I'm on Lime and Violet!

Just heard Lime and Violet's podcast#34: A Brief Interlude of NotYarn. They mentioned a link that I e-mailed them and I squee-ed out loud. Good thing I was alone in the car.

Purlescence, a yarn shop, had a contest asking what storybook characters would have knit. I sent them the link to a pattern to some lacy thigh-high stockings Cinderella would have knit.
http://www.purlescence.co.uk/storytellers/cinderella/cind_secret_stock.pdf

Lime and Violet are my favorite podcasters, and they're in my links list to the right. Their show is ostensibly about knitting, and they love, love, love socks. So I thought they'd get a kick out of the Cinderella stockings.

Lime and Violet are two women who some how ended up in Omaha, Nebraska, became friends, and got into knitting. They're former Goths and Ms. Violet is married to Side Show Husband, who does things like eat fire, light his head on fire, and I think piercings of some sort. Ms. Lime is dating Kilt Boy, a sound engineer for rock shows. They go to clubs and side shows and knit and people think they're the strange ones. Half their show is not about knitting or yarn, but other funny and bizarre things going on in their lives, sometimes involving Side Show Husband and Kilt Boy, and it often involves drinking and cursing. Much of their show makes me laugh out loud.

So I was very, very excited that they mentioned my e-mail and my name, even if it was mispronounced.

New HP trailer

A trailer for "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is available here. http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/harrypotterandtheorderofthephoenix.html

It looks good. I always had difficulty trying to picture the action scenes in the Ministry of Magic and am really looking forward to seeing how they depict it in the movie.

On the other hand, who dressed these people? Some of those outfits the kids wear are awful.

Not surprisingly, I have preordered my copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Just letting you know now, I will be unavailable for any social events on July 21.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam was the last stop on my European trip, and this time it was all for pleasure, no business. In Amsterdam, I met up with my husband.

Some of the other fellows from the fellowship extended their trip to Amsterdam as well. Here I am with one of the other fellows on the fellowship. The other two guys are my husband and the husband of another fellow (and here is an example of the need to find a gender-neutral term, other than fellow and fellowship) who took the picture, so she's not in it.

We are at a great Indonesian restaurant called Kantil and the Tijger, having ristaffel. Essentially, you get lots of little dishes of differnt kinds of foods, to go with your white rice. Shyam was thrilled to have ethnic food. It wasn't Indian, but it was close enough for him. He kept saying how happy he was about the food. We all were.

Here we are touring the Heineken brewery. I have to say, after drinking the Belgian beer, I found Heineken to be watery and flavorless. Not that it stopped me from finishing the beer that came with the tour.










Now for the postcard pictures.
Look -- pretty row houses















The Dutch have much classier double-wides than we have here in Georgia.

This picture cracked us up. It's the Dutch National Monument, and it's a huge phallic symbol. Check out the guy with his arms up on the right.

Here's a close up of the guy on the left side of the monument. Be sure to walk with your pelvis out front!

Statues at the Rembrandtsplein park.

Someone decided to improve on it.

Full moon over a canal. Very romantic. Trust me on this.

That would be 1 Euro, 30 cents. 1 Euro = 1.33 US dollars. Don't know how big the beer was.

Here is a snack platter we ordered in Amsterdam. Starting on the left side of the plate and going clockwise, we have cheese cubes, 2 dipping sauces, batter fried chicken nuggets (real pieces of chicken, not reconstituted chicken paste), meatballs, and the red stuff on the right side of the plate are pieces of sausage. However, I don't think it was cooked meat. Very tasty none the less and no one got sick. In the little tray are quarters of pickled onion, little pickles and spicy mustard. And beer, of course.

At Vondelpark, this was a tree that fell over at some point, but it's still alive. There were leaves budding on the tips. But I like to joke that I was so strong, or so heavy, that I pushed it over.

Yet another blogger

I'm back from my trip and my head is still spinning. It may be jet lag, it may be my cold, it may be the outrageous levels of pollen in Atlanta that's messing with everyone's sinuses and turning all surfaces yellow.

Anyway, here's a link to Sam's blog: http://html.wral.com/news/local/blog/1212251/ He and I were only in the first and last cities, that is Paris and Brussels. But you can get a feel for the trip over all, and he's got lots of pictures.

Other bloggers

I'm not the only one behind in my blogging. If you want to get a flavor of how the other travellers are doing, go to www.natashaj.com to read her blog. She and I have been together in all my cities, except she went to Lisbon and I went to Rome. As you can see, she's pretty behind in her blogging too.

Riot police and the American Embassy

Today we started earlier, like at 8:30am. I got 6 hours of sleep and that was fine.

Okay, before I go any further, I just have to say that I'm sitting in the lobby of the Admiral Hotel in Copenhagen, and there's a private party playing right next to me playing 'Play that funky music white boy' and earlier played 'Dani California' by Red Hot Chili Peppers. There's a group of 20 something people in ties and shirtes talking loudly behind me in something other than English. I'm quite tempted to joing the funky white boys.

Anyway. Today we met the minister of culture who read from prepared notes and gave us copies of KulturCanon, which apparently discussed what was core to Danish culture, then went to the Museum of Art and Design. We had some other meetings, but what stood out was the 3hour meeting with the national police of Denmark and the Copenhagen police. We learned about Danish national policing, how they deal with rioters, met a riot policy commander, saw their body armor and armored police vehicle.'

I interrupt this post to say that the party just finished 'Walking on Sunshine' by Katrina and the Waves and is now playing 'Love in an Elevator' by Aerosmith.

Okay, after the riot police, we went to the home of the deputy US ambassador. Nice, but very much party line. Then dinner and drinks at the bar, and now bed.

Copenhagen and Madison

Yesterday we arrived in Copenhagen and walked around and had lunch and enjoyed the sunny weather. According to our cab driver, the sun appears only in August. He was a little bitter about it. He's from Pakistan and when we asked what brought him to Copenhagen he said that his parents made a mistake. Danes like foreigners, but only as tourists.

By the way, I am traveling now with only 4 other people who I met only on March 8, exactly one week ago. But, having spent all day together for that long, having drunk many beers and wine (they serve wine at lunch and dinner in France) with them, you get to feel pretty close. Fortunately, they are all friendly, hilarious, and seriously smart people. More about that later.

So, we are staying in a hotel in the old part of Copenhagen, near the canal with all the colorful houses on the water. Turns out that the rest of Copenhagen does not look like that. It looks like old Europe with marble buildings, statuary all around, etc. There's a pedestrian only street not far from our hotel with many shops and restaurants on the first floor and flats above. My traveling companions and I have said that we would like to come back with our families.

Cultural lesson of the day: Danes eat in several courses and don't mix food. They start with some kind of dish I don't remember, then there's the poultry course, then the dark meat course, then the fish course, and dessert. They have a different plate each time and find it strange that Americans mix all that together.

Juvenile moment of the day: Here in Copenhagen, we have a guide, Kristina, an older lady who's done this before. She said that she heard we were a partying group. Our reputation precedes us. For lunch today she took us to a traditional Danish lunch place, which serves fishballs. Michael, a professor, practically lost it. I thought he was going to start giggling at the word fishballs.

Then in meetings about climate change and international environmental policy, he's all into the topic, asking all kinds of questions. That makes sense, it's his field. But at other meetings, about the economy, or immigration, or health, or whatever, he asks totally serious questions and sounds so knowledgeable. At his environmental meeting (we're going to all the meetings together) I contributed the word 'cartography' and 'artificial reef' when the speaker didn't know the word in English, and I asked about biodiversity. The rest of the meeting I kept my mouth shut.

The last meeting of the day was very interesting, about immigration in Denmark. I was absolutely floored to learn that Denmark did not start admitting immigrants until the 1960s. As an American, and as a child of immigrants, immigration is normal.

At the last meeting of the day, one of the speakers is special counsel to one of the governemental ministers and he did the exchange trip to the US a few years ago. It turns out that he went to Madison, Wisconsin and arrived the day before Halloween. Madison is known to have one of the largest, if not the largest, Halloween street party in the US. Certainly, the University of Wisconsin in Madison is among the top party schools in the US. If we had time, I would have liked to ask him more about his experience and what he did in Madison. But he had to go home to his wife and four kids. He said he was interested in Wisconsin since he was a little kid and first read Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie.

In knitting news, I did finish the yellow Malabrigo yarn pillbox hat on the plane to Copenhagen. I haven't needed it, but it's supposed to get cold and possibly snowy over the weekend. I'm working on a blanket for my husband and after I finish blogging, I may start my lace fichu.

I've been traveling of just one week. It feels like much longer because in that time have been to Washington DC, Paris, and now Copenhagen, and have been getting very little sleep. I think I'm finally changing that pattern.