What to do with one day in Germany, or zwei or drei

Midlife Sentence | Lüneburg Am Sande

It has happened before: regardless of what Einstein said about the definition of insanity, we’ve done the exact same thing we’ve always done and had something totally unexpected happen. Take this trip, for example. We’ve had such good luck finding lodging with minimal knowledge about where we were going or extra wads of cash to spend. Even when we were in Copenhagen, and I’d made our airbnb reservations after reading exactly one article on how cool the Nørrebro neighborhood is, we ended up getting a hip, little flat in what turned out to be the neighborhood about which everyone we’ve talked to since has made that sucking-air-through-your-teeth-sound at, even then we had good luck.

That luck-with-the-lodging thing kind of went pfhht in Hamburg.

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Our Denmark Adventure: How Somebody Totally Undersold Sønderborg, and I’m Going to Need a Pastry Intervention

Midlife Sentence | Sonderborg

Our oldest son is a young man of many talents, but I must say, he’s got a ways to go if he wants a future in the travel industry. When we’ve talked about the town he’s called home this past year, he totally undersold it. The impression he left us with was: safe, small, and rainy. There’s a rocky beach and a harbor, a decent mall, and a great kebab shop within walking distance.

We weren’t really prepared to be blown away by Sønderborg, a seaside town of around 30,000 that straddles the narrow straight of Alsslund in southern Denmark.

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Deciphering Finnish Wedding Traditions

Midlife Sentence | A Finnish Wedding

Two summers ago, Saara, who’d been our first exchange student nine years ago, visited with her beau, Joona. We did all the usual Idaho stuff to see if we could scare him off. We camped, set off fireworks in the street, made him drink cheap beer at a baseball game in a zillion-degree heat, and asked him all kinds of intrusive (to Finns) questions like “how was your flight?” and “did you sleep well?”

Anyway, we and the other members of Saara’s Boise circle failed to scare him off that week and – long story short – he proposed before breakfast on their last day in town, and then we all hugged (more intrusion), and sat down to pancakes.

Midlife Sentence | A Finnish Wedding

Later that same year, Saara sent me a locket with a small slip of paper inside asking if I would be a bridesmaid. Saara’s the kind of person who puts a lot of thought into things like that. The fact that she knows I am more of the kind of person who recruits bridesmaids over beer and still thought I would be suitable for the job tells you a little about the bond we have.

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Pori, Huikee and the Sea

Midlife Sentence | Pori

It’s obvious how much thought Joona and Saara and others have put into planning our stay in Finland. On our first full day, Saara had to work for part of the day, so Joona took us on a short walking trip around Pori and to visit a natural history exhibit in the town museum. That evening Joona’s parents, Matti and Pirkko, fixed another meal for us in their home in town.

Pori is a town of about 85,000, with a university, and lumber and manufacturing as major industries. Established in the 1550s, it has burned down and been rebuilt nine times until someone got the great idea to install wide esplanades as firebreaks.

Midlife Sentence | Pori
Photo by Mike Markley

Next week, it will host its annual Pori Jazz Festival, and organizers were setting up tents and platforms in the streets while we were exploring in the drizzly weather. I don’t know a lot of the artists on the bill, but Chaka Kahn and Grace Jones were two I recognized.

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Sauna Time in Finland

Midlife Sentence | Finnish Lake, Sauna Time

In Finnish there are, apparently, a number of different words for “mosquito,” and one that in certain dialects, also means “cow.” I don’t know what that says about Finns, the complexity of their language, the mosquitos around here, or cows for that matter. I haven’t seen any cows, but the mosquitos are prolific.

For the most part, they’re also thankfully disinterested in our party. I think if one of those words is for “polite mosquito,” that’s the kind we appear to be dealing with this week.

We arrived in Pori yesterday via Onnibus, a low cost transit service that features double decker buses, with free wifi and chargers. For about 30 Euros per round-trip ticket, plus a small charge for seat reservations, I was able to secure the front row on the top deck for our party. It’s about the most fun and lowest cost way to travel the three and a half hours from Helsinki to Pori I could imagine. The scenery was fantastic, and the chance to sit and watch the landscape go by gave us a nice respite from the crowds and cobblestones of Helsinki (although that is one of our favorite cities).

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A sunny day in Suomenlinna

Midlife Sentence | Suomenlinna

I have to say, I thought our kids would remember more about Helsinki from our last trip here than they actually do (which just goes to show, if you’re trying to make family memories with young-ish kids, or even with pre-teens, you should formulate your plans around what the adults want to do and just tell the kids later what a great time everyone had, but I digress). The last time we were in Helsinki, the boys were twelve and eight years old, and I’m thinking they were more focused on not losing track of their luggage than they were on taking in the scenery.

… Maybe it’s because we kept saying: “if you forget anything, we’re not coming back for it,” which was not the exact truth, but at twelve and eight years old, one rather freaks out about losing one’s Gameboy, or being abandoned on a train platform. I don’t know why either kid would think we’d abandon him, but I am impressed with how each of them tends to keep up on our trips.

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Days 3 and 4: Everybody’s getting married in Helsinki

Midlife Sentence | Uspenski Cathedral, Helsinki

The days are starting to run together at this point, so that’s the perspective you’re going to get from this blog now, dear reader. If anything you’ve read heretofore made any sense whatsoever in the first place, that’s probably outside the norm, anyway.

Regarding our last day in Copenhagen, remember that thing where I said ‘Mike kept testing the gods, saying things like “I thought it always rained here? You guys are just pulling my leg.”?’

You knew that meant rain in our future, right?

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Day 2: Canals and castles in Copenhagen

Midlife Sentence | Nyhavn Art Installation for World Refugee Day

Our luck was holding out on our second day in Copenhagen, although Mike kept testing the gods, saying things like “I thought it always rained here? You guys are just pulling my leg.” Jack kept shushing him and making the sign for the evil eye and looking skyward.

We returned to Nyhavn for a boat tour, which started near this thing:

This, as it turned out, was an enormous art installation called Soleil Levant, featuring 3,500 life jackets discarded by refugees who’d landed at Lesbos. The piece as assembled for World Refugee Day, June 20, by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

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Day 1: In Which We Found a Graveyard Banksy and Didn’t Kill My Mom

Midlife Sentence | Nyhavn Copenhagen Denmark

The good news is: we have our boy back. The big one. The one who’s been on exchange for almost a year.

The better news is: he appears to have actually taken the opportunity of his exchange to learn a decent amount of Danish. Most folks in this country are fluent in English, so if he’d wanted, he could have easily frittered the opportunity to expand that part of his brain.

The really exciting news is: there are about a bajillion new ways to annoy him by pronouncing Danish words incorrectly, and we don’t even have to try.

Pretty much the first day into this trip, I decided our primary goal was to give Jack’s eye rolling mechanism a workout by mispronouncing purt’near everything I can in Danish. It isn’t hard to do, and he’s mostly a good sport about it, BUT I haven’t broken out my Swedish Chef imitation yet, nor has Colin asked him how to say Fahrvergnügen in Dutch, so we have some cards left to play.

In all seriousness, it is really nice to have the band back together.

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Family Travel Tips: Expect Sleep Disruptions, Remember the Ranch

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This weekend we head out on our road trip to Yellowstone, so an original blog entry for today would put me over the edge. Instead enjoy this piece of nostalgia, a version of which recently appeared on Motherhood: May Cause Drowsiness.

“Over here you can see an example of Soviet era architecture.”

Saara was craned to face us from the front, translating for her uncle, who narrated in Finnish while pointed at long rows of abandoned-looking cement apartment buildings. The car wove back and forth and occasionally into the lane of oncoming traffic.

Saara, who had been interpreting for the better part of an hour, looking back at us, surprisingly wasn’t turning green, as I would have been.

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