Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (God Jul og Godt Nytår)

Christmas has come and gone. Hopefully it was merry for everyone reading this. This year we stayed in Denmark over the holiday. We missed our family and friends in the U.S., but we happily also missed the blizzard that would have greeted us the weekend before Christmas. Anya enjoyed the holiday, especially anything associated with Santa. Several stores in our area had mechanical Santa figures which caught her attention. We may have encouraged her by stopping to see them when we went out to walk. The best part was visiting Santa in his sleigh at Tivoli. Anya was amazed to finally meet the "real" Santa. Santa/Julemanden was very nice. He told us that he's going back to Greenland on the 31st and will take a week-long nap.

The focus of attention here before Christmas was the COP15 climate conference. There were lots of protests and noticeably more people in town. Copenhagen is not a big city, so the addition of 50-75 thousand people makes quite an impact. Only once did I get close to a protest. I was on my way home from working on a Sunday (a rare occurrence) just after noon and stopped at the grocery store by the train station near our apartment. When I came out, there was a protest march passing by, surrounded by police on foot and in police wagons. Shortly after I saw them, the protest was broken up and many of the protesters detained.

One trend that was noticeable during the climate conference was that it steadily got colder during the talks. By the weekend after the conference, the lake near our apartment had frozen over and the swans and ducks were reduced to either sharing a patch of water the size of our kitchen or waddling across the ice to scavenge for a bite to eat. It stayed frozen over Christmas. The day after Christmas, we went out with some stale bread to feed the ducks. With the ice on the path, the cold weather, and many people being out of town for the holiday, the ducks and swans (and coots and gulls and terns) were not getting the handouts they've grown accustomed to. They got assertive and some ducks even climbed up on the backs of swans to try to get some of the bread.

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In closing, we'd like to wish you all the best for a happy, heathy and peaceful 2010.