Copenhagen, Denmark

In early July, Amy was in town for 2 weeks. We all went to Copenhagen, Denmark for 4 days. Scott has been working in a small city 30 min west of here from April until September. A US equivalent is Boston - touristic harbor town. The major difference is that Denmark is a socialist government. A socialist government means that the government guarantees jobs for the entire population (<1% unemployment rate). And while they guarantee jobs, the don't guarantee you the best and brightest of jobs - over 25% of the jobs are public service (i.e. garbage service, janitorial jobs). And what this means is the city is CLEAN. If a dog poops on the sidewalk, you can guarantee it won't be there in the morning. Unfortunately, with a socialist government, taxes are astronomical (60-70% of most salaries are lost due to taxes), and what this means is that it is EXPENSIVE to live or visit there!

Lots of rain while we were there - which doesn't add up to alot of enjoyable walking....

The Copenhagen Opera (built by Maersk, 2nd largest shipping company in the world - located across the harbor so he had something nice to look at out his office.)

When you look up Copenhagen, one of these two pictures are usually what you see. The first, a mermaid and the second, an inner harbor called Nyhavn.

On the weekend that we were there, it was a special holiday on Saturday named "Mid-Summer's Night". On this night they had bonfires all across Denmark.




Copenhagen is an interesting city full of funny-looking spires. Some are immaculate, and some are just strange. While its hard to see, the one on the right are various animals twisted up into the spire.



Next is Luzerne, Switzerland!

Italy (Condensed into 1 post)

Just catching up on some of our blogs. Between the last post and this post was just a bunch of winefests and gorgeous weather...

June came and went with our weeklong vacation to San Gimignano Italy. This was the longest vacation we have taken since being married that was not to go see relatives. This area of Italy is the Tuscany region (wine/olive region) about 1 hour south of Florence. Pisa is 1.5 hours west and Rome is 5 hours southeast. Easily the best vacation we have taken and I would venture to say there will be few vacations that will ever match it. We stayed in a small villa about 1.5 miles from the city - the villa was surrounded by vineyards, on a hill over looking many of the valleys. There were 5 other apartments at our villa, and while the week before and after our villa was full, the week that we stayed, we were the only ones there. We essentially used our villa as a "homebase" that allowed us to take day trips to many of the cities around the area.

This is San Gimignano - called the "Manhatten" of New York due its 13 towers. When we bought our tourbook in December of Italy, we had no idea where we would go. After we booked our trip we realized that this picture was on the front cover. So a book of ALL of Italy, and the city we were staying on was on the front cover. Of course, some tourists (on the weekends) but staying there the whole week allowed us to go during middle of the week and night which was very nice.

Food consisted of Pizza, Pizza, Ice Cream, then more Pizza. In 7 days, Daniel ate pizze 13 times, and ice cream 10 times. Here is 1 of 10.

One more picture of the city before moving on...

Did I mention that our villa had a swimming pool. While we did have "odd" weather (50-70s) for the time of year, it was nice!

So on our whirlwind Italy trip, we went to many cities in the area. First was Volterra (yes, as in the song).

Next was Pisa:

Then Siena:

And then Monteriggioni:

And on the last night, we stumbled across an Italian Festival in Colle Di Val D'Elsa (the crystal city). Italian Festivals are MUCH different than German Wine Festivals, and we really stuck out here. It was more like an Italian cafeteria line where all the food is behind a wall and you have to "guess" what you want. "Give me 1 Polpetti, a Trippa in Umido, a Zuppa di Farro and the BIGGEST bottle of Vino Rosso you have... Ciao Bella!"

Next is Copenhagen!