Ten clues that I am just me (I was going to say international, not just British, not Scandinavian, but actually I meant, just me)

1. I am happy in a climate that is HOT, and under skies that are BRIGHT, and clear, and blue. I stayed away from Britain all those years partly because the climate was so miserable. I'm not sure what happened two years ago ..

2. I am very polite, and will always try to be pleasant to people, and the more so if they are polite to me, regardless of what their social status is. This is because (a) in a country where life is hard it is what people do to survive - it is a kind of deliberate counterfactuality - and (b) bad manners just make people repulsive.

3. I like to laugh, and like to make people laugh, and I think it is very important to see most things as absurd, most of the time. (Because they are.)

4. I am extremely eccentric. I spent much of my life getting here, and I am damned if I am going to damp myself down for pathetic types who get scared looking outside their hobbit holes. The people who speak my language are all equally eccentric or more, and in fact the non-existence of this on these northern shores is one of my chief complaints.

5. I love to read, and I love to learn, which I regard as a beautiful thing. And I regard education as the greatest excitement and its own great reward, not as something cruel to spare children from.

6. I am getting increasingly intolerant of food which doesn't have strong spice in it. I like strong clear flavours, and I've started putting chili in my tea.

7. I just want to eat prawns all the time.

8. I like to be silly, and think silliness is one of the greatest virtues. When you are being silly you are both not taking yourself seriously, which is good for the world, and being very serious about what is important.

9. I don't believe in cultural relativism. Having lived in two, no my god three cultures (British, Egyptian Arab, Danskie), it's clear to me that some things in some cultures are a hell of a lot better than others. Won't go into details in public, though. I get into a lot of trouble. We had freedom of speech in Cairo. We don't here.

10. Having learned how to be friends late in life after a miserable childhood and early life, making and being friends is something I really love to do and miss, dreadfully, here. I am a warm person and love to connect to people. When people blank me out, I retreat into a sort of internal exile to avoid misery. I hope I don't forget how to make friends living in Denmark.

And 11. Having lived in the South for years and years, and found it infinitely more fun and more enriching than the West, I know that real life can involve so much more, and so much more intensity, than the modern Western way of life. Which is a kind of dreadful poverty.

So there.

It's Europe, not just Denmark

I am getting some perspective shift as I think to and fro about living here in Denmark. Undeniably, settling in here is really difficult for people from outside, and I call them / us ‘internationals’ because ‘foreigners’ as used locally is a word that just means, ‘people we don’t want.’ (Denmark, fix yourself.) Living here as an international is very difficult to crack socially, hard to manage (let’s face it) materially, and often full of hurts, small and large. But although Denmark is more inward-looking, more peripheral and socially deader than other European countries, I think it’s very unlikely that settling in any European country, including Britain and France, would be what one might call easy. It might be easier to make friends, but I’m sure that in every case, most of one’s friends would be other internationals.

My point is that I think these European societies are very dense and settled and unused to change, and that this makes them hard to get inside. Whereas this does not seem to be true of the US. Families don’t stay in the same place, everyone moves around the country, there is extreme social mobility, all the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration melting-pot thing, and a second-generation American is president. There are big cities, lots of subcultures all over the place, MOVEMENT.

There are various other places in the world that are genuinely international, multicultural. Cairo is one. Hong Kong. Bombay. Delhi? Don’t know. Jakarta? Writer, tell me. Singapore, certainly. Shanghai maybe. Rio. Buenos Aires. Those are a bit different. It’s not that they’re rich melting-pot countries to which people came from all over. These are all cities that were colonized by foreign elites, multiple times over, not just the British. Cairo, for example, was run by foreign elites without a break from 330BC to 1952, that’s more than 2,000 years. Makes you a bit more open to outsiders. Also, all these cities (don’t know about Rio) were always on major trade routes, and are still major international crossroads. (Scandinavia? Are we joking?)

Anyway. In these places it is easy to live as an international, and not just for people who are jetted in by oil companies. I turned up in Cairo on my own with nothing but my education, and did fine.

But why *would* it be easy to settle in Europe? I think that we, for one (meaning me and my family), made a big mistake in our thinking coming here. We are white, English, privileged (though I hate that word and have done my time to work it off), educated at the best universities in the world. We don’t get the racism that is flying around here, but we get the xenophobia and the intense resistance to anything from outside.

In my spouse’s field, Muslims in Europe, it is apparent that second- and later-generation Muslims in Europe do not prosper. Very few manage to achieve a decent education; they become dissatisfied, they turn to the counterculture and they get networked into radicalism. Yes, it’s a worse starting situation in Europe because European Muslims are not skilled and educated (those go to the US). But the only niche they can find is at the bottom, and surprise, surprise, they are not happy. Well, I think this doesn’t only apply to asylum-seekers.

I too wanted to try living in different places around the world. I did it for fifteen years, extremely happily, in Cairo. But I think in coming to Europe we have all come to the wrong place.

To laugh

If you have five minutes, here is a kind of humour that I love and isn't much in evidence in the rational North. This is a vignette of (yes, you guessed it, Cairo) life written as a series of imaginary taxi journeys across town. They’re in a book called Taxi, by Khaled al Khamissi, which a friend gave me this summer. (Maybe I'm just weird.)

--------------

I was on my way to Heliopolis [distant 'burb] where I had an important appointment at the Armed Forces public relations department to get permission to film in front of the podium where President Anwar Sadat was assassinated back in 1981. The appointment had been arranged a long time before and I did not want to be late, so I went at least half an hour early.

I took a taxi from Dokki [downtown] and we took the Sixth of October bridge. The traffic was heavy as usual but I was feeling smug about the way I'd planned it. By about the time I had expected to be there, we had reached Salah Salem Street [a notorious blockage], and as we approached the exhibition ground the traffic came to a complete standstill. I wasn't very worried but the waiting dragged on and the minutes passed slowly and we started to ask the cars nearby what the reason was. They told us that President Mubarak was making an excursion. [They close the streets when this happens.] Okay, I thought, may he arrive safely, and in a few more minutes the road would clear.

We stayed sitting in the car, which by some magical power had been transformed into a mere rock squatting in the middle of the road, unable to move a fraction of an inch, even if Hercules had been pushing. After we'd been waiting close to an hour, I decided to pay the driver the fare and get out and walk, for no doubt, I thought, walking would be better than sitting. As soon as I started to get out, a police officer approached me and prevented me from getting out.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"It's forbidden, sir," he said. "You have to stay in the car."

"What do you mean? This is a street and I want to walk in the street," I said.

"It's forbidden, sir. Get back in the car."

I got in the taxi dejectedly and the driver laughed. "You mean you wanted to leave me in this mess! See what God does," he said.

"I was trying to make my appointment," I said.

"Forget that. This is one big jam. Once I was stuck here for four hours without moving."

"Oh my God, four hours!"

"That day I got out of here, took the car back to the owner, paid him everything I had on me and told him 'Never mind, I'll give you the rest tomorrow.' I went home and by God we all went to bed without dinner. My wife and kids had been waiting for dinner, like, all day long, and I came home empty-handed. My wife cried and put the kids to bed. I stayed by the window listening to the Koran to calm down."

"So what are you going to do today?" I asked.

"That depends on you. You could compensate me for however many hours we get stranded here."

"So that whole story was so that I’ll pay you for today?"

"No, I swear on the Holy Koran. What I’m telling you is the honest truth, and if you don’t want to pay more than you’ve paid that’s okay by me. But stay with me to pass the time of day."

We sat for three hours, passing the time of day. He told me how he once loved Cairo with a passion, then he began to like it, then he began to have conflicting feelings about it, then he disliked it and now he loathed it.

In the end he told me about 20 jokes and I told him just as many back. Unfortunately I can’t tell you them because any one of them would be enough to send me to prison for slander, although I don’t see why I should go to prison because of jokes which most Egyptians know and which they circulate and laugh at daily.

Since I naturally do not want to be jailed, suffice it to say that we laughed a lot, even if I did not make my appointment. Since then I’ll never feel smug like that again.

Denmark blues

One of the few things I really can blame Denmark for in good conscience is people's staggering parochialism. Laila, my 12-year-old, has a school camping trip in two weeks down in the woods near Norsminde, and they need parents to cycle out with them as there is a whole class' worth of over-excited Lottes and Henriks to keep in the right place on the road. And I thought I wouldn't really be able to offer because I am just too strange for those little Henriks and Lottes to accept and that it would create an awkwardness and make Laila feel bad, despite the fact that all the girls have come to our house for birthdays and slept over and met me. And I checked with Laila and I'm right.

What do you-all think about that eh?

A bit of carnivorousness

Now down to what really counts. I am proud to report that Mille, who does go outside, today ATE her catch good and proper. That's a first. She has played around with baby blackbirds, adorable field mice, even a pigeon, but it's always just for a bit of torturing. Today though, under the apple tree we found her eating with bits of bird leg sticking out of her mouth, and all there was left was one leg sticking out of the grass. I was proud. I mean, it's what she's supposed to do. It's like Laila getting the prize for the best Luxor diary. Ooohhh ..

Apart from adoring cats and desperately wanting them to love me, I do really like about cats their complete conviction when they flop out and are pleased with themselves. You should hear the beast purring away on Lina's bed. As if it was only put there for her (and of course it was flat-pack Ilva, June).

Strange customs

I am a little bemused as to the lack of reaction in the Danish press to the videoed police assault on the students last week at the Iraqi asylum-seekers deportation debacle. In Britain once anything so inconvenient as a video is produced, police assault gets investigated and things begin to happen. (Without a video, no they don't, but that is one of the beauties of digital democracy innit.) An officer is facing prosecution for manslaughter for an unprovoked attack on a bystander at the G-20 summit in London in April. He's been suspended. There have also been investigations of two additional cases of police assault on unarmed demonstrators (both women) at the same demonstrations. The files have been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Is unprovoked assault with batons considered okay police crowd control in Denmark? They could have got the students out of the way without batons, could they not.

We take our rights to protest seriously. Don't they care in Denmark?

Public space in DK - der mangler det

To elaborate on something from Paula's blog, Why is poor dear old DK such an un-social space. I've got part of it. There actually is no public social space. No public socializing. People go out and picnic outside en famille a lot, sure, with their picnic boxes, and are incredibly super-active physically and nature-wise, but if you look at what is happening, people never gather to meet new people. You don't see folks socializing in restaurants. There ARE hardly any restaurants. It's all DIY stuff with people who already know each other, make up a defined social group already. To put it another way, there are no fixed, pre-existing points where you go to socialize. It's all freelance.

There you have it. That's why those of us who come from the South culturally (me, for instance) choke so much. There's no social oxygen flowing around.

But rather than dwell on it, I'd rather get on with manufacturing our own social oxygen - and booking as frequent trips abroad as possibly possible.

Safe! Though I shouldn't say, Home

I'm safe, back in the real world, away from the G.B. (the Great Blank, elaborated on Paula's blog). Can't upload a photo because of hardware challenges. We MADE IT! past the thermal imaging monitors at Cairo airport - the authorities are quarantining anyone who comes into the country with a temperature, because as always they define nasty lergies as sabotage brought into the glorious mother country by foreigners, probably Israelis in disguise at that. The lockdown of the American University dormitory - 250 people inside, faculty as well as year-abroad students - has been lifted. Anyway, we made it. And once through that lunacy, back into our glorious, ALIVE city of idiocy, beauty, wisdom, grit, dust, dirt, ignorance, LAUGHTER. Private beauty (gardens, a nightingale, early morning pools), public squalor (dust, risking your life crossing the road [tho our policeman still recognizes us and stops the traffic for us]). ([([])])

Good Lord, why does living in a sad and empty place where people are only 1/4 alive make you feel so awful? I am going to work out some ways of proofing us against this.

But I also have to stop pining for Egypt and start treating Denmark as a real home to live in. Rather than waiting for the torture to stop. I can have them as two parallel worlds perhaps, so that one doesn't cancel the other out. Dualism is not the answer.

Oh I can hear the azzan. In Egypt, at least, the foreigners are polarized into those who can't stand the azzan and those who it makes feel comfortable. Actually, one of the nicest things about being back is the ambient noise. There's masses of it, everywhere. On Thursday night, when Egypt beat Italy in whatever the football thing was, you should have heard the driving and tooting in the street. I recorded it, will post. But there's always a lot of it. I like that, it makes me feel safe.

Happy Lucy ..

Love outpouring

I (I mean we) are going back to Cairo in four days !! Just for three marvellous weeks, but back to the city I love and back to one of the great multinational metropolises in the world. Istanbul, Bombay, New York, maybe London .. Here are just one or two snapshots of what Cairo means to me:

Beautiful Zamalek streets with my girls walking home from school:



And the counterintuitive street experience:



Gardens, and sun, and colour, and LIFE:



And deep shade and bright light, and people SOCIALIZING:

#

And my Cairo at night:



And over towards Mohandiseen:



And the incomparable Nile:




From our apartment:







The butcher downstairs in the Coop:



Amm Abdu and Ibrahim of the garage:



Ibrahim the rubbish and Ibrahim the garage man (who I quarrelled with for years):



And sitting in their street:




And the shawarma man:





And this isn't even my medieval city, for which I stayed .. I don't seem to have any digital photos of Islamic Cairo, they are all on old-fashioned slides from the 1990s.

Some places on earth just are lovelier than others.

Something VERY good about Denmark

One of these blogs was tagged recently to name some things that we like about Danish society. Well, here's one, and a really good one. There isn't social snobbery. A couple of my children's schoolfriends' mums clean, and nobody looks down on them or treats them differently. And the person who sometimes cleans our house, who is a qualifying psychologist, is giving me a really nice linen skirt for a birthday present.

I think that's amazing actually.

Bloggers - what are we on about then?

Kel has okayed it, so here are some pictures of our meeting up yesterday. Here are Kel, and Nicki, and me.







So, met up with a real, live Arhus blogger tonight, and it was lovely. But I cannot get used to this funny sensation, of driving to what is, in effect, a date with someone of whom you know some rather personal sides but who is someone you don't actually know at all.

And then the other weird thing is that there is this big difference between the person you know from their writing - who is the person as they see themselves - and the person you actually meet coming from outside, who may be quite different. Talk about subjective/objective and multiple identities! It’s enough to get you reaching for your Wittgenstein.

I've never seen so clearly that how we see ourselves is not how others see us. And do we write for ourselves, or for the hypothetical Reader? Or just to be friends, perhaps.

There you are, that’s enough philosophizing for tonight. Tomorrow I am supposed to get up for a huge bike ride with my eldest daughter. I wanted to explore north-western Djursland, but she is put off by the weather forecast and wants to go boring old south where the rain isn’t.

What a day

Obama said the unsayable today in Cairo. He said that the suffering of the Palestinians is intolerable; he used the word Torture in the US context; and he said out loud, in Egypt, a country which I know very well, that all peoples long for a government that doesn't steal from them. Bless him for daring to change what can be spoken.

Just bless him, actually.

And on a day which commemorates Tiananmen.

What a day.

Animal life

I would like to say that this was Mille convalescing, but in fact she became quite ill and is in hospital chez the holistic vet. It turned out that it wasn't a fall from anything, but a bite from another animal - given that this is Spring and everyone is running about (in the cat world) on heat and very over-excited - which had caused a nasty deep infection and necessitated lots of very strong drugs being injected right into her poor little leg. So Mille is boarding at Gudrun's, out in Fløjstrup. It feels very odd to have our household going its dysfunctional way without her.

Meanwhile over the weekend we went to Legoland. The children were strapped into various terror rides and I had forgotten how utterly delighted they are to be squeezed through G-forces, dashed down cliffs, dropped into water and turned upside down. I tried some very mild G-forces myself and hung on to my rail so hard that it made it much worse, but I couldn't stop myself.

They had a Lego Acropolis (complete with Erechtheum) and a Lego Abu Simbel!




This was preparation for my Big Danish Exam, which was today. I can't say it was really a good preparation, but it was amusing and we all felt pummelled and satisfied and sun-drenched on the way home.

And I feel very mellow, having drunk a point of strong beer at lunchtime after completion of the B.D.E., without any lunch. I didn't fall off my bike on the way home, either. Though I didn't get my flower bed planted.



And finally, here is our magnificent horse-chestnut tree.



Eat your heart out neighbours.

Peglegs rule

Our little cat fell off the roof (or out of a TREE??) last night. Many alarums given what happened to her predecessor, and we took her to the døgnvagt vet at 11pm. It cost - let me get this right - 1,699 kr. But it seems she may only have bruised her leg, which means that she and I are hobbling around the place in the same pegleg fashion. I find this quite amusing. Pets are supposed to resemble their owners. Anyone remember the beginning of 101 Dalmatians?

It's fantastic news though. Thank goodness. We thought she'd been got by a car.

Mille's not very good at cars. She goes out and lies down in the middle of the road. She causes traffic jams of animal-loving Danes queuing up to get past the house. The vet suggested getting a friendly neighbour to drive past with a water pistol and spray her out of the window to get her to realize that cars don't play nice games. ???

Poor Mille. Animals are so sweet.

Can't keep those fingers still

I can't keep my fingers off this blog, though I have nothing to say of any worth at the moment. So I won't use any excuse, but will just do what I've been itching to do and put up my three lovely children and my sweet spouse. On the desert island that is Denmark, these are they in whose sweet company I am marooned. Well it's been good for our family I'll tell you.

Here is Laila, in her moment of glory:



and dethroned:



And very much herself, on a steam train in east Germany:



And here are Zou and Lina:



and Zou (Zahra):



and in exultation:



and little Lina:



and:



And my dear Mark, puffing away:



and on the exile ship (no no, it was just the boat to Kalundborg)



and this was how we saw ourselves in the water. That's us down there. Exiles or what?



Now shut up Lucy and go back to må and skal.

Feeling free

This is how I'd like to feel. This is what one should do in this spring.

Middle-aged blues

My daughter had her birthday party yesterday, and as she's newly a pre-teen and feels she is growing up, she wanted to have all the girls in her class to sleep over. So we stupidly said yes. I must have been hoping that Mark would switch on and be a responsible parent, and Mark must have been lost in sentimental sweetness.

So it was yesterday, and actually it was very sweet. I was a bit sad, because last year they sang the Happy Birthday songs so beautifully and the H.B. songs are much nicer in Danish, and my maternal heart swelled and I thought, Oh gosh, here we are in Denmark, here we go. This year, because all I was doing was running around anxiously in serving mode with food, and Mark was in Odense for a conference, they were loutish, and did loud snatches of one sort of song and then loud snatches of another, polished off by Laila having taught them 'You look like a monkey and you smell like one too'. Which really made me annoyed.

But the rest of it was sweet, and apart from chocolate cake being ground into the floor we can now never afford to replace the mess etc wasn't too bad. But some of them got up this morning at five and made a lot of noise - and I should think all the neighbours were woken too, tho none of them have said anything about it because children are so worshipped here - and that was it, I am completely wrecked for the whole of the rest of the day. I've tried going back to bed, I've tried watching the Hairspray they rented, I've tried pigging out on chocolate cake, I've tried to go to sleep on a rug in the garden in the gorgeous sun, and I still just feel awful and am just waiting to go to bed tonight.

And it's all because I'm MIDDLE AGED. :-(

But I'm being really vicious to Laila to make up, and that makes me feel a bit better ! :-))

My daily fix

I find I've now got addicted to reading other bloggers' blogs. I feel very disappointed and unsatisfied if there isn't anything there when I log on to check. Does everyone get this?

Academics being defensive

Today a BA student at Harvard emailed me to ask for an electronic copy of my thesis on the development of the Darb al-Ahmar, and I spent the morning converting files, and scanning tables and prelim pages that apparently got lost transferring from my old computer to my present one. And I found myself surprised to find that it was good and very serious. Also puzzled that I just didn't take it any further. Need to think about that. Now I'm living in the wrong town to do any more with it. Why was that, just because I was occupied with babies and making friends with mothers and playdates. Strange.

Anyway, I looked up various colleagues and senior people who were working in the area, and found that of course their current work is increasingly up one meta-level, from the urban history of Cairo and the 'Islamic city' to studying the conceptualizing of those cities. I suppose this is inevitable, but it makes me a bit sad. I know academics have to use conceptual frameworks these days to keep professional, but why do they have to become more and more self-referential , and more interested in the framework within which they are studying than in the content they are looking at? Honestly, sometimes I just wish people could come off duty and talk about the real subjects they are still actually studying, if they would admit it. It's the academics' form of political correctness. But it's so annoying. And in a decade or two it will look so dated.

And it's so predictable. And there's such a gulf between that mode, and what you would actually say if you were going out to a totally novice audience - clever high school students, or even, heaven help us, DANES. Shouldn't that difference make one worry?

Anyone else terrified of Danish numbers?

After Fuzzy's Danish language clip, I found this. It's a Norwegian comic called Fleksnes.

YouTube gives a translation. The Dane speaking over the radio is saying, Mayday, mayday, mayday, can anybody help me, I am in trouble in high seas. Fleksnes says, Hello, this is Oslo, Oslo calling. The Dane on the radio says, Hello Oslo, finally someone is responding to my distress call, here is my position - and then he gives his coordinates.

Danish numbers terrify me actually. On a good day I giggle, but last month I went to pieces in a class presentation because I had naively put in all these dates, which I just couldn't say. In retrospect it was hilarious.

Who we are

I am a sometime journal editor and (if I'm honest) failed would-be academic. I am from Wimbledon, London, and I am in my forties. We came to Denmark nearly two years ago. A long time ago I took a year out from work and went to the Middle East to see if I could manage it on my own. I meant to spend six months in Cairo, because it was an easy place to start, and six months in Istanbul, which I knew was incredibly wonderful. I never got to Istanbul (except on holidays). I wanted to study the Mamluk buildings I could see all around me, and I had the wherewithal to teach at the American University, so I started a diploma in Islamic studies, and then although I knew it was all taking too long I did the M.A. in Islamic Art & Architecture instead. By 1995 it was taking much too long, and I quit working to do the Arabic and the thesis full time. I also married Mark, who I'd met three years before on a downtown Cairo evening with some Danish friends. We met seeing an Adel Imam comedy called Terrorism and kebab. Bless him, he supported me through it all, and we found ourselves pregnant, and we had Laila, and I got finished some considerable time later. And then we had Zahra, and then we had Lina. I became a full-time mum, Mark got his Ph.D., his first proper job in the AUC History Department, worked incredibly hard and gradually became a real, good historian, good enough to get back to the real world. I was going to get an article published on Mamluk urban development. But I didn't. And I was going to get my Arabic back up to running speed again. But I didn't. Looking back, I was depressed. Despite the wonderful community of mothers, school and children, so active and rich and good for those children and so life-enriching, and something I will always be incredibly grateful for. Pity. The not doing things, I mean.

And we missed Europe, and wondered. Do we go home? Should we go home, is it conceivable not to go home at all ever? Isn't Cairo too little a pond, shouldn't we go back to the North again? After all we are Europeans. You can't go beyond a certain point with most things in Cairo. And we didn't want the girls to go through adolescence in Egypt. I wanted to go back to Europe, Mark wanted to go to the US, where most of his community is. Mark also missed Europe, but his Europe is Spain/France, where he partly grew up.

And then we took this job. I say we, because Mark is the most considerate person and we took the leap to come here together.

So: Mark is a historian at AU. We bought a house in a prosperous area not far from the sea, a lovely house with a dream of a garden. We'd never had a house, let alone a place with a garden that you can do old-fashioned things in. It was heaven. The children, Laila (12, in the green jacket in the bike ride pic), Zahra (8) and Lina (7), go to the folkeskole down the road. They can do the Danish thing. I have been doing the Danish thing and am getting there, but I've been slow. Why, for someone who can read and write Modern Standard Arabic? God knows, I don't. I've also been slow to face that I have to get on with my life. I am getting going now, and I want to get going fast.

Laila is seriously able, and is developing into an independent, mature person. She reads grown-up novels, and was ahead of her class at BISC in Cairo. Won't say any more on that subject. Zahra is very bright and is a very strong person. She is Out There. She's very active and plays a lot of football. Little Lina got in here at the børnehave stage and it was very good for her. So she is going up through the Danish system. I've finally woken up to teaching her to read FAST. All three girls should really be at school in English. Practical problems about that.

And I have made some friends here. I have two and a half wonderful Danish friends, and a wonderful non-Dane.

So that's us.

There are others out there!

So this is my new blog. I hope I'll have some good things to say, not just formless complaining (not that others do that). We have been here for almost two years, but I discovered the expatriate bloggers of DK - even, dare I hope, Århus! - only in the last two weeks. We have all been so lonely. On a good day it doesn't feel that way, but there isn't any doubt that the experience we are having is quite alien. Mark thinks it's the Århus experience, not the Denmark experience. I think Copenhagen would be nicer, and life out in the suburbs makes it worse. It's especially hard on Mark, who grew up in central London and never went outside the Circle Line. But we've spent years growing up the children in an apartment in the bustling heart of the loveliest part of one of the greatest cities on earth. From Zamalek to Risskov! And the Veri Center!! ooh, I can hardly bear to write it.

When we were weighing whether to come, a Danish friend said, There must be interesting people somewhere in Århus: the question is where to find them. Myself, I wish he'd said a lot more. But the thought that I may have found a few - in the bloggers - is making me smile today.

On a bike ride with my daughter