Before Andrea and I expatriated ourselves about 45 days ago, we made promises as nonchalantly as we turfed decade-old possessions into the Hartland land fill. One of those promises was that
I told everyone that
Andrea would begin to blog of her adventures abroad. But to understand why you're hearing from me instead, and so late at that, I have to share a recent story.
In Denmark, Scandinavia as a whole, in fact, one gets an entire krone (almost 20 cents) for just one bottle or can return. Find six hundred cans and you can buy a nice winter jacket. And, by the time you've wandered about enough to find six hundred cans, you've gotten a good deal more exercise than if you'd been busking, instead.
My salary is good, but we weren't really very sure how far it would take us in an expensive country like Denmark; so, based on some conservative preliminary budgeting, we figured it wouldn't hurt if Andrea could scrape together, I don't know, say, $7/day, and preferably without deep-frying cow carcasses inside yellowy-orange, plastic buildings for an hour. Cans seemed like the perfect option.
But after a month in Århus, she still had not found a single can. This, despite having wandered hours over the city joining Toastmasters groups, volunteering at student bars until 5 in the morning, and searching every alcove for coffee that I wouldn't dump down the sink. So, on Saturday, I grabbed her by the hand and led her on a short walk through the university, to return the 30 or so empty beer cans that I had begrudgingly produced for her. She emerged with enough money to buy herself a tasty little cortado, or one twentieth of a jacket, if you prefer. On the walk home, she found another 30 cans, and had to go back to the return kiosk. Every day since, she returns from her daily adventures with some four, five, six cans and a clearer idea of which jacket she would like.
So this is what I have learned about her since a fair while ago. In general, she is very open-minded and enjoys new experiments, adventures, and escapades. She just needs a good shove from behind to get going. I suspect that soon now you'll hear the afore-promised stories more often and not written by me.
Andrea and I both love visiting Germany. The cities are overwhelmingly large, and it seems that everything else is correspondingly large, as well. For 1.89 euro, you can find Ritter Sport bars the size of a dinner plate. Cups of ice cream come with three flavours and a mountain of whipped cream.
In Århus, we live beside the Botaniske Have, and it makes for a very pleasant twenty minute walk to make one's way around it's perimetre. In Hamborg, we ventured through for about 90 minutes, from roses to cacti to olive trees, and still missed the majority of what was to see. But we had little choice, if we were going to walk the hundreds of rooms of Picassos and Cezannes at the kunsthalle before it closed.
