well not really, but an online travel guide (Schmapp!! I'd never heard of them either) liked one of my snaps of Rosenborg Slot/Castle in Copenhagen and added it to their 2007 Copenhagen travel guide.
I'm not a very good photographer and It's not a great snap but the app itself looks like an interesting MashUp created with Yahoo! Maps and Flickr.
[Listening to: 'Altocomulus Opacus' from 'Pop Ambient 2007' by 'Markus Guentner']
(school actually starts next week... this is about Malcolm's first few weeks @ his daycare)
coming back was relatively easy for Susan and I; after all, we'd been at Microsoft here in Seattle for five years before we left for Copenhagen, we have established friends here (and family not terrifically far away) and we knew the drill.
But it's been a little harder for Malcolm who has had some anxiety his first few weeks back. He's gone from a small børnehave-kindergarten with (typically) around 8 kids and two adults watching them to around 50 kids in his new daycare, where he is among the youngest and smallest, and where he doesn't know anybody.
At first it felt like we were putting him in the orphanage. He clung to us the first few days and didn't want us to leave, and he cried a bit on the second day, but we took the teachers' advice and tried to leave quickly and cleanly. According to them it is much easier for the kids that way. They told us afterwards that he became chatty and engaged a little while after we left, and that made sense... that's what he is like. But we still felt like we'd taken our puppy out to the countryside in the car, thrown a stick for him to chase and then drove off again.
He's a bit shy with the new kids, unsure of himself, and unused to having to initiate any conversation and he has to engage the adults if he wants help, they're too busy to watch over him directly. In the first week he had a bout of diarrhea and soiled himself... he didn't ask the teachers for help because he was unsure who to ask and he was a bit ashamed afterwards... some of the older kids made fun of him for that.
But like all new kids, he found other kids who were also new, who needed friends and made them his friends. His 'special' friend is another boy, Riley Jones, who is quite shy and withdrawn and who is also starting kindergarten next week. Riley and Malcolm seek each other out and are usually together on the playground.
I overheard one of the teachers asking Riley's mum if he was OK as he was so withdrawn and shy. "Oh no, he's always like that at first" she said (at first? how many times has the kid had to switch schools?). "but he has been talking about Malcolm.". I was glad to hear that as Malcolm has gotten in the habit of sitting on the couch in the reading area when we arrive, saying "I'll just wait for Riley to show up.". So they've formed a bond.
He's better now. Each day is a little improvement, for example today when I dropped him off, some of the kids on the playground yelled "Hey Malcolm! Come play with us!" and when we picked him up he was excited about learning to play 'Battleship' and tag and other games with kids.
I like the people who run the place as well... they seem like very nice, patient and decent people. It's a tough job watching all those kids! One of the administrators (Mike) and one of the other adults (Cheri) had cool tattoos... in his case, a tattoo of a meerkat family on his calf. I liked him straight away :). And besides that, he's super friendly and gentle with the kids who all seem to love him.
[Listening to: 'Kappsta' from 'Pop Ambient 2007' by 'The Field']
After a few weeks he is still a tiny bit hesitant but settling in. They had an outing to Camp Long in West Seattle a week or two back where the kids could camp out if they wanted to; Malcolm stayed for the day and for hotdogs and "sm'ores" over a campfire and we picked him up after that.
The camp outing seemed really nice: Some teenagers who had attended the day care came for the day to help out with the kids, and Malcolm had fun playing soccer with the teenagers followed by "delicious s'mores!" as he kept calling them. Dave was up for the weekend with us and caught this picture of Malcolm enjoying his first "s'more" :)
here we go again: some papers in the US are pulling the latest Berkeley Breathed/Opus cartoon because they're afraid it will be offensive to Muslims.
I watched this nonsense first-hand in Denmark where it was completely blown out of proportion by local imans. We live in an open society, not a caliphate, and we cannot allow fundamentalists of any stripe to hijack the social discourse. That includes cartoons and satire, naturally.
Allow me to help rectify this: link to cartoon
It was Malcolm's friend Zoë's 5th birthday on Sunday, at The Little Gym. Great to see Zoë, Kai, Sarah and Steve again, they're friends from Copenhagen and Zoë is one of Malcolm's longtime friends ("do you remember me?" he asked her bashfully :)).
It was great fun with lots of running around, silliness and a few games, and of course a pink cake... always her favorite color.
and little Kai is getting big!
Tillykke Zoë! Snaps can be found here.
That is: Why move back to Seattle? Besides the obvious stuff like we miss our friends, and want to be closer to our families?
Brit Jonathan Raban gets it best (via Timothy Egan):
Seattle is the only major city in the world that people move to in order to get closer to nature.
Spot on. In Seattle you can live right in the city and be next to a salmon run. You can step out of your door and kayak, or sail, or ski (OK you have to drive a short distance to ski). You can see orcas and sea lions from the ferry. You can see bald eagles and 500 year-old trees as well as the Space Needle and office towers. And most days, you can see "The Mountain", Mount Ranier, the dormant volcano that looms over Seattle like Mt. Fuji, and some times you can see both Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker to the north.
If you like scuba diving, some of the largest octopi in the world can be found in Pugest Sound just minutes away from downtown Seattle.
You can get around via bicycle... not as easily as Copenhagen, there are big hills and fewer separated trails, but it is safer here on a bike than most US cities.
If you pick the right city neighborhood (like Capitol Hill, Fremont, Ballard, Green Lake and the like) it is very pedestrian friendly with lots of shops and amenities within walking distance.
People here, on the whole, are friendly and open. Most will say 'hi' if you do. On our first day back, bringing our luggage etc. into the apartment building, a guy was coming in juggling a pizza pie and he held the door for us. Nice. And even though I'm sure it is true (as some Europeans claim) that the smiles etc. you get with service in shops, restaurants etc. may be insincere, I don't care... I like it. I like it quite a bit better than the indifferent-to-surly service that typifies Copenhagen.
And there's the climate. The drizzly winters get some people down, but not me. As long as I'm active and outside it doesn't bother me. I like the watercolor skies in winter... it's very dramatic. And the reward for winter is the beautiful, blossom-filled fragrant air of lilac and magnolia in spring and the glorious summers where we get sunsets like this one
of course there are downsides, like the traffic. But traffic can be avoided if you're smart about it. Seattle really is quite a special place. It's nice to be home.
from wikipedia:
Cascadia is a proposed name for the independent sovereign state that would be formed by the union of the Canadian province of British Columbia and the states of Washington and Oregon in the United States, were they ever to successfully secede from their respective federal governments in Ottawa and Washington D.C..[1] The boundaries of this Cascadia would incorporate those of the existing province and states.[1]
and as for telegrams, that is just a shorthand for terse blog posts :).
we had a gloriously uneventful 10-hour flight from Copenhagen to Seattle: Susan wisely stopped feeding our cat Charlie and gave him only minimal water the day before, so he was quite calm in his carrier and didn't soil anything, and Malcolm contented himself with playing video games on the seat back console. I tried to do a bit of work but couldn't, I was too restless.
You're immediately struck by culture shock upon arrival back in the US: The ad hoc/private nature of the airport facility (lack of design and central purpose), the casual dress, and sadly, the extra weight that so many people carry. But it is good to be home. The weather was glorious and we sailed through customs with our cat and picked up our MS-arranged rental car.
Our temporary housing for the next six months is downtown Seattle, in Harbor Steps, just south of the Pike Place Market on 1st. On arrival we were rewarded with a fantastic view from our apartment - thanks 'Uncle Bill'! :) Here's some snaps I've taken from the balcony:
I will stop taking pictures of the Bainbridge Ferry, I promise.
