A Nice Easter Break

Hi again, friends and family!

We're having a beautiful and busy forår here in Denmark. Things are turning green and sometimes, the sun shines!

We've enjoyed some lovely walks in the forest, complete with climbing on fallen trees and throwing rocks in the lake. It's really nice when that's all in your backyard!

My (inherited) Chinese hibiscus put out some flowers, so I must be doing something right. I made an attempt to fertilize both of the flowers with pollen from the opposite flower. We'll see if I can get some seed pods!

Kaden's class went on a trip to Airtrix, the trampoline park, and he had a fun sleepover with some of his friends from school. They took the train in to Reffen on opening weekend (the big food truck area) to eat some delicious food and experience the hype. He has a good time when he gets out and about!

We do cool stuff, too. For example, we ordered from the Hjem-IS truck for the first time ever! The Hjem-IS truck is a big blue truck that drives around (kind of like Schwann's in the U.S.), and it rings its bell and waits around like an ice cream truck. You can run out and buy boxes (not single treats) of ice cream and other frozen goods right off the truck. One more step toward our Danish transition is complete!

Oh, and Grandma Iris's Christmas card finally arrived in the week before Easter...what a fun surprise! (It was post-marked just after Thanksgiving.)

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I had to travel to the U.S. for work the week before the kids' Easter break. I think it's actually very nice that I get that opportunity once in a while - I should never complain about being sent on a free trip to see my family and friends!

Matt flew in from Portland to hang out before my working days started, so we were able to get some good beer, some good coffee, and some good pizza. We got to see Jeff and watch Drop Out together. No matter what we do, it's always nice to see my brother!

We also got to visit with Kami and the kids, play games with Grandma Iris and Mom, and chat with our Great-Aunt Fran and Great-Uncle Larry. It was a whirlwind of a family reunion, and I think I have my nieces and nephews convinced that they need to come for a visit!

Grandma Iris spent some time going through a huge box of family history with us. We got to see photos of loved ones who passed away when we were young, as well as photos of my great-grandmother's parents and their parents and siblings. We saw Grandma Iris's ration booklets from World War II, read letters and historical accounts and newspaper articles, and listened to stories that Grandma knew about each person. It was very cool.

I always knew my great-grandmother's family was from Norway, but I never knew where they were from, so this box gave me lots of places to look up. Actually, my great-grandmother's birth certificate and my great-great-grandmother's birth certificate are in Norwegian, which is very close to Danish, and I was excited that I could read the scripts written on them!

I was incredibly tired the entire time because for some reason, I just couldn't seem to adjust, but it was still a pretty great trip. I was overbooked, once again, and I didn't get to see everyone I wanted to, but I tried hard to make the most of it and fit visits in wherever I could!

We won trivia at Precious Things!

Our work meetings were super well organized and facilitated some great discussions. It was a pretty smooth trip overall, but I was very happy to be back home with the family!

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Sadly, my trip meant that I missed out on a lot of cool stuff in Kaden's extra-curricular life. Baseball has been really exciting for him lately!

He was asked to play for the U18 team (the age group above his) since he was available and they needed another player. Zac and I had to drop him off at the field just before I was supposed to be at the airport for my flight to the U.S. We had to miss his first game!

Kaden had three times at bat and played right field. He had a fun time but was a little hard on himself about his performance. It was a tough for him since he wasn't playing with the teammates he knows.

He's the tall one with the glasses in the back left. :)

The following weekend, Kaden's usual U16 team played a three games with some teams from Germany. They won their first and second games and Kaden was even able to score a few runs. Of course, I missed all of those games, too, since I was still on my way back from the U.S. I was the stereotypical father in a '90s movie who can't make it to his son's big game because work calls. Sigh.

The week after that, on the Friday before Easter, we dropped Kaden off at the airport for his baseball tournament in Berlin. He and his team flew to Berlin to play in a two-day tournament against three other teams. They took home the gold!

I'm very grateful for the coaches and parents that went with the kids and helped make it a pleasant experience. Super thankful for those parents who took pictures the whole time so those of us who couldn't travel to Berlin could still follow along!

Baseball continues to be an unexpected expense in our lives, but I'm just really glad one of the kids is participating in an activity that they have committed to and enjoy.

* * *

Kaden was gone on Easter Sunday in Berlin, so the rest of us went on a little walking tour in Copenhagen. The cherry blossoms are famously beautiful in a few different locations around the city, and I knew our window to see them was closing.

The most popular place to go see the blossoms is at Bispebjerg Cemetery, which is across the road from Grundtvig's Church. I've actually been wanting to go look at the church architecture for a long time, so this was a good excuse, and it wasn't even very crowded!

That church was so incredible. The building is very pretty and it was nice to be able to stroll around inside and not be overwhelmed by crowds. The kids like the organs, Zac liked the doors, and of course, the facade was admired by all of us.

After our walk through Grundtvig's, we walked across the road and took a nice tour of the cemetery. The cherry blossoms are at the far side and they line the walking path. There are signs directing you to them so they are easy to find if you don't mind the distance. Unfortunately, we kind of missed the window at Bispebjerg. Most of the petals had dropped already, but a few lovely clusters of flowers hung on for us and Khloe took nice photos.

I had a backup plan for blossom-viewing in case Bispebjerg was done. Superkilen is a cool park in the city that consists of different colored areas, each with a different theme, and they have good cherry blossoms as well. It's walking distance from the cemetery, which was a big plus.

Superkilen represents the diversity of the neighborhood. The surrounding area is very international, so when they designed the park, they asked residents to suggest items for the park representative of their homelands. Then, items were chosen from the suggestions and either transported from that place to the park or replicated in the park. There are neon signs, sound systems, boxing rings, trash cans, manhole covers, trees, and seating from all over the world!

Anyway, I had read that the blossoms in the Red Square were gone, but that the ones in the Black Square were still good to go. They were right - there were some very pretty flowers on the trees there!

First, we came to the Red Square. This is an area, themed in red, of course, with a kind of sporty theme. There are interesting and unusual outdoor playground equipment that caters to all ages. We never got a chance to go on the rocker swings, but Harrison and Khloe climbed around a bit, goofed off in the boxing ring, and took turns attacking the punching bag.

The Red Square leads into the Black Square, where there are fountains and trees and benches all around an asymmetrical blacktop. It's very cool to see in person.

After the Black Square, there is the more park-like Green Square and playground. Khloe and Harrison liked all of it.

The walk to Superkilen was a little long for Harrison, but we stayed busy looking at all the cool street art as we went along. It's very common in that area to see big murals and art pieces on the sides of buildings, so you basically get to visit a museum on your normal commute!

After Superkilen, we took the metro to get some ice cream at Østerberg. Danes are very serious about their ice cream, and if I didn't mention in any of my previous posts, the person who founded Østerberg ice cream is an ice cream scientist! She studied the science behind the structure of ice cream while she was at university, and she uses that as the foundation of all her recipes. It's very good ice cream, and while there are always traditional flavors, she makes some specialty and seasonal combinations that are soooo good. (I had tonka bean and salted caramel.)

But as I said, Danes are very serious about ice cream, and if you go get ice cream in Denmark, they will ask you seemingly weird questions, like, "Do you want softis on top?" or, "Guf?"

Softis is essentially soft-serve ice cream like you would get out of the machine at Dairy Queen. You get a couple scoops of normal ice cream and/or sorbet in your cone, and then they put the softis on top. Sometimes it's vanilla, and sometimes it's licorice flavored! After they add the softis, they will ask you if you want chocolate, rainbow sprinkles, licorice sprinkles, or any number of finely shaved toppings to finish it off.

In other places, they don't top your ice cream with softis, but rather guf, which is kind of like a marshmallow fluff, but I think it's made with powdered sugar and egg whites all whipped together. Sometimes, it's just sugary and plain, and sometimes, it has flavor, like strawberry. When they top your ice cream with guf, you sometimes also get the choice of the shaved toppings and/or a flødboller, which is a special Danish treat you may have seen in some of my previous posts.

Anyway, if you want to order Danish-ly, don't skip the softis or the guf. Just lean into it.

We finished off the day by getting empanadas at Torvehallern for dinner. On our way, we finally walked past the kartoffelrækkerne, or the potato rows, for the first time in the daylight! These are rows of houses laid out like rows of potatoes. They were built as Copenhagen expanded outside the city ramparts and housed multiple families within each house. They were historically preserved a few decades ago and renovation made them livable as single-family homes. The houses are absolutely lovely, with little courtyard spaces between the homes in the back, and with beautiful tree-lined streets in between them in the front.

I would have taken a nicer photo, but the family was getting pretty worn out and I didn't dare go tourist-ing around on a detour.

(And we would totally buy one of these houses...it's just that we don't have 2.6 million USD laying around!)

We grabbed special drinks for the train ride home, and everyone was very tired at the end of our Easter adventure.

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We hope you all had a nice Easter and that the bunny was good to you. Our long Easter Break is over and it's back to work and Danish class and school and swim practice and all that good stuff. Big things are happening, but more on that later!