Godt Nytår

Happy New Year to all. We're back after a very nice Christmas trip to the states. We enjoyed seeing many friends and family. We returned to Copenhagen on the morning of New Year's Day to find it very quiet but with lots of spent fireworks covering the streets. It must have been quite a show. I'm sure the cats were not amused. Here, instead of having community fireworks displays like the Independence Day celebrations in the U.S., people buy their own fireworks and set them off in the streets or in parks, etc. We'll have to see what it's like next year.

When we got back from our trip we found Kevin (our newly-identified Norwegian Forest Cat or norsk skovkat in Danish) even fluffier than before. It turns out that the reduced sunlight in the fall/winter triggers his coat to grow out. He'll shed in the spring, so we'd better have the vacuum ready. He never went through this cycle when we lived in Houston because the light change was not so dramatic. Speaking of the changing light, we're on the upswing now and it's already noticeably brighter than when we left.

Today we took a nice bike ride to a park between Emdrup and Husum on the north side of the city. We saw lots of birds, mostly ducks, herons, and swans. We also visited a large church (Grundtvigs Kirke click on "Galleri 2" or "Galleri 3" to see photos) and ate lunch at a cafe.