Denmark

We love going to visit my Aunt Carla and Uncle Poul in Denmark because it feels like home. We love staying at their beautiful home and farm, we love exploring the rocky beaches, picturesque countryside and quaint villages, and we love just hanging out with Carla and Poul, especially while enjoying one of Carla’s excellent dinners. This trip was 10 years since my first trip to Denmark.

We arrived at London’s Stansted airport Friday evening and while we waited for our flight, John efficiently made calls regarding the rental of our house. Unfortunately, our lovely upstairs tenants are moving out, but with the help of our friend Mike, we were able to find a new tenant quickly. John made a few more calls when we got to Denmark and when we woke up it was all sorted. Thanks Mike!

We didn’t get to Carla and Poul’s (C&P) until the wee hours of the morning but it was worth it to be able to have three full days there, and Carla let us sleep in. Once we finally got up on Saturday morning, we had a leisurely breakfast with C&P, which included cream for our coffee and home made butter tarts! Carla, you know the way to our hearts.

Carla then took us on a 14km bike ride to the harbour town of Kerteminde. She had a route all planned out, which took us through classic old Danish towns and we had a few stops along the way. The first stop was at Carla’s friend Alexandra’s house, where we toured Alexandra’s art gallery and ate pears in her orchard. The second stop was Elizabeth, Anders and Anna’s house, where we went on Christmas day. Elizabeth and baby Anna greeted us with coffee and cookies which we enjoyed in their perfect garden.

We eventually made it to Kerteminde where Carla took us straight to the harbour to see their new sailboat, called the Feel Good. C&P bought it last autumn and spent the winter fixing it up. It is an impressive vessel. Poul is out seveat least once a week racing it. Poul biked down to meet us and we all enjoyed a beer sitting on the boat in the harbour. The bike ride back along the coast, while beautiful, was agonizing for me. I haven’t ridden a bike for a while and my butt was not up for the challenge. I think it’s still sore! Good thing we weren’t on a week long bike trip somewhere.

We had a warped concept of time that day and we didn’t end up sitting down for dinner until 10ish. We filled ourselves on delicious steaks, Polish onions, garden potatoes and beats, accompanied by Carla’s secret sauce. Yum! C&P entertained us with stories of their adventures, which included making their own hot tub out of a large cement livestock feeding drum. They balanced the large cement pot on rocks, built a fire underneath, put a tarp on the inside so they wouldn’t scrape their bums and filled it with water. Very ingenious but it looked like a human cauldron.

On Sunday morning, Carla had breakfast and lunch packed when we got up and we headed straight to the Feel Good for a day of sailing. We got the sails up and headed out of the harbour (when I say we, I really mean, Carla and Poul). As we cruised to the Island of Romso the sun came out. We got off the boat at Romso and walked around the island before getting back on the boat for more food and drink. We thought we would sail around the island before heading back and we got the spinnaker up, both of which seemed a good idea but then the wind died. At that point, I had a nap in the cozy cabin. When I arose we were motoring back and John and I got to spend some time cuddled up on the bow. C&P, thanks for taking us out on the boat; it was a pleasure to watch you skillfully sail it (and thanks for letting us try too).

That evening we opted to have dinner at the restaurant at the harbour (no dishes to clean up after). We also walked through Kerteminde to see a house C&P just bought and are redoing. Renovating houses that date back hundreds of years sure makes any renos we did back in Vancouver look easy.

Back at the house, once it was dark enough, we lay outside and watched the meteor shower. It was like being at the lake watching the shooting stars, and it was quite different from London where we can’t really see stars. We saw lots of little shooting stars and even a few big bright ones with long tails.

It was cool and slightly overcast on Monday morning, but Carla and I were on a mission to go for pre-breakfast swim in the ocean. When I was there in August ten years before there was a heat wave, and Carla and I would go down to the sea every morning for dip. It wasn’t as easy on Monday, but we braved it anyway.

The sun came out midday and Carla took us to Den Fynske Landsby. It’s an open air museum, a recreated Danish farming village with restored original structures from various parts of the island of Fyn. The visit tied in nicely with the “old Danish town” bike tour Carla took us on on Saturday.

From Den Fynske Landsby, we made a beeline to a Danish Hot Dog stand so John wouldn’t get hangry (a great term we learned from my Aunt Barbara, a combo of hungry and angry). As we drove back towards C&Ps it started to pour rain, but that didn’t stop us from getting ice cream enroute in Kerteminde. The homemade waffle cones were irresistible.

We spent the afternoon relaxing and reading. John managed to find a hammock. I was engrossed in a Daphne De Maurier short story book (The Birds, Don’t Look Now - too good). We ate another delicious dinner in the sunshine in the garden before having to leave for the airport.

Thanks for having us again C&P!
Our next trip is to Canada and we can’t wait!

Malta

We finally got a taste of summer!

John spent last week leading an air service development workshop at the airport in Malta, a small island country in the Mediterranean. It wasn’t a place we would have thought to go to but given that John was there for work, it was a good excuse for me to go for the weekend. I had two goals: enjoy the heat and go swimming in the Med. We did that and much more, and really enjoyed ourselves.

I left cool and soggy England on Friday night and arrived in Malta at 9:00 p.m. A wave of heat hit me as I walked off the plane, causing a large grin to spread across my face. John picked me up in the rental car; I blissfully navigated while “I can see clearly now the rain is gone” appropriately played on the radio, and John struggled with the counterintuitive left handed stick shift and kept turning on the windshield wipers every time he went for the turning signal (he got the hang of the backwards car the next day).

The country of Malta consists of two islands, Malta and Gozo. Malta is about 30 km in length and Gozo about 10km. Despite being tiny, Malta is full of ancient temples and ruins and it has an impressive history due to its strategic position. There are great tales of the Knights of Malta, Napoleon, the Great Siege, being the most bombed place in WWII, and gaining independence from Britain.

During the week, John stayed in a nice hotel in a trendy area known as St. Julian’s. For the weekend we had hastily booked a hotel in the Bugibba area without doing any research. We were a bit concerned because whenever John asked one of his colleagues about the area the response was, “Oh...Bugibba”. It was dark when we arrived but luckily all of the neon tourist signs lit our way (please note my sarcasm). We found our hotel in the maze of one way streets jammed with very touristy accommodation. The hotel was decent, like a Mexico all inclusive but not right on the beach. Unfortunately, we got a room on level -1, yes, the basement. Once in the room, we read the tour book description of Bugibba and had a good chuckle at ourselves.

“During the 1970s and 1980s, Maltese speculators, bewitched by the lucrative earnings from early tourism, developed Bugibba with heady recklessness. There was no unified vision and little cohesive planning to the building programme, with multistorey apartment blocks and hotels erected in the shortest time possible to monumentally ugly effect.”

Despite the British couple in the room next door having a screaming match until the wee hours of the morning, we both slept well and awoke to sunshine, 35 degrees, a good breakfast and upgrade to a room on the 5th floor with an ocean view. We quickly left Bugibba in pursuit of Malta’s more attractive attributes.

One of the guys in John’s workshop was Maltese Canadian. Jason was born on Gozo, lived in Ontario growing up, went to UBC and worked in Vancouver, and now works in Malta. He kindly offered to tour us around Gozo on Saturday. He did a fantastic job zipping us around the whole island and giving us tons of local Maltese knowledge which we wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

Jason picked us up at the ferry port and started the tour by taking us through the town his parents live in and also the highest point on Gozo. Like his parents, many Gozonians left Gozo, lived abroad, and have moved back to Gozo. The ties to North America were very apparent as Canadian and American flags were flying and the houses were named things like Oh Canada, God Bless America, The Maple Leaf, American Eagle, Sky Dome. We felt quite at home.

Our next stop was Ggantija, the oldest free standing stone temple in the world (5,000 years give or take). We were sufficiently hot by that point so we went back to the southeast part of the island for a swim. We swam and snorkeled for ages in the beautiful waters. Across from us was the blue lagoon of Comino and in it was anchored a very large private yacht with a helicopter on board! The swim worked up our appetites so we drove to a small harbour in the north part of the island for a leisurely two hour lunch. We ate a delicious Italian meal on the restaurant patio overlooking the water and learned about the Maltese people from Jason. After lunch, Jason showed us the salt pans: pans carved into the shore line where sea water evaporates to leave salt for collection.

Next up was Victoria, the capital of Gozo. Victoria is home to a citadel (fortress) with a great view of the whole island, a cute market, and two rivaling Catholic churches. As we walked along one street, we approached a young boy holding a bottle of Windex, suspiciously like it was a water gun. As John walked by, the boy sprayed John’s legs with Windex! We had a good laugh over that.

We went back out to the northwest coast of the island (that only took a few minutes) to check out the Azur Window. Enroute to the next swimming hole we drove through a town getting ready for their town Feast. The majority of Maltese are practicing Catholics. The population of Malta is 400,000 and there are 365 churches, some of which are very impressive. Each church has an annual feast (festival) to celebrate its patron saint. The centres of the towns are decorated with colourful banners and statues of the saints, the town congregates to celebrate and the evening is capped off with fireworks. We saw many different feast preparations on our short stay in Malta.

Our second and last swim on Saturday was in a very deep bay off the cliffs on the northwestern shore. After a quick beer overlooking the cove, we sped back to the ferry terminal. We were just in time for the next ferry and as it sailed back over to Malta, we watched the sun set over Gozo.

We were exhausted after our fun filled day of touring Gozo. Despite that, on Jason’s recommendation we went to Mdina, the former capital in central Malta (only 8 km away) for dinner. Mdina is a walled town (Medina means walled village in Arabic, to which Maltese is related), very well restored, at a high point on Malta. It was beautifully lit up at night. We wandered the confusing streets (designed that way so invaders would get lost) and found a lovely restaurant. After dinner we went to the Fort’s look out and watched some Feast fireworks go off across the island and admired all of the glowing blue lights in the towns perched on top of flag poles (symbols of the Virgin Mary).

Sunday was a scorcher but we vowed not to complain about the heat. From Bugibba, we drove along the seaside, through the main cities of Malta and through more feast decorations. Our destination was Valletta, Malta’s main city. We followed a walking tour in our guide book and saw the highlights which included beautiful gardens, a waterfront fortress and the Grand Harbour. We were absolutely drenched in sweat by the end. Originally we thought we would go and see some of Malta’s ancient ruins but given the sweat situation we decided it was definitely time for a swim!

We drove across the dry island to Ghar Lapsi, a swimming hole recommended by Jason. Ghar Lapsi was an adorable local swimming hole. It was the most beautiful water for swimming yet. All the locals set up in the caves around the water and the rocks form sheltered swimming pools. Boat houses serve as day cabins where people congregate. I was blissfully swimming through the clear water but it was cut short as I got stung on the foot by a jelly fish. (Nothing serious, but it sure stung. No, John did not pee on my foot.)

We then drove along the Dingli Cliffs on the west coast. The sheer drop beside the road took my breath away. We attempted to go to another recommended swimming hole but it was the end of the day and everyone was coming the opposite direction out of the one way road to get there. Instead we went to Marsaxlokk harbour, full of colourful fishing boats. The town was getting ready for its feast, and we had gelato on the waterfront. It wouldn’t be a hot holiday without gelato.

We headed back to the airport and begrudgingly put our jeans on. It was 12 degrees when we landed at 11:30 in Luton, quite the shock to the system! Unfortunately, we had our longest customs line up yet, 2 hours! We were in bed by 3:00 and ready for another week at work.

Thanks Jason for touring us around on Saturday. That made the trip!