På Beløbet

We had such a nice trip. Despite the heat and crowds, both of which we anticipated, we managed to have a pretty relaxing time in Venice. We visited some of the requisite tourist spots, like San Marcos Cathedral:

We sat on the ground in a tiny sliver of shade eating bread with fruit and pate for lunch, shooing away the ravenous pigeons, only to learn afterwards that you can be fined 50 euros for doing these things in the square. A pigeon attacked James.

On my favorite day, we visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and bought her autobiography, which I am now reading with great alarm over the many various abusive husbands and lovers she endured. I am only halfway through, and hoping she had nicer mates in her future. But the collection, located in her Venice home, consists of works from all the early twentieth century masters with a Jackson Pollack here and a Alexander Calder there. It’s cool and intimate to see photos of the rooms as they looked when she lived there, surrounded by the art. In the sculpture garden, a basic marble slab marks the spot where her ashes are buried, next to the graves of her many lhasa apsos.

After the collection, we trekked through the masses around San Marco and out to one tip of Venice, where the only grassy park is located. There, we read and napped in the shade with plenty of others who had sought refuge from all that hot stone of the city. Here is James in his Italy getup:

One night we had dinner and then wandered around in the sestiere where our hotel was located — a relatively quiet part of town. We came upon a square where first recorded music, and then a live band played, and couples danced. This was clearly a nightly event, and seemed organic to this neighborhood. I tried to take a picture, but it doesn’t do justice to how sweet this was. By the time we wandered off, there were about 25 couples dancing, many swirling around the dance area with their eyes closed, and lots of neighborhood children:

We did visit Murano Island, where they blow the glass Venice is famous for. It was kind of crummy — a shopping mall of glass. I don’t recommend it.

A couple of things that surprised me: The waters around Venice are so choppy! Of course there is so much boat traffic that they would be, but I am almost surprised there aren’t other forms of transportation, since it’s so slow and bumpy. You stop at a water bus stop and the bus sort of bashes into the side of the floating shelter, and then the wake makes the shelter bounce around, so that you are sort of catapulted on or off. I doubt this goes well for the elderly. I also just never knew how narrow some of the streets are there. In places you can spread your arms and touch the buildings that line each side of the street.

Here are some pretty pics. I really wished I had a better camera.

From the Rialto bridge:

Near our hotel in Sestieri Santa Croce:

The clothes Mabel removed in order to try on pants in the H&M dressing room:

• Jacket
• sweatshirt
• tank top
• sundress
• skirt
• doc martins
• jeans

The clothes Nick removed to try on pants in the H&M dressing room a few minutes before that:

• jacket 
• slip on sneakers
• track pants

and then realized that people might not see it very well. It’s Nick telling the story of the easter camp they attended at work — in Danish. He was a bit self-conscious at first.

http://thildeferieskole.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!4FF5AB4D64560458!210.entry

 Here’s a link to a project Nick created last week during a little IT camp they had here at work.

http://thildeferieskole.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!4FF5AB4D64560458!210.entryI think he was a bit nervous at first, so his voice was a bit dorkish, but he settled in and rambled on quite a lot. I’ll try to post Mabel another time.

I’m having trouble getting in the blog groove since the switch, and I don’t know if it’s just that that was a disruption, or if it’s that we have hit a mark here where things are not so new and worthy of comment, or if it’s maybe just winter. Anyway, I’ll try.

Yesterday we went to see Juno. It came out here this week, in a torrent of other Oscar faves, such as There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, and Atonement. It’s been a long dry spell of reading reviews of those movies, hearing interviews (I’m a little hooked on Fresh Air podcasts), but having no access. Anyway, I loved it. It was a delight. Many of you probably enjoyed it six months ago

For the shortest month of the year, February stretched on for ages. Finally James starts the permanent job on Tuesday. Nick is going to stay in the Danish as a second language program, rather than switch schools, so he won’t have to switch twice (due to our moving into Copenhagen this summer). He has been going to the after school program on a trial basis, in preparation for the time when he has to go there for real, and it’s been fine. This is the one we sent him to last year, and almost immediately pulled him out of again, because the kids were picking on him and there seemed no adult supervision. His Danish is quite good, and he knows the kids at school now, and is tight with Noi, the girl in his class, and these things seem to have made the experience a lot more comfortable. Now he just finds it boring. 

Noi has been coming over after school several days a week, and this has been great for Nick, but definitely a language challenge for me. She speaks Thai and Danish, so I have to cobble together sentences to try to communicate with her. It’s good practice, but I always feel like the moment has passed before I’ve squeaked a little something out. It’s probably for the best that I can’t really talk to her much though, because all the time I’m asking, “Er din far og mor hjemme?” (is you father or mother home) what I really want to know are things like, did you ever know your real father? Do you remember much about Thailand? What was your life like before you moved here? Is this really better? Do you like this guy you call far? Is he nice to you? Is he really nice to you?  Sometimes Nick goes to Noi’s house too. Yesterday her dad made them muffins. It’s just a really normal life, except the whole business of having brought a woman and her daughter from a completely different culture to this one to make a family aspect. And I can’t help it, I’m curious.

Speaking of Danish, classes begin again in mid-March. We learned of a school that’s teaching the curriculum of the school we attended last fall, before it was closed down, so Elona and I have signed up. I am happy to get back at it — the clock is ticking on my subsidized language training. And I’m very happy to resume this approach, the cramming of sentences approach, because I really thought it was doing the trick.

 So there you go.

It sounds like Denmark was recently in the news in the U.S. for once again being voted the happiest place on earth. And the thinking goes that some of this is due to just not having inflated expectations for things. For example, in the U.S., we are all just a little elbow grease away from fame, beauty, and wealth. In Denmark, well, they kind of already look like models, and people who drive expensive cars sometimes have to worry that the cars will be vandalized for being showy and for making the owners think too highly of themselves, and people live in often quite small apartments because housing is so expensive. Anyway, you’re never remarkable here, and you shouldn’t try to be. And that takes a lot of pressure off, I think, and maybe even lets people enjoy what they are doing without questioning whether it’s a good enough time, or comparing it to other people, who might be doing something else with better people or what have you. Also, so many events are sort of in the script — people spend their free time and their vacations and their holidays enjoying the same things as everyone else.

Anyway, I think we are experiencing a version of this in our house. I think it’s Mabel’s default to say she hates it here, and it’s boring, but I have noticed a bit of an upturn in her general mood. She is more even tempered and good humored. The change is palpable though I wouldn’t say this to her, as she would have to prove me wrong. And Nick says he likes Denmark and is happy. They still don’t have much going on, they still don’t have much social life, but they have achieved a level of general acceptance of this. So yesterday I took them downtown to meet a family considering moving here from Seattle for lunch, and that was fine, and then we did go to the small photo gallery I tried to take them to over the Christmas break, and that was pleasant, and then we did the grocery shopping on the way home. But the day was bright and they both said they had a good time. I’m not sure they would have said the same a year ago.

Part of this is that they don’t have a lot of activities, so just getting out in the world is a nice change.  But I also think that Mabel is in a funny place with school. She doesn’t like it. It’s much harder for her than it would be if she were working in English, and I don’t think her teachers or fellow students really understand that there is a gap between her intellect and her ability to understand them, or express herself. She’s still trapped in a pretty limited vocabulary.  But she doesn’t have the same expectations of school and friendships as she would if she were in an English language environment, and while it’s frustrating and maddening and often really boring, she doesn’t take it personally. So I sometimes wonder if she’s missing out on learning some formative lessons by not being exposed to the cruelty of girls at this age, or if she’s going to be better off in the long run without it, less damaged. Both kids know how to entertain themselves really well now, but do they also know how to be social, and enjoy and get along with other kids? I think it’s about 70-30 right now, and I’m going to bet that when circumstances change some day, that balance will shift accordingly.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and the first order of business today is to lay in some provisions. One grocery store in our town is open. The others are closed today, tomorrow, and the 2nd. I’ve been on vacation for a little over a week, and a level of dissipation has set in. We have all been staying up late, waking up late, hanging around too much, reading, watching too much tv, and scurrying out of the house at 2 or so, hoping to catch a few minutes of daylight before the sun goes down.

I have been trying to incorporate more walking in my daily life, so have been doing things like walking to the grocery store or the train station instead of taking the bus. The weather has been pretty cooperative so far — not especially cold or rainy. But these little trips to the store have pretty much punctuated the vacation. I took the kids into Copenhagen the other day, in an effort to visit a museum of photography, and it was closed through the new year, a fact they failed to mention on their Web site. So we walked around the pedestrian shopping streets a bit, checked out the few shops that were open, had a slice of pizza, and went home. Last night we went to see the Golden Compass, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. The kids have been in quite good spirits, and I think for Mabel, this is due to not having to go to school and deal with not understanding, and the boredom and isolation that involves. Nick is happy because he just likes to be home.

I failed to get a good pic of the kids when I tried on Christmas. But here are some nice ones from October, before they became all wintry and yellow, from a walk we took at Fredensborg palace, where Queen Margrethe spends her springs and falls.

Happy New Year everybody.

There have been a number of changes since the last time I wrote — back in the days before John decided to move to Ireland to be near his daughter and stuck his server and other worldly belongings on a freighter that may finally be nearing Dublin. For one, Mabel has switched schools. She’s in full-time Danish school now, with about 23 kids, and little English support. She can walk to school in about 10 minutes, which is a big improvement over the 40 minutes and 2 buses it was taking. So far, the school experience has been “fine.” There are 15 boys and 7 girls in the class, and they have apparently not discovered each other as friends or otherwise. The girls have been very nice to Mabel, but they are very feminine and into horses and she’s not especially excited about those things, and she still doesn’t feel like she’s fluent in Danish.  After the Christmas break, Nick will start at this school too, but his teacher is taking it a bit more slowly because he is anxious about change and because she wants to go with him, and be there to help him the first couple of days, and because when he leaves, there will only be one kid left in the class, Noi, the Thai girl who is his close buddy. Apparently Nick never speaks English at school anymore. That’s great progress. He brings home Danish books from the school library, for pleasure reading, and recently told me that the thing he likes about living here is learning a new language. So in that sense, things are going pretty well. In the sense that his teacher thinks he has ADHD, things are less great.

The other change is that James is working a full-time contract in my group for a few months, which means we are spending a lot of time together. This has its pros and cons. Of course, it’s great experience for him, and he is really happy to be going to work everyday with purpose. And I rather enjoy having someone to chat with during the commute and am ecstatic about the added cash.  We have to escort Nick partway to school, so we are getting to work fresh and early. But I feel like the weeks are so much longer now, and I think it’s because we are gone for about 10 hours every day, with the getting there early and doing a little grocery shopping on the way home. I used to just go to work and come home. Also, we have to do a whole new rejiggering of duties. It turns out I can’t just lie around like a husband from the 60s, with my drink and newspaper, waiting for the wife to finish the dinner and take care of the shopping and the laundry and getting the kids through their homework. I knew this day would come, I wanted this day to come, and I wouldn’t trade it for the financial strain that is the alternative, but as a result, I find myself cooking a pot roast, for about the second time ever. I didn’t purchase this roast, and probably wouldn’t have, but I am not so much doing the shopping as wandering the aisles while James selects the items. Then I find out later what, exactly, I’m supposed to be cooking. I took a look at this slab of beef, then got out the dictionary to narrow it down, and my mom’s old Joy of Cooking that’s coming apart in clumps, and with some heavy sighing and cross referencing and improvising of ingredients and converting of temperatures, got the thing in the oven.

Stan has kindly offered to let me hitch a ride on his server, and helped me get set up. I gave the blog a new name and a new look, and those things pretty much sapped my creative energy. Okay, the look part is a template and so it was a matter of choosing from hundreds. “På beløbet?” is a question you are asked just about every time you purchase something with your debit card here, especially at the grocery store, and means, “on the amount.” I don’t really know what it signifies as the name of my blog, but I enjoy it.

While you are in the neighborhood, I really recommend checking out Stan’s photos of Copenhagen. They are beautiful: http://www.rezio.net/photos/index.html