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:

     I decided it’s time for a new theme — the cherry blossoms were sweet, but the whole blog look seemed a little flat and stark to me. So I’m going to try some stuff and things might be a little disrupted around this joint until I get it squared away. Ha ha! As though my complete silence for weeks at a time could be disrupted!

     But we are doing okay here and I appreciate all the support and nice thoughts! Thank you. I will let you know re horse’s head Laurell.

     The main reason for the silence has actually just been a major work deadline, that required much overtime. So that is finished, and now I have one more week before I start my very Danish three-week vacation. That’s three weeks in a row. I think the last time I had that was in 1996, when I was still teaching. We’re shipping the kids off to Cincinnati to visit my parents, and then James and I are going to have a lot of together time, which will also be an unusual experience. In addition to making some plans for the future, we are heading to Venice for five days in there. So there’s lots to look forward to.

     And summer in Denmark is so pretty. It’s the reason people live here. The skies are often blue, and the temps hang in the moderate mid-70s. I’ve been biking to work more often than not, and it’s a pleasure.

     We have signed Mabel up for a new school for the coming year. She couldn’t face returning to the local school, and the international schools are full. We asked our kommune to subsidize her enrollment in a relatively nearby Swedish international school (it’s public, so they don’t have formal tuition) but the kommune said no. For a bit, we settled in with the plan to homeschool Mabel this fall, which was pretty much the death knell on our time in Copenhagen. But then Mabel decided to give it one last shot at a Danish school, so we found a public school downtown that has a few qualities that might make for a better experience for her. For one, it’s in the city, so the students will likely not be so horsey. And this school has a Danish as a second language program, as well as several English speaking kids, so there is a better understanding of the needs of foreigners. And they have mixed up the classes at her grade level in the past year, so the friendships are not so entrenched, and should make the students more open. And our friends are sending their kids there, so while they are a different age and stage of Danish, I think that will add a nice sense of community to the experience. Best of all, Mabel is really up for the change. She’s up for the hour-long commute each way, and she’s up for trying out a new place and new group, with the understanding that she has to make a better effort to be outgoing and approachable. She feels like her language skills have really come along, and I think this will make for a much better transition for her. So we are hopeful.

A coworker told me he had to drive his sons to their high school exams because they had to bring their own printers. They are allowed to write the exams on their laptops, but the schools don’t have the facilities to print so many exams out. Ahhhh! That explained the kid lugging a barrel-sized printer onto the bus yesterday. And the other kid, also printer laden,  trundling down the sidewalk in the afternoon.

It’s been a completely shitty month. James lost his job, and though this seems to have been a sort of procedural/political issue, he wasn’t really given any good information on why, largely due to his manager crying the whole time she was firing him.  He is depressed, disappointed, angry, confused.  And all our plans are pretty much screwed. We won’t be moving downtown — that’s the one thing that’s pretty certain at this point. The rest remains to be seen.

And two friends have lost parents this week, which is just so much more devastating. I don’t really have words. It’s petty to talk about the weather, but I actually think if it weren’t for the fact that we have been having 18 hour days, blue skies, and warmth, all of this would be unmanageable. Right now, it’s barely manageable.

Well, that is about all there is to say. Sorry for the gloom.

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

The last couple of Easter breaks we have gone away for the week. But this time, we are waiting it out, in a combo of not really feeling like contending with the masses shifting their way around the various cities of Europe, and wanting to save a bit of kroner for the eventual move. Still, I took Tuesday and Wednesday off, specifically because Mabel and Nick were doing a three-day IT camp at Microsoft, which meant I could be home alone for about 8 hours each day. I mentioned this plan to a coworker with kids and she said, “that is heaven.” And it was, at least the first day. I watched a movie, did a tiny tiny little bit of writing, read, napped. It was delicious. The second day, the cracks began to show a little. I started to get a little itchy, a little restless. I did a bit more writing — just enough to get a fix on the decrepitude, the complete festering rot that remains of my writing ability/enthusiasm. This was a bit painful, and then I read this article in the New Yorker, about Nico Muhly, a 26 year-old composer who had done more creative work by the age of 15 than I have done by 42. And that made me feel even better.

There are people like this guy who are sort of irrepressible in their creativity, like they can hardly stop themselves, it just has to come out. And people like them tend to think that if it’s not gushing out of you, then you should just become an insurance adjuster. In fairness, Nico Muhly, seems quite pleasant and never said any such thing in the article. But I assume it’s the people who gush who assert that those who don’t should just give up. I don’t really believe this is true, but it makes me panic a little. So I console myself by thinking about a woman who had a story in a collection sometime in the last 10 years, who said she had to take up jogging to get herself to write, and this makes excellent sense to those of us who can forget to do either writing or exercise for months at a time because we are distracted by the Simpsons and having jobs.

Anyway, here is what I am attempting to do now: make kulfi (Indian cardamom ice cream). A couple of months ago, James and I went to a French restaurant downtown where they served kulfi for dessert, and I have been craving it ever since. So I found a pretty simple recipe, which is to combine the following ingredients and then pour the mixture in popsicle cups and freeze:

Sounds easy enough, but I couldn’t find evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk, or even dried milk, so I am attempting to evaporate and then sweeten it on my own. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

 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.

Today James signed a contract for a full-time position, working for the man. Or really, the woman. He is going to be an editor, and is really excited, ready to have a full-time career, and I am ready for the relief of another income in the family, and being able to travel and do nice things for the kids. So this puts a few other things in motion, like we’ll move into Copenhagen this summer, and get a dog (I want a dog so much!) and two cats (the kids want cats so much!) and I guess I will get back on it for the last 9 months of subsidized Danish lessons I have coming in this country.

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.