Life on the Road - Kobenhavn

We got up early yesterday and took the train into Kobenhavn - what a beautiful city!! Our first adventure was to go on a walking tour with Hans Christian Anderson, an American who fell in love with a Dane 25 years ago and stayed. He dresses and acts as if he were Hans himself - a very interesting and likeable fellow and extremely informative. He says he always has special topics for each of his tours and today's topics were commerce and welfare. So the Danes, while still very steeped in fishing and agriculture, have now established themselves as one of the pre-eminent manufacturers of highest quality specialty products in the world - Bang and Olafsen, Ecco, farm equipment, drugs, they make over 1/2 the large windfarm mills in the world, etc. The welfare side is more extensive than I had imagined - income tax hits most at 52% while the 25% VAT is on top of that! For that they all get totally free medical, education (university students also get $1000 a month for food, books, etc.), and end of life care, plus they all get six weeks of vacation a year, and a pension for life. The wages are pretty controlled from laborers at $20k to doctors at $120k. The tax on a new car is 180% - no wonder they all ride bikes! The tour was excellent, so if in Kobenhavn, take a walk with Hans.

This is a walking/biking city - there are free bikes around for anyone's use, but we could never find two available, so we walked and walked. The mile-long Stroget through the old city is just jam packed with people at just about any time of day and is all retail, cafes and bars - all very busy. It is holiday time here, so most of the tourists were Danes. There are miles of canals throughout the city so we took a canal tour to rest our feet. This is also a great way to get an overview of everything you want to go back to and visit. Most of the old city was destroyed by fire in the 1800's so the old buildings are not ancient. Some of the new architecture is jaw dropping - the opera house, the Black Diamond library, and the Royal Danish Playhouse are all spectacular.

We ended up the long day by visiting Tivoli Gardens - no doubt this was Disney's inspiration for Disneyland. Beautiful grounds with lovely gardens, ponds and flowers everywhere. But they also had rides for the younger set - some appeared so dangerous that they would never be seen in the US. About 40 restaurants, all private, are also on the property, so to celebrate BJ's birthday, she picked - tah dah - the Hard Rock Cafe!! After two weeks of dining "locally," we were both delighted to dive into some good Memphis pulled pork, along with a margarita. We strolled the grounds holding hands just like all the Danes, but ran out of juice about 10:30 and caught the train home. On Monday, we take off for a week long train trip into Sweden and Norway which will be our next adventure - on the road.

Stay in touch,

Al & BJ

Life on the Road - Denmark

Ah, Denmark - the happiest place on earth! We landed in Kobenhavn, found the parking office, paid and picked up the keys to the two awaiting cars Nicolai had left for us (something we could never do at a US airport). Both cars (a SmartCar and an MBZ) were both equipped with GPS so the girls wanted to drive the SmartCar while Bill and I got the Mercedes. Naturally the girls' GPS worked perfectly, and ours probably did as well, but of course the two macho guys decided to use the map because that felt like the right thing to do (we didn't admit until later that we couldn't figure out our GPS).

We found our delightful little village of Glumsoe, about 45 minutes outside of Kobenhavn, and drove right up to our home for the next month. A neat place - better than the pictures on HomeExchange - we are going to be very comfortable here. It's an older farm house type home, but has been completely modernized and sits on about an acre of well maintained land with fruit trees, lawn, and a very nice brick patio with table and umbrella. We can walk everywhere in town and have done so on a daily basis. We found an excellent and surprisingly large market, a scrumptious bakery, an ATM, several small restaurants, a pretty little lake, and walking paths everywhere. We shopped and began to settle in. Nicolai is Director of IT for Metropolitan University in Kobenhavn and his home reflects it. I went for the computer system while Bill took on the Sonos music system - suffice it to say that both are still works in progress.

Bill and Micki had been to Kobenhavn several times, but had never spent any time outside of the city, so we decided to focus their week on the surrounding environs. Wow, what a terrific choice that has turned out to be! Over the next week we explored by setting the GPS to the next town of our choice. We had breakfast in every morning, then took off. There are helpful tourist offices everywhere and we can always find someone who speaks English - good thing, as Danish is an extremely difficult language to learn and especially to pronounce. The sea is within a 1/2 hour in just about any direction so we explored ports, harbors, islands, cliffs, gardens, castles and manor homes, museums and managed to find an outdoor cafe whenever we were hungry for lunch where we explored the quite different food options which were always washed down with a cold Tuborg. And for dessert, Bill and I ogled and confirmed that there are many, many beautiful, blond Danish women. We generally drug ourselves home in the evening, cooked out over an unusual BBQ and ate and drank good wine on the patio until quite late as it doesn't get dark here until close to 11pm. The countryside is just beautiful - very agricultural inland with fishing and harbors along the coast. It is also the cleanest, neatest, most organized place any of us have ever seen. For one whole week now, and we have driven many kilometers, we have not seen one slum, no abandoned cars nor farm equipment, no untended lawns or houses, no homeless, nothing to discredit the "most happy" claim. Granted that Denmark is very expensive with a VAT of about 25% and total taxes pushing 45%, but they seem to accept that price for full medical and educational plus a nice retirement. They seem to feel that they all contributed, so they don't seem to have the haves and the have nots. We may be heading that way in the US, tax wise, but we sure won't be able to get over the fact that way too many of our "citizens" have never contributed anything.

Bill and Micki left yesterday for home and BJ and I took today as a much needed down day after two weeks of non-stop touristing. Tomorrow we are taking the train into Kobenhavn to celebrate BJ's birthday - dancing under the stars at the Tivoli.

Life on the Road - London

Hello to all:

We arrived in London mid-morning on July 9. Heathrow airport is immense with five terminals, all with different transportation and access systems. We had purchased a London Pass with the travel option in advance (which, by the way, we highly recommend), so we set out to find the Heathrow Connect Rail line which was included in our pass. Dragging our cases, we spent the next two hours finding, riding and changing trains, arriving at Paddington Station to find we needed to travel yet further on a bus (not meant for four large suitcases), then got off at the wrong Marriott and had to drag the suitcases through the City for another 1/2 hour to find our Marriott which turned out to be in the heart of the middle-Eastern community in London - more about that later. And, adding to the fun, we found out that we had arrived on the hottest day of the year - it was pushing 90!

We met up with our friends, Bill and Micki, who will spend the next two weeks with us, and all felt much better after a cold beer or so. B&M are experienced Londoneers, so we were happy to follow their lead. We had terrific weather all week - warm and sunny, so we were happy and very much at home in shorts every day. The transportation system throughout London is wonderful (providing you are not hauling suitcases) and we went everywhere using buses, the underground (mighty hot and sweaty on hot London days), and the rail system - all fully covered by our London Pass. We think we paid for the Pass just on transportation alone, plus entry to all the castles, museums, etc. was also included.

Over the next five days we did all the expected things: Covent Garden (the pubs were packed and all were spilled out onto the sidewalk because of the hot weather - drinking in the street is not allowed, but sidewalk imbibing is jolly good fun), the Tower Bridge with a walk along the Thames (I'll break here for a side story)

We lunched in an outdoor cafe on the river and asked the server for ice teas. He wasn't sure if they had that, but after checking, brought us four ice teas. We later asked him for refills. When we got our bill, we discovered that eight ice teas cost us 64£ (about $100). We were shocked and outraged, but they covered themselves by showing us on the bar menu that we had ordered non-alcoholic cocktails at 8£ apiece. Since then, everythíng we buy is compared to the cost of ice tea.

Back to the travelogue: we did the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace,the Queens Gallery, the Mews (where Bill, a newly minted Wyoming mountain man, just about got arrested for having a hunting knife in his backpack) , Hyde Park, Green Park, Regents Park, St. James Park, Hampton Court, and on and on. Some of the highlights were Windsor Castle - a great tour, the Churchill War Rooms - absolutely fascinating, and we saw a wonderful musical - We Will Rock You - in SoHo. We also watched the final World Cup match in a bar surrounded by lots of guys who probably couldn't get past our TSA folks. Luckily they were all cheering for Spain, so we all left happy.

London is incredibly worldly and cosmopolitan - also very, very expensive. The food was generally mediocre until we finally asked the concierge for his favorite restaurant. He apologized that it was in SoHo and we would have to take the tube, and that it was Indian. We are all fans of Indian food and were we pleased! One of the best meals any of us had ever had - an absolute 10! Is is The Red Fort and don't miss it if you love Indian cuisine - it's also a great value. We also met a delightful pub owner - The Duke of York - also a fun experience. But every evening, we had to go back to the hotel and the last five blocks we walked from the tube was entirely middle-east - burkhas, hookahs, lots of cigarette smoking, and not a Brit in sight.

We were wrapping up our London adventure - it was great to have M&B to show us around so be sure to invite them on your next trip there. We were next off to Denmark. We got to Heathrow a lot quicker and a lot smarter than our arrival, but found the crowd in Terminal 3 almost impassable. Naturally BJ and I had our baggage searched and we had too many items in too large plastic bags, so spent about 1/2 hour with the friendly security folks. Then we got in this huge line to check in, worrying if we had enough time to get to the plane. Then, thank God for racial profiling, a tall young man worked his way through the crowd and asked if we were really going to Beirut! We were clearly the only anglos in that line. He steered us to the SAS line where we breathed a huge sigh of relief and headed off for Copenhagen.