Easter Sauna

They said on the news tonight that this March had the record for sunshine hours since 1943.  I'm guessing that was the April 1st joke because I swear we had only 5 hours of sun last month.  Then again it could be that they had only 5 hours of sun in March 1943.  Anyway there has been a few beautiful days last week and i snapped this funny picture just down the harbor from where we live.

Notice the way the water, sky and snow from nature blend in with the scene on the sauna trailor.

From this point i am just a 10 minute walk to the central station, Tivoli and the Town Hall.

Looking in the background is where we live on the left hand side. We don't see the smoke stacks.

 

 

The fenced in area is the summer swimming area where 1000's of young people meet in the summer to swim, pic-nic, listen to concerts and other such events. In the same area it is also for the Viking winter bathers or as I call them "insane icicles".  There has been talk about adding a sauna to the swim area and so this year they rolled in 2 saunas to see if they would be popular enough to build a real sauna on the floating dock.
There is stilll snow in the photo on the side of the sauna but the real snow is about 99% melted now.

Bounty is the epitome of "Bag Lady" -  she is alwasy looking for trash and we always are picking up her poo in plastic bags.


Also a friend of ours, Tami from Orange County, asked if we had our Easter sticks out.  She has her out and we do too.  Our friend Stefan from Sweden gave us some "real" Easter sticks when we lived in the house but we just have no space to keep them so i am doing with the cheap discount version of Easter sticks this year. If you put them in water, small yellow flowers will bloom and if you keep the sticks long enough, they will start to sprout roots and leaves.

 

Here is a photo of the real Easter sticks.  I shot this from the florist just down the street.  These are very expensive as they grow extreamly slowly and notice how curly they are.

Ok - that's it.  Short and sweet.  Hope you all had a wonderful Easter and plenty of sunshine coming your way.

 

 

New Gay Square

It was announced last night on the news that the new square in town - which has been under construction for the last year or so - is almost completed and is going to get an exciting new name.

The square used to be a very busy 2 way street with parking space for both cars and bikes, a stop for the Hope On-Hope Off tourist bus, a taxi stop and a bus stop for normal city traffic.  On the square is a wonderful monument of Viking horn blowers.  

All of this falls in the shadow of the amazing town hall tower.  On this square – one of the corner buildings had a bar or pub or who knows what – plain jane and non-descript.  

It was converted years ago into a swanky joint named - Alexandra Bar - after Prince Joachim’s wife.   A wonderful busy business woman with a father from Hong Kong and a mother from Austria.  She was an amazing woman and everybody loved her.  She picked up the Danish language as easily as cotton candy melts on the tongue.  The bar was not a hit and I can’t understand why.  It was a really groovy bar both inside and out and talk about ‘location location location’ – this was it!  Prince Joachim and Princess Alexandra have 2 boys but later divorced.   

Meanwhile…. Just a few streets away, deeper into the old down town area, was the most trendy gay bar/café called Sebastian.  The owners of the joint, Wally and Claes, must have hit the jackpot when they sold it.  The new buyer must have lost his ass because the place died at almost the same moment the new owner stepped in.   

Sebastian Bar and Cafë

So where were all the fags to go?  Somebody got smart and opened another gay café/bar called Heaven – at the end of the street and around the corner.  It did really well because it was also in a great location with lots of atmosphere.  It was a place to people-watch with good food. It was thee place to go until Wally and Claes of Sebastian bought the dead Alexandra Bar and made it the newest (several years old now) gar bar/café in town called Oscar.   Oscar was a huge hit when it opened and several years later, it still is.  It’s such a hit that Heaven, which later died as well, moved next-door to Oscar to suck up some of the overflow. Little by little, Oscar, and now Heaven, have been creeping out into the parking area with patio tables and chairs to accommodate their overflowing eating/drinking/clubbing guests.  

Oscar Bar and Café

Then last year the bulldozers came in – no, not dykes, Caterpillars – to scrape away all the asphalt and cobblestones to make way for a new square.  And every square has got to have a name - right?.  So they came up with a really good one and announced it on tv last night: Axgil Plads.  Ok – Plads – Place – Plaza – all of them are just another word for square.  But what the funk is Axgil?

 

   

It’s a made up last name from two guys first name – one guy named  Axel Lundahl-Madsen, and the other guy named Eigil Eskildsen.  They took their first names and combined them to make a new last name for themselves.  Who are Axel and Eigil? They are the worlds first 2 gay guys to ever get married. Here you can see them sitting in a horse drawn carriage in front of the town hall where they got married back in the later half of 1989. (technically called civil partnership at the time, but required a civil marriage act in the town hall)    

So the new square in the very center of town - a literal skip, hop and limp wrist away from the town hall building - will be named after the pioneering men who dedicated their lives to equality, paving the way for Obama to include us in his inauguration speech and maybe one day soon the US will finally follow in the footsteps of Denmark, making it possible for ALL people to marry whom they love.

 

Make The Yuletide Gay

We just finished watching the movie called Make the Yuletide Gay.  What is Yuletide? - asked our French friends, Patrick and Fabian from Paris, who are here for the weekend helping us celebrate Christmas.  Yuletide is the English spelling of the Scandinavian word Juletid and it means Christmas time.  The award winning 2009 film is a cute story about 2 collage boys spending Christmas together with one of the boy's very crazy family.  You can easily get your own copy for just a few $ from Amazon.com

OK - Fabian and Patrick arrived to Copenhagen Thursday on Air France at 2:30 just as I was getting off of work.  It was such perfect timing.  By the time I had changed from my work clothes to my street clothes and moved the car from the personnel parking lot to the passenger pick up parking lot, I had to wait a total of 7 or 8 minutes.

The day they arrived, I made the guys a nice birthday BBQ dinner.  Fabian had his birthday on December 5th. After dinner we did fireworks and had a big slice of b-day cake.


We have finished our dinner and now we are digging into some very tasty birthday cake.

The next day we went to see all the Christmas decorations at Tivoli and then we had a typical Danish Christmas dinner at one of the restaurants near by. 

Here are a few pix from today.............

 

 

After Tivoli we went to Axelborg Bodega for a traditional Danish lunch/dinner.

 The following day, the plan was to take the boat from our apartment to the restaurant in Nyhavn.  But Patrick and Fabian wanted to start the day with "just a little" breakfast and then do some down town shopping.  Instead - Jens and I took the boat to meet Patrick and Fabian as they were already in town.  Here is Jens standing at the dock as the boat is approaching. This boat stop is just out in front of our apartment.

 Here we are now at the restaurant Skipperkroen in Nyhavn.  We just sat down and ordered an aperitif.

 Jul i Nyhavn - Christmas at the New Harbor....... with our stomachs full from a delicious meal, and hands filled with bags of down-town shopping, we now head back to our apartment.  At the end of the harbor is the boat stop and the 4 of us sail home. Click here for 10 sec. youtube clip in Nyhavn or click here for 2 minutes, 26 seconds youtube clip in Nyhavn.

 Inside the boat - it's only 3 stops and we are home.

We step off of the boat and walk 1 minute along the waterfront to snap this Kodak moment.

 Once inside the apartment I light the candles on the tree for just a moment - don't wanna burn the house down.

CLICK THIS LINK TO SEE ALL 109 PIX OF X-MAS IN TIVOLI

Canarian Birthdays

Jens and I did a quick and simple birthday at home in DK but our major celbration took place once again on the island of Gran Canaria.  Since we have been there 1,000,000,000 or more, the camera stayed in the hotel room most of the time.  But I did manage to snap a few pix.

 Enjoying a cocktail and late afternoon sunshine on the porch of our bungalow.

 This is the view from our porch.

 These are the flowers in front of our bungalow complex.

 The only time we took our pants on was when we were going out to eat.

 But before hitting the restaurant, we need to work up an appetite.

 Jens checks out his coordination.

 Now it's time for a birthday dinner at our favorite restaurant.

 Jumbo shrimp - there not really that big!

We think it is funny that Pia has her own Danish restaurant on Gran Canaria - Danish food is not really what one thinks about when going out to eat on the Spanish island.

Swedish Weekend with Stefan

There where we used to live in the house on Gladiolusvej, lives our good friend Dan from New Jersey just 10 doors down the road.  His boyfriend Stefan invited Jens and I along with Bounty who has been there before, for a nice weekend visit at his country home.  Stefan gave us a little tour of the nearby village, Lund and the countryside.  To get to Stefan's home we just have to cross the bridge to Sweden.  The entire journey is about a one hour drive from our apartment.  We had a very nice time and saw quite a bit of the surrounding area and happened to catch the last of the autumn colors while we were there - it was wonderful.  Good food, good wine and good company for a lasting memory with these photos.

 

At the end of the dirt road is Pippi Longstocking's house.

 

See all 43 photos - click here.