Sunday, December 17, 2006

Glædelig Jul!

We are enjoying the Christmas season in Copenhagen. We took another walk last night to see the skating rink at Kongens Nytorv and browse the Julemarked along Nyhavn. Next time we may actually rent skates and try out the ice for ourselves. The lights around the square are beautiful and it was crowded on the ice and on the streets.

Last weekend we attended our choir's Julefrokost. We had traditional food including a herring course (three kinds + marinated, roasted, and "curry" - in a mustard sauce). Second course was various kinds of pork including the traditional flæskesteg. There was a dessert of rice pudding and beer, wine, and snaps. The meal was catered in a badminton clubhouse. Badminton is big here, not just for picnics.

During the meal we sang a few songs including "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer" in Danish, Whisky in the Jar, When you Wish Upon a Star, and some others I have since forgotten. We also sang "skål" songs for the frequent toasts during the meal. We held a gift exchange after dinner where everyone brought a gift then people took turns rolling a die (have to roll a six) to see who could pick a (wrapped) gift from the gift table. When those were gone, the game continued with people stealing gifts from other people until time expired. I ended the game with a DVD ("Phone Booth") and bubbles. Between activities and songs we got to know some of our fellow choir members better. Much of the entertainment came from the other group in the room, 20 or so new aspiring police trainees. They had started before we arrived and were still going strong (more or less) when we left. So, we survived Julefrokost season. It was fun and we look forward to it next year.

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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Sun and sand

I can't write much about Denmark today because I spent the last week in the Middle East (my first visit). I was in Qatar for three days followed by two days in Oman. In Qatar (besides working) we attended the Asian Games being held in Doha. We also went to a shopping mall in search of dinner. After searching high and low we settled for Applebee's. It was a bit strange - it could have been Kansas City. Qatar is certainly open to products and franchises from the U.S. (Burger King, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, KFC, Starbucks and so on).

The Asian Games were lots of fun. I read that they're trying to get the 2016 Olympics, so this was a bit of a test run. Turns out that they didn't have enough hotel rooms, so they couldn't accept lots of visitors from outside. That's okay, because plenty of outside visitors are already in the country doing virtually all of the work in Qatar (mostly from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Phillipines). At the games we saw badminton where the Chinese won the woman's gold medal.

The other event we saw was Kabbadi.
This was a bizarre game combining the finer points of tag and tackle (American) football on a tennis court. Two teams of seven take turns sending a player to the opposing side where he tags an opponent and tries to return to his side while being tackled all in a single breath. China is clearly getting geared up for the 2008 Olympics, getting more gold medals than the rest of the countries combined.

The most striking thing about Qatar is the amount of construction that is underway. It has already in the span of six years built more office towers than there were in downtown Houston, and there are more than 20 tower cranes in operation. A funny thing was that they almost invariably built the office towers in twos. "Why build one when you can build two" seems to be the motto. I'd like to go back in five years to see how it has changed.
Oman was a nice place. We spent most of our time in the mountains where it could sometimes look like west Texas, except for the camels. One night we had free time to explore Nizwa where we saw the restored wall around the old town along with various shops. The weather was nice, 25C/77F and sunny, a big change from here. Both countries were very safe. Gas prices were 50 cents/gallon in Qatar and 70 cents/gallon in Oman (if I did all of my conversions correctly). Most everyone in Qatar drove large SUV's. Not unlike Houston a few years ago.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Ugh.

Not much exciting here. I've caught Alexa's cold which she caught from the kindergarten where she teaches. One thing we hadn't anticipated is that being a teacher in a new country opens a person up to a whole new suite of bugs to which we're now building our immunity (the hard way). This is the second episode, not as bad as the first.

On another topic, across the harbor from my office is a cannon which is fired off to mark sunrise and sunset every day. Well, not exactly. Until a few weeks ago it sounded off at 8:00AM and again at sunset. Now that sunrise comes after 8:00AM and sunset gets earlier and earlier, I am left with the suspicion that someday soon they will just merge together to one shot as the sun peaks over the horizon and settles down again. Of course, that won't happen as we're far south of the arctic circle, but it looks like we will be getting down to about 7 hours of daylight by the time of the winter solstice (8:37AM-3:38PM).

Christmas party season continues. Our choir will be holding their party (or Julefrokost) next Saturday. That will include lots of singing, so maybe we can learn some traditional songs. Will keep you posted. Otherwise, we are enjoying the decorations and working up the courage to try out the ice skating track set up in one of the main squares downtown.