Danish Folk Metal, the Copenhagen Zoo, and Khloe's 13th Birthday (Part 1)!

What's up, friends and fam?! We totally have Spring Fever over here. The weather teases us just enough to make us excited before we get spattered with rain and wind again. Typical. Haha.

Everyone here continues to apologize for their weather and ask us if we are doing OK, and we continue to explain to them that we came from North Idaho and the weather there is very similar. We are not shocked. We are not depressed. We are not regretful. We are fine with it.

Look! Zac and I even rode to work several times already this year.

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One of the perks of moving to Europe is that all the European metal bands Zac loves are much more accessible here! There is a Danish folk-metal/black metal project called Myrkur that Zac has been a fan of for many years. They haven't played many shows lately, but recently, I saw they would be playing at Vega, a concert venue that our friend, Jacob, talks about all the time.

[Quick Tangent: Did you know that we're friends with a Danish rockstar? Jacob Ihlemann (Danish-ly pronounced kind of like YAH-kuhb EEh-luh-mehn) is a former member of Magtens Korridorer, a Danish rock band who got super famous when their song, Hestevise, was used as like the intro song or something for a popular radio show.

Jacob worked with me at ALK in Post Falls for about two years when I first started. He was on assignment there from Denmark, and even though he has since returned to his ALK job in Denmark, he has stayed in touch with our department in the U.S. Every time one of us visited Denmark for work, Jacob happily chauffeured us from Copenhagen to ALK each day, invited us for meals at his super cool apartment with his super cool wife, Christina, and took us out to do fun things. When Zac and I moved to Denmark, Jacob and Christina helped take excellent care of us. They gave us bikes, invited us in for visits, showed us the famous Louisiana museum of art, provided me with an amp to use...they are the best of humans.

Here's a video from a Magtens Korridorer concert at Vega where Jacob made a special appearance while he was home in Denmark on holiday during his tenure in Post Falls. (Red guitar, red shoes, black hoodie.) Vega is Jacob's favorite concert venue, and we were proud to tell him that now, we've been there, too!]

Anyway, I always browse Vega to see who is playing, and when I saw Myrkur was going to play there, I got us tickets. We made a date night out of it, so that was fun. We made dinner reservations at Little Brother, a pizza place that was recommended to us by an Italian guy in our Danish class when we complained that none of the pizza here was good Italian-style pizza. The food was yummy, the restaurant was cozy, and the cocktails were delicious.

After pizza, we went back to the Dia'legd Ølbar, a beer bar that we found on accident when Katie and Jack were visiting and our intended drinking venue was roped off by the police. We got the same cozy booth we had on Zac's birthday and enjoyed the most hygge beer ever.

It was a 15-minute walk over to Vega. We checked our coats, bought a beer at the bar (Tuborg, but still...), and found a good spot in the center of the room.

The supporting musician was Jo Quail, a really cool cellist from the U.K. She performed solo with an electric cello and a loop pedal, and basically composed each song in front of us in real time. It was primal and classical and nordic and everything all rolled into one. I enjoyed it a lot.

Myrkur was very enjoyable live, too. Amalie Bruun plays a variety of instruments and is very talented, but she's super humble about it. I don't always like listening to Myrkur albums at home when Zac plays them, but I'm a sucker for live music, and I had a good time.

I was quite surprised by the concert-goers. In contrast to metal concerts in the U.S., there were approximately as many females as males, and every single person smelled like clean laundry. It was much nicer to be packed into a room with adequate ventilation and no B.O.

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Lest you think we only go out and do things without the kids, here is an account of our trip to the zoo!

Zoo København is a zoo situated in the middle of Copenhagen (technically, it's in Frederiksberg, which is its own municipality within the confines of Copenhagen), next to Frederiksberg Have and Frederiksberg Slot. (You might remember from our Week 2 post when we walked through the park and saw the zoo's elephants over the fence from the pathway.)

I made up my mind to buy everyone in our family annual passes to the zoo. Not that we live super close to it or anything, but by the magic of Instagram, I saw they had a baby elephant AND a baby tiger cub. The elephant has made an appearance already, and the baby tiger won't be out for viewing for at least two months. This clearly means that we are going to the zoo at least twice this year, the zoo pass is the price of two admissions, hence, zoo passes.

We did not go to the elephants first, we meandered through the whole zoo, but I didn't want to make *you* wait to see little Chin.

It's not the biggest, most diverse, or most original zoo I've ever been to, and it doesn't have a massive insect house or a botanical garden, but it's a really good zoo. This is my first non-American zoo, and you can definitely tell. The give-away is that the barriers between humans and animals are very minimal and there are many super clear viewing opportunities. Could you reach out and touch a Tasmanian devil? Yes. Could you easily hop off a little walking bridge onto the back of a massive rhinoceros? Yes. Could a sloth just come down off its branch and sit on your shoulder if it felt like it? Absolutely. But these things just don't happen here. It made for a very nice experience.

There are tons of things for kids at this zoo: playgrounds, petting zoos, mazes, and lots more.

I said they didn't have a HUGE insect house, not that they didn't have insects. They were beautiful.

Khloe really liked the poison frogs.

I liked the giant cave cockroaches. I also found cockroaches of other species casually hanging out in some of the other enclosures. I'm sure they were not supposed to be there, but even with my poor vision, I can pick out cockroach friends.

The ring-tailed lemurs were sunbathing hard. I couldn't get a good line of sight on the tiny baby, but it was so small and fuzzy!

I have a much closer picture of a meerkat, but unfortunately, I didn't notice the fresh (and oddly HUGE) pile of poo next to its head, so I'll post this one instead. No poop.

Rhinos running under our feet.

I know it would tear me to shreds, but they look so snuggly!

This polar bear was super interested in everything going on along the fence line.

Zebras! One is for sure pregnant. We will have to go back for baby zebra.

Harrison was actually very excited to go to the zoo, because in school, they had read a book about the zoo, and they learned that one of the ostrich's names was Rasmus. He wanted very badly to see Rasmus. I don't know if the book was current or if it was non-fiction, but we rolled with it. We found an ostrich that we called Rasmus, but when he was very close to us for good photos, Harrison realized he had lost his phone crawling through a cave or something by the bears, so we had to go retrieve it from the entrance and never got super close to the ostriches again.

"Rasmus."

The other thing he was excited to see was the hippo enclosure. I'm sure you all remember Harrison's best stuffed friend, Hip-Hop. Harrison promised Hip-Hop we would say hi to his hippo friends (or flodheste in Danish - this translates to "river horses"). The big male hippo put on quite a show for us with his swimming and yawning and explosive poop showers. Quite a show.

Harrison stopped to learn things! He read facts and then shared them with us as we left the elephant space.

...and I know I said they don't have botanical gardens there, but they do have a carnivorous plant terrarium.

Here's the sloth that scratched furiously just above my head as I panned up to take its picture, and I'm sure I brought home some sweet sloth hair. Or nits. Who knows?

My glasses fogged up instantly when I walked into the butterfly and sloth and bird enclosure. I took them off and somehow found this amazing contraption. Do all humidified enclosures have this? If so, I've never seen one (for obvious reasons), and if not, WHY NOT?

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And we have another teenager in the house now!! Khloe turned 13 on the 15th of March. It was a school day, but it was also a Friday, so Zac made the dinner she requested (chicken broccoli rice casserole) and we bought Ben & Jerry's pints for dessert.

After dinner and dessert, she opened a few presents from you all!

She has been playing ukulele in school a little and might get to play a song for the spring concert coming up! Zac tuned her new ukulele from Aunt Katie and Uncle Jack, and she showed us one of the songs she's been working on.

We're off to London for Part 2 of this little Hufflepuff's 13th birthday celebration next week to do all things Harry Potter.

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So what else has been going on?

Harrison has been feeling pretty artsy lately. At school, the kids were asked to draw their shoes, and everyone voted Harrison's as the most true to the source material.

He's also missing some teeth! He lost his two front teeth within a couple weeks of each other and was quite pleased with all the Danish kroner under his pillow.

Sorry. I only have a picture after he lost the first one.

It was book week last week, and Harrison had to complete a reading challenge BINGO card. One of the squares said, "Read to someone younger than you," and another said, "Read to someone via video chat," so he took care of both of them at the same time. We called his little cousin, Donnie, who very respectfully sat through The Very Hungry Caterpillar as Harrison read it and showed him the pictures on WhatsApp.

This kid loves a good chapter book now!

He also got super excited about the basketball unit in P.E. He came home super stoked every Tuesday talking about how him and his friends scored all the points. Just like Kaden did a few weeks prior, Harrison got to play for the North Zealand International School team in the tournament against the other local international schools. (He wrote a little blog post about it!)

He's a busy boy. He spends half his time on screens playing Minecraft and the other half playing outside, riding bikes, going for walks, and hitting things with sticks.

He made us a St. Patrick's Day treasure hunt, too. It was cute and we got chocolate gold coins at the end. I don't know where these coins were made, but they tasted WAY better than any other chocolate coin we'd ever eaten before.

There were a lot of steps I didn't include, but suffice it to say he really led us around the house and there were hot/cold games, clues from toys...the works!

And I guess we've reached the part of the blog where I just give you some random one-off updates that don't connect with anything else:

I wasn't surprised about the Christmas beers (Julbryg), but I was surprised to see an Easter beer. Yes, it was different, and yes, it was good.

I listen to this podcast called Coping in Copenhagen for immigrants. It's hosted by an American, an Irishman, and a Dane. They solicit listeners for cultural topics to discuss on Mondays, and I emailed them about the weird Danish phenomenon that is the mass tooth-picking at the table every day after lunch. It got on the podcast and was the title of the whole episode!

Some parties in Denmark are as worried about America as we are. There are these bus ads sponsored by the Socialistisk Folkeparti, where the hubcaps are Trump's eyes, but they are offset so they roll around as the bus drives, and the bus says, "If this is America, we need a united Europe."

Zac and I both passed our Danish language module 3.1 test! We had sushi to celebrate and it was delicious.

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That's it for now! We hope everyone has a good Easter. We're thinking of you all and we miss you!