Slowly but surely!

Well, we're full-on living in Helsingør now!

Look at our cute little mailbox!

We started out slow, kind of bouncing between two homes. After we got the keys to our new house, we spent a couple of nights there, cleaning and sleeping on air mattresses and watching movies on the laptop. It was exciting and great. Maybe a little hard on the body...

We brought the dog, of course, because he couldn't be alone for so long, but we waited a bit to introduce Marabel. Han was confused and nervous, but happy to be with us.

It was challenging to work on the house after dark. In Denmark, people usually take the light fixtures with them when they leave. To my knowledge, this is not a regular occurrence in the U.S. Anyway, we had a light in the kitchen that the previous owners left, but there was no light in the dining room or the living room. We had my small flowerpot lamp and a plug-in light we borrowed from Harrison's bedroom at the rental house.

Kaden had to skip baseball practice, we were pretty useless as far as texting and calling people, and we ate like garbage, but we got a lot done. I used up a thousand Magic Erasers (well, the German equivalent), we scrubbed and polished all weekend, and at the end of it, we felt pretty good about our progress. Good enough, at least, to agree we could start moving things in.

This guy is so good at windows!

I made a point of bringing our Halloween tote, so Harrison helped out by decorating our sparse surroundings for Halloween.

The older kids busied themselves setting up their own bedrooms as best they could. It will be tough for a while until they get the furniture they want/need to really organize them the way they envision. Christmas is coming!

* * *

The following work week was busy, so between that and Danish classes and packing, we were pretty dead. We did know that we needed a second car since we moved to Helsingør, though, and so our only goal for the week was to purchase one and try to have it in our possession before the end of the weekend.

We had decided on the Volkswagen ID.3 after asking around and looking at about a thousand vehicles online. We currently have a VW Passat and it has treated us well here. We wanted something fully electric for our second car, and something just big enough to get me and the kids and their backpacks to school and work every day. We also needed something that was within our price range and would last us at least three to five years, so a used ID.3 seemed perfect.

The trouble is that every time we found one we wanted, it would be removed from website by the time we had an opportunity to go look at it! Who knew the used VW ID.3 was going to be such a hot-ticket item? Zac had seen one that Sunday across the street from where he was getting fuel.

He walked across to look at it, liked it, and thought we should buy it. He bought a few groceries, came home to drop those off and get me, and by the time we got back to the dealership (like 10 minutes down the road), another couple was in the process of buying it! We decided that if we found another one during the week, we would need to act fast.

On Monday night, we found one in a town about 20 minutes away from where we work, so Tuesday, we just left work early to go drive it. The battery life was a little lower than we had hoped and it was not a color we really wanted, but it did have everything we were looking for, so we signed for it. They told us it would be two weeks because they were going to change the tires for us and detail it. We told them we were moving soon and really needed it faster than that. They said it would probably be ready sooner. We crossed our fingers that we'd have it by Sunday evening.

* * *

Friday was moving day! We took the day off (ALK gives you one paid day off every calendar year for moving if you need it), kept Kaden home from school, and picked up a moving van bright and early!

We don't have very much stuff, so we did it in two trips, and Kaden really worked hard. Everything made it safe and sound before the younger two kids even got out of school.

We also had lots of mail waiting in our mailbox! Since Denmark is so digitized, everything delivered after 15 October, regardless of whether it was sent to our old address or our new address, was placed properly in the mailbox at our new house. We displayed all of our Halloween cards and New Home cards on the dining room window sill to brighten things up in our otherwise barren and chaotic space.

There was more work to do, of course, too. We never rest anymore.

We also decided it was time to introduce Marabel to her new home. We knew she'd be grumpy, but we were not prepared for the week of absolute glaring we were about to receive.

She's doing better now. She has even wandered outside a few times without getting run over in the street out front.

* * *

Sunday, I called the car dealership to see if we could come pick up our car. They told me to call the salesman who we worked with on Monday.

On Monday (Day 1 without a second car), Zac took a vacation day since it was impossible for him to get to work on time and for me to get all the kids to school and get to work on time. Yeah, public transit is an option, but we were too overwhelmed to face that long and multi-system commute at the moment. I called the salesman first thing. He didn't answer, but I left a message explaining our situation and asking for a callback. No call, all day.

I picked up the boys from school, and Khloe got out late, so she took public transit home with some boys from her class that live up in this direction. As Zac was preparing dinner, I saw a note from the school about an international school volleyball tournament the following day.

I asked Khloe if she was on the team, hoping desperately that for some reason, she had decided she hates volleyball or something, but she said yes. She was supposed to be at Copenhagen International School in the morning, a 45-minute drive south in good traffic, and at least twice that long during the morning commute. WHY?!?!

Fortunately, there was a bus leaving from her school at like 07:30, so we figured she could ride in with Zac and make her own way home again. I had a terrible migraine, so I skipped Danish class.

On Tuesday (Day 2 without a second car), Zac took the car to work and dropped Khloe at school to catch the bus to the volleyball tournament. I attempted public transit with the boys. Kaden was also going to try getting himself to and from baseball practice after school for the first time, so he had a school bag and a baseball bag. A little clunky, but he managed!

We left at 07:25 to walk across the street to the bus stop because I wasn't familiar enough with this little local bus to know if it would be early, prompt, or late, so we wanted to leave plenty of time to catch it at 07:29. It arrived right on time and took us to the train station in the next town down. We caught the train to the town where the kids' school is, and from the station, they were able to catch a bus to school and I was able to catch a bus to work. It was pretty smooth, and I got to work just before 08:30.

I called the car salesman, and he actually answered! He told me he would go check on it in the workshop and call me back in 10 minutes.

No call. All day.

I called him again just before 14:00 and he didn't answer. I left a message. Zac and I rode home together and picked up Harrison on the way.

Khloe made it home safely from Copenhagen, even if it was a long trip. Kaden made it home from baseball. (He was hungry and tired as hell, so I'm not sure those Tuesday practices are going to work out in the future.)

On Wednesday (Day 3 without a second car), Kaden stayed home sick. Zac got up super early so he could take public transit and leave me the car. This was OK, except that it woke me up very early and I was sleepy and fussy all day about it. I also had to leave work to go show the rental house to some potential new renters (the owners have delayed their return for another 6 months or so). In the afternoon, I rushed out of the lab to get to the school for Harrison's "Exit Point" presentation about deforestation of the rainforests. I made it (for the last five minutes)! Khloe got out of school super early, so she took public transit home again. Harrison and I picked up Zac and work and then went home. I had a horrible migraine (again) and skipped Danish (again).

Zac talked to the car dealer. They told him they were waiting to get the car into the maintenance shop to change the tires and did not remember us saying that we needed it sooner than November 3rd. They told us there was almost no way to get us the car before then, and they would give us a loaner car, but they didn't have one available. Ugh.

On Thursday (Day 4 without a second car), Zac took public transit again. I drove the kids to school. After work, Khloe took public transit home and I picked up the boys. Zac had a teambuilding event at work, so he was home late and got himself there on public transit. Kaden skipped baseball. No word from the car dealership.

On Friday (Day 5 without a second car), I don't even know what we did. I know it was Halloween and that we picked up Harrison and Kaden from school in the car. I think Zac and I were just carpooling that day to and from work? Khloe and her friend took public transit home so they could have a sleepover and trick-or-treat together. Kaden had four friends show up over the course of the evening for a sleepover as well. More on Halloween in a minute.

The dealership called Zac about the car. They said they actually could not even get us the car by November 3rd because the registration paperwork had not been imported with the car when they brought it in from Germany. It would be another FOUR TO FIVE WEEKS before they could register the car to us. They offered to let us cancel the sale, and we did so as fast as possible.

They refunded our money, and I found a car in Copenhagen that I thought looked good. It was late Friday when I found it, so I scheduled a test drive for Sunday midday, the next time they were open. I got a call immediately from the salesman and he told me that the car was actually having a recalled part updated at the workshop in another town and was not available for a drive. I explained our situation and our desperation, as well as our wish-list for the vehicle. He told me it would come back to them Wednesday afternoon. He promised me they had the registration paperwork for that car and that we could probably come in Thursday to drive it and go home with it Friday. I told him we wanted it and would await his phone call. I didn't wait though.

I called him Wednesday (Day 10 without a second car) to see if the car made it back to them as planned so we could come buy it.

THEY SOLD IT TO SOMEONE ELSE.

He said someone had seen it on their website, called one of his colleagues, and asked to sign for and pay for the car electronically immediately. I was absolutely floored. Fortunately, he was an incredibly kind and helpful car salesman. He searched their unlisted inventory and found a good one. It was also having the recall part changed, but he said it would be back Thursday.

I said I wanted to sign for it and buy it NOW.

Zac and I saw three photos, transferred all the money, and signed immediately. On Friday, we went and picked up our car, and it was in such phenomenal condition, we were very glad it all worked out as it did.

* * *

That Friday was another first for us as well...we got our first firewood delivery! There is a company in a nearby town that delivers it to your door, and we figured we might want it now that the weather is cooling down. While we were getting our car, they dropped it off in our driveway. Kaden did a lovely job stacking it in the shed out back as Zac and I transported it his way.

* * *

OK, Halloween.

Harrison really wanted to carve pumpkins, but Zac and I just could not find the will to do it. Harrison was getting pretty sad about not having a jack-o-lantern as Halloween got closer, so I went out to the garden and selected a nice Hokkaido squash. It was small and thick, but it had pumpkin-like qualities. I lopped off the end of it so it could sit flush on the ground and then painstakingly scraped out as much of the inside as I could. It was much more difficult than a pumpkin. Do not recommend.

Then Harrison made little pricks with a toothpick where he wanted the corners of the triangle eyes and the mouth and everything, and I helped him cut it out.

It ended up being pretty cute.

Khloe and I made her a Cheshire Cat costume and her friend was a deer. They went out together and visited some fun haunted houses that people were doing in their back gardens in the area. They also bought candy at the store, I think, but they were pretty happy and self-contained the whole evening.

Kaden and his friends also visited some of the haunted houses. They didn't dress up, but they went to a green space to play flashlight tag. They decided to go to a party with some school friends. Kaden was a little on the fence about it, but we encouraged him to go have an experience, for better or worse. He didn't have a very good time, but he and his friends did make it back home safely. After a weird run-in with the undercover police, that is.

Apparently, two people in a nearby apartment complex got into a fight and one stabbed the other. He ran, and some undercover police were driving around looking for him on the streets. This was the same time that all five boys were walking back to our house from the station, so they were stopped and asked for their IDs and not really told what was going on. I'll leave out all the details, but the boys swear these were not real undercover police and that there was something very "off" about the situation. Two other men started running after them in the dark as well around this time, and the "undercover police" showed up again but did nothing except shine bright headlights on the situation and then drive past our house about four times after the boys locked themselves inside behind the gate. I'm still a little unclear on the details, but essentially, they made it home, I reported the incident to the local police, the news says that the police found the guy they were looking for, the real police are investigating the possibility that two people were pretending to be undercover cops, and all is well.

Zac and I threw on our standard dark, Halloween-y costume pieces and made our faces look a little dead and took Harrison, our little rabid zombie raccoon, out trick-or-treating. We didn't find the best area to go, but we did have some good experiences and Harrison got to go through two good haunted houses in people's gardens.

You will notice that a lot of people in Denmark really make the pathway up to the candy as much of a horror show as they can manage. It's pretty great. There are entires streets that people will drive to from other parts of Denmark just to walk through their haunted setup. We enjoy the mood quite a lot.

We walked around for about half the time with the previous owner of our house and his youngest boy. We also met one of our new neighbors along the way!

Zac had met her before (she is right next door), and we had all met her husband out in the driveway earlier in the week. She was very friendly. The husband is Australian and she is Danish, so their kids, even though they are young, are bilingual, which is a huge advantage for us. In fact, Harrison and the oldest boy are only about four months apart in age and they have become fast friends. They've already had a sleepover and they spend almost every possible second with each other at one house or the other. The next oldest boy is only maybe four? So he comes along, too, and is SO adorable, but he never speaks. He just follows the other boys around with a cute little look of amusement on his tiny face.

* * *

Back to house stuff.

There are details of this house that I love. For example, many of the doors are original in the 100-year-old part of the house, and I like the door handles with their ornate mounting plates/rosettes. There are also things I hate. For example, how many previous owners did not love the door handles and their ornate mounting plates/rosettes enough to not avoid dousing them in thick white paint.

My colleagues introduced me to brun sæbe, or brown soap, which is basically just a very concentrated potassium soap, so I bought some in hopes of cleaning the paint off without chemical paint removers.

First, we had to break through three or four layers of pain to find the screws on the rosettes and figure out how these old door handles were secured! Reddit and the internet, in general, were not as helpful as I normally find them, so I resorted to ChatGPT. It helped me figure out the problem immediately, so I guess score one for AI technology.

There's a hidden metal tapered dowel that is tapped through the rod!

After two rounds of brun sæbe, the turquoise color on the metal pieces is gone, but I'm still working on the lower layers of paint. Stay tuned.

* * *

During this busy couple of months, a lot of other things were happening on the side!

Zac and I celebrated our 10-year anniversary! We took an evening to go to dinner in Copenhagen and visit a beer bar on the canal we hadn't been to yet.

Speaking of beer, we celebrated J-dag in Helsingør this year. If you recall from a previous post, J-dag is the day when the Tuborg Christmas beer officially gets released at 8:59 p.m. It's always on the first Friday in November. Zac and I went to a beer bar I had been following on Instagram shortly before the big release. When we saw all the young kids and the smokers (in the weird indoor smoking fume hood they have here), we knew we were not in the right crowd, but it was too late to go elsewhere, so we stayed for a bit, and at 08:59 p.m., they tapped the keg and started the Christmas music, and it was actually a pretty fun little moment.

They didn't give us Tuborg nisse hats when we bought our Christmas beers like they did for the other people (they told Zac they were out of them), so Zac decided we weren't welcome and went to get our coats. I went to the bar and very politely said that we bought Christmas beers, we were told they were out of hats, but I definitely see hats now. They gave me two and we left. I don't know if it was active prejudice against us or not, but it sure felt that way.

When we left, we followed some people along the old streets of Helsingør as we tried to find where the big spotlight in the sky was coming from. We found an outdoor party at Axeltorv, a big square in the middle of all the old buildings. There was a stage and a DJ and a bunch of little beer wagons selling Tuborg Julebryg. We ended up having a very nice time in company that was much more our type of crowd.

Kaden had his class trip at the start of the school year instead of the end of the school year. He went to Prague! He took zero photos. His teacher sent one though!

Khloe had a week of interning at a Syrian/Danish vegetarian cafe in Birkerød. She loved the experience! She helped serve customers, wash dishes, and prepare meals. She learned a lot about food prep and service, and she brought home delicious snacks and leftovers every day. She even chose to do an extra day there the following week as part of her community service hours!

Zac and I attended a "Friendsgiving" event at the house of a nice American we know from Danish class. He and his wife were hosting at their home outside of Copenhagen. We didn't know how many people to expect, and we knew we wouldn't know anyone besides our host, but we went anyway, adventurous as we are...haha.

We made a green bean casserole from scratch and OH MY GOD. It's so much more delicious. If you thought it was a good Thanksgiving side dish before, I dare you to try it this way. Mmmm. I have no pictures of us, the event, or the food, except for this cute pic of the green beans after I French-cut them.

There were around 20 people there and we were really out of our element, but we did our best to socialize. There were several internationals there, so most of the conversations were easy:

"Hi! Where are you from? How long have you been here? What brought you to Denmark? What do you do?"

It was fine, the food was incredible, the company was friendly and chatty, and we got home at a reasonable hour!

* * *

I took the reading and writing part of my final Danish language exam, the PD3 (Prøver i Dansk 3). It was on a Tuesday, and even though we had gotten our car by that time, I took public transit because it was in Frederiksberg (which is a municipality within Copenhagen). It's election season, so one of the Liberal Alliance candidates was at the train station before the break of dawn, handing out boller to prospective supporters. I can't vote here yet, but I gratefully accepted my breakfast.

I was fairly prepared for the exam, and I knew I would pass, but there was something very nerve-wracking about having to travel and bring my passport and all that. There are a lot of rules and if you break one, you can be expelled from the exam, so I wanted to make sure I did everything right. There were around 370 internationals taking the test on that day!

It lasted from 9 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. I did finish a little early, so a classmate and I walked to a bodega that opened at noon and waited for the rest of our classmates to finish and join us. We compared our experiences and had a couple of beers and then took our respective metros and busses home. We still have Danish class until our oral exam, which will be on 08 December, but we made it through this leg!

I have made a post about the Danish grading system before, but basically, it goes -3, 00, 02, 4, 7, 10, 12. Twelve is the best and -3 is the worst. There are no in-between grades for each number. I recently heard from Vanessa that the system is as such because none of these numbers can be changed into other numbers in the system without it being obvious, so it's a cheating deterrent. Clever.

Anyway, for the Danish exam, you get a score for the reading, a score for the writing, and a score for the oral. The score for the oral exam counts x2 because it's sort of like a listening exam, too, and your average for all of them has to be a 02 or better to pass. Realistically, if you get a 7 on the reading and a 7 on the writing, you could get a -3 on the oral exam and still pass, so I'm not super worried about the oral exam, but I still want to prepare. We also haven't gotten our scores from the reading/writing one yet, but I am fairly certain I got at least 7 on each of them. I guess we'll see!

Harrison had his exit point at school (basically, the end of a cohesive unit that spans all of their subjects). He had been learning about deforestation of the rainforests, so he and Riaan prepared a presentation about deforestation, organizations that help preserve the rainforests around the world, and products people can buy to support those organizations. It was followed by a quiz with prizes, and they had a musical performance afterward with an original, rainforest-inspired song.

Harrison represented his school at the DISNAC football tournament. His team didn't do fantastic overall, but in their second match, he scored his team's only goal!

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Zac had a birthday! It was a busy Tuesday in the thick of our housing transition, but the kids made him very sweet cards, and after work, he and I just went for a walk downtown to the little record store in town to buy some new vinyl. We picked up pizza on the way home. It's nice to live in a little walkable city! Harrison prepared a birthday surprise music competition, where he shut us all in his bedroom with some instruments and we all had five minutes to prepare what we would play for the competition. He and Khloe played really lovely songs on the piano, Kaden gave us a special clarinet solo, Zac played guitar, and I did my best to remember the chords to a Christmas song I recorded in 2008. Zac won, of course, and the prize was revealed to be a dark chocolate bar that we all shared.

Friday night, he and I went out for a real dinner at a nice restaurant on the harbor. Zac got a steak, we had drinks and dessert, and then we walked around by the castle and the wharf in the dark. (They do not light up Kronborg at night, so you would almost miss it if you didn't know it was there!)

We got our first snow of the year, and it was just the most beautiful, fat, fluffy snowflakes you could imagine. It came down and blew around all day and then left us forever.

* * *

We've been really trying to get out of the rental house, which we paid on until the end of November. Part of our contract stipulated that we should paint the interior of the house, sand the kitchen countertops and re-oil them, and we should lacquer and sand the floors in the hall, kitchen, living room, and dining room. These things would take maybe a week if you could work on them non-stop for a week, but we did not have that luxury. Between getting into our new house and all the day-to-day conferences, appointments, practices, classes, and school/jobs, we really only had partial weekends to work. It's been a huge stress.

We cleaned really well, and Zac patched and painted. We got the countertops sanded and a few layers of the oil applied. Fortunately, while I was suffering through the Julebazar at the kids' school last Saturday, Zac finished the floors and countertops.

We hate the Julebazar. Even the kids make it sound like they're being tortured.

We are ready for inspection on Saturday, we'll turn over the keys Sunday, and hopefully, we will get to start using our very limited spare time to work on our own house!

* * *

We are very much looking forward to having some time off for Christmas and relaxing in our new home. Where are we going to put the Christmas tree? I guess you'll find out in the next blog. For now, here's my tiny Christmas tree at work.