Category Archives: Travel

I’d only been to Sweden once before — to Malmø on a slow Sunday afternoon — and I wasn’t impressed. Or in a hurry to get back (that was almost two years ago.) This time I saw a very different part of Sweden, and would welcome the opportunity to go back.

Lisbeth and her sister Hanne had been in Sweden for a week, canoeing and camping. They were joined by Hanne’s boyfriend Kaspar, and two of their friends Søren and Lotte from the collective where they live. But they didn’t come to canoe. They came for rock climbing.

The area where we were, Kullen, has very rugged terrain. It’s pretty much rock coming straight out of the ocean. The scenery is stunning, but it’s hostile too. Everything is rocky. There’s no sand on these beaches, just big rocks.

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In Denmark we get five days off for easter (if you count the weekend), so Lisbeth and I decided it was a good time to go see Berlin. I’d never been there, and she’d only been there briefly as a teenager.

Day 1

We walked about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) on the first day, starting at the Sunflower Hostel where we stayed and ending in a completely different part of town. We started by waking toward the center of town, down Karl Marx Alle, which is a really wide boulveard that the communists used for parades and such.

It’s an impressive street. It’s entirely symmetric. Each building has an exact mirror copy on the other side — something that’s hard to capture with a camera. It’s also hard to say how much of it seems strange just because you know you’re in an area that was under tight state control until relatively recently. Read More →

We spent last week skiing in Hovden, Norway with Lisbeth’s family. For me it was fun for several reasons. For one thing, I’d never been to Norway before. I’d also decided years ago that I hated skiing, and that I’d never do it again, so enjoying myself was a pleasant surprise.

We met in Vejle, at Lisbeth’s parents house on Saturday, where we spent the day leisurely shopping for supplies, packing, and, eating, visiting. We went for a walk after dinner, before we got serious about loading the cars. It was a very pretty evening.

We took two cars, one with Lisbeth’s brother Mogens’ family — his wife Anne and their three girls, and one with me, Lisbeth, Lisbeth’s sister Hanne, and her boyfriend Kaspar. Both cars were heavily loaded — there wasn’t much room to move around, but most of it was blankets, pillows, and coats, so it wasn’t uncomfortable. We drove for about three hours, up to Hirtshals, quite close to the very Northern-most tip of Denmark, where we took a ferry from there to Kristiansand, Norway. Read More →

Codehouse, my new employer, threw their Christmas party in London this year, despite the fact that Copenhagen is the headquarters. They flew us over on Friday afternoon and we had a nice dinner. Most people went back on Saturday, but Lisbeth and I opted to stay for the weekend.

On Saturday morning, a few of us that weren’t incredibly hung-over went to the Borough Market – a market that has apparently been around for 20 centuries, but “only” 250 years at its current location. It’s an amazing market, and there were enough samples thatwe didn’t need breakfast.

But not everything was appetizing. I had some cheese that tasted exactly how Iimagine a sheep’s brainwouldtaste, for example. And, although I love seafood and even sushi, the seafood at the market seemed… too fresh. Notice all the blood oozing from the shark. Read More →

Lisbeth and I went to Dublin earlier this month for four days. She was attending a class at the Microsoft Dublin campus, and I just tagged along for the fun of it. Neither one of us had been to Ireland before, and we were looking forward to, among other things, hearing Irish accents and drinking some Guinness.

For the weekend we stayed at Trinity College, which rents some of its dorm rooms out during the summer break. It’s a really nice campus in the heart of the city, so it’s a fantastic place to stay.

One thing that surprised me about Dublin is that all the public signs are both in English and in Gaelic. I thought Gaelic was pretty much dead, but apparently there is a movement to keep it alive. In fact, in Western Ireland, English town names have no legality in government documents or survey maps, and English has been banned from use on road signs.

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