so dire I had to slow down to about 90 instead of the limit on that stretch of 130km/ph. Anyway, we survived and finally got to our destination in Alkmaar after 10 hours at 1am. Charlotte had given up on being picked up at Schiphol and found her own way to Alkmaar by train and bus and even found the spare airbnb key in a plant pot in the garden and let herself in!
On my way home a week later, I drove the afsluitdijk in the daylight! Bloody hell! What are those crazy Dutch people on? Turns out I had driven over a 40km chunk of road built in the middle of the sea in a bloody hurricane and managed to not die! Now that explains exactly how it felt! Howling winds from one side, waves going over the top of me... takes windswept to a whole new level. So glad I didn't know what it looked like when I drove it in the storm. Lol. Here's a photo from the return trip...
And a video of how it feels weather-wise even on a nice, bright and dry day!
Llama girl
I'm just back from a week in the Netherlands so there will be a few wee stories popping up here over the course of the next wee while.
Amaia is still obsessed with llamas, though I have no idea why, given she doesn't really like any animals in general - she'll cross the road to avoid a dog on a lead! Walking down the street in Amsterdam last week, we happened upon this! Look at that happy face...
The wee chancer did try to venture the following:
"Do you think we could buy one of these to stand outside my bedroom door for at home, mum?"
But given outside her bedroom door is the middle of my dining room 😂, it was a bit of a non-starter!
Amaia is still obsessed with llamas, though I have no idea why, given she doesn't really like any animals in general - she'll cross the road to avoid a dog on a lead! Walking down the street in Amsterdam last week, we happened upon this! Look at that happy face...
"Do you think we could buy one of these to stand outside my bedroom door for at home, mum?"
But given outside her bedroom door is the middle of my dining room 😂, it was a bit of a non-starter!
Brexit
Just a thought... The government is willing to go for no deal (or the shit deal they came up with at the 11th hour) because they have found it almost impossible to negotiate what to do with the Irish border, and that's despite being at the table for more than three years now. Brexit day marks the STARTING point of negotiations for everything from trade, tariffs, immigration policies, research and medical cooperation, workers' rights... with 195 countries because their current deals are based on being an EU state. The list is infinite. Does anyone think they'll ever be able to 'just get it done' or is parliament going to spend all its energy for the rest of all our lifetimes on Brexit? There are so many more important things in this world at the moment that any government should be doing than trying to negotiate themselves a worse trade deal than the one they currently have.
Exasperated!
Exasperated!
Monday, October 07, 2019
Flag's up
Léon put up the house flag to welcome the family for dinner yesterday. It looks quite pretty, colorized.😁
Conkers
Finally, when Amaia was about five I had an epiphany. Where are there trees, but not many passing kids? Graveyards, not just graveyards but the furthest most secluded corner of the Necropolis to be exact! I've never admitted this, for fear of it getting out, that there was a tree in there that actually had conkers by the handful. The first year we actually managed to fill my camera bag and the kids managed to play conkers and make little conker animals, Danish-style! Bliss. 
I know the kids are getting kind of big now but Amaia still has a conker year or two in her, so thought I would need to start my scouting early in this unknown new place... until we moved into our new house and looked out the window, that is. What did I see? What do I actually own? This! Oh my lord - there is an abundance. If I'm still here when I'm a granny, I'm going to be the most popular granny in the world! I was certainly a fairly popular auntie yesterday to my six year old niece who lives in a fourth floor flat in Copenhagen! She went home with a supermarket bag full. I expect Thomas's sister might even be able to sell them to other parents in Valby, she collected that many! And Amaia collected a few too - the other 98% are still out there on the tree!
Friday, October 04, 2019
Last year
On September 26 last year, at a routine gynaecological scan, a doctor found two tumours growing on my ovaries. Each was over 10cm across. She told me, given my age, that the chances of me having ovarian cancer were very high and that the chances of it not having spread, given the size of the tumours, were tiny. My world spun off in an instant to a parallel universe.
I waited two weeks for a CT scan to confirm the size of the tumours and whether I was riddled with cancer. That was 336 sleepless hours with my greatest demons sitting on the end of my bed watching over me. I then waited all of October and two weeks of November for emergency surgery. The surgery went well but I developed several infections and by the time I finally received a non-cancerous diagnosis fully two months of utter hell had passed. I can tell you, at the age of 50, with young children, waiting on your phone to ring then mustering the courage to pick it up when you know the person on the other end is phoning to tell you if you are dying or if you might get to spend the rest of your kids' childhoods on this planet takes some balls, even if I say so myself. As your insides fall out, you try to answer nonchalantly as if it's the most normal phone call in the world. Leanne, the nurse who rings you up, is doing an incredible job. I had to go through that call once, she has to make that call every day over and over. Whatever they are paying her it isn't enough. A more kind, caring and wonderful person is hard to imagine. Of course, having spent nearly three weeks in hospital, I had befriended the other women on the ward who were on the same journey as me, except they weren't... Leanne had different news for them when she rang that day. I was the lucky one who won the lottery, the only lucky one, but it left mental scars that will never heal and life will always be a bit more fragile now.
So why mention this now, other than it being the anniversary? It suddenly struck me this morning that this will be some other woman's reality now, today. The NHS has fewer nurses now than a year ago - EU nurses coming to the UK have dropped by 90% in a year. It has fewer consultants - one of Glasgow's top oncologist gynaecological surgeons, who operated on the forty-year-old mother in the next bed to me and who was diagnosed at stage 3 that morning, has left. There are more vacancies and medicine shortages are potentially 27 days away. Mentally, I barely survived what I went through last autumn. Going through surgery waiting for a cancer diagnosis while this government is playing power games with CT isotopes and chemo drugs would have broken me altogether. It is unforgivable. I am safely now under another health system, but there are women in Scotland who got my diagnosis last week and they are about to embark on a roller coaster ride no one should ever have to go on.
That anyone can vote for the current government scares me witless.
I waited two weeks for a CT scan to confirm the size of the tumours and whether I was riddled with cancer. That was 336 sleepless hours with my greatest demons sitting on the end of my bed watching over me. I then waited all of October and two weeks of November for emergency surgery. The surgery went well but I developed several infections and by the time I finally received a non-cancerous diagnosis fully two months of utter hell had passed. I can tell you, at the age of 50, with young children, waiting on your phone to ring then mustering the courage to pick it up when you know the person on the other end is phoning to tell you if you are dying or if you might get to spend the rest of your kids' childhoods on this planet takes some balls, even if I say so myself. As your insides fall out, you try to answer nonchalantly as if it's the most normal phone call in the world. Leanne, the nurse who rings you up, is doing an incredible job. I had to go through that call once, she has to make that call every day over and over. Whatever they are paying her it isn't enough. A more kind, caring and wonderful person is hard to imagine. Of course, having spent nearly three weeks in hospital, I had befriended the other women on the ward who were on the same journey as me, except they weren't... Leanne had different news for them when she rang that day. I was the lucky one who won the lottery, the only lucky one, but it left mental scars that will never heal and life will always be a bit more fragile now.
So why mention this now, other than it being the anniversary? It suddenly struck me this morning that this will be some other woman's reality now, today. The NHS has fewer nurses now than a year ago - EU nurses coming to the UK have dropped by 90% in a year. It has fewer consultants - one of Glasgow's top oncologist gynaecological surgeons, who operated on the forty-year-old mother in the next bed to me and who was diagnosed at stage 3 that morning, has left. There are more vacancies and medicine shortages are potentially 27 days away. Mentally, I barely survived what I went through last autumn. Going through surgery waiting for a cancer diagnosis while this government is playing power games with CT isotopes and chemo drugs would have broken me altogether. It is unforgivable. I am safely now under another health system, but there are women in Scotland who got my diagnosis last week and they are about to embark on a roller coaster ride no one should ever have to go on.
That anyone can vote for the current government scares me witless.
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