Our second home in Aarhus

Dear family and friends,

We are back with some new posts of the latest news up here in Aarhus, Denmark. Not much traveling has happened, as you might guess, so our posts are a bit less frequent. We are looking forward to some adventures in South of France in three weeks though, to visit Q’s first niece, Mila, who was born today, May 2nd, 2010 :-)

It is still cold and windy at the beginning of May, but that won’t change much any time soon. Or maybe it will get warmer, but it will still be windy... But we love it! At least it is sunny a lot—almost daily, although perhaps not for the entire day. We really appreciate the sunny weather in our new place, which has lots of big windows all around, and some even through the roof (see photo).

Our second home here in Aarhus is slightly further away from work, but not by more than a few minutes of walking distance. We are closer to the historical downtown area, with its cafes and shops, so we enjoy the opportunity to just be able to walk everywhere. The street we are on is pretty quiet, and although from the outside it looks like a row of apartment buildings (see photo), on the other side the buildings actually surround an open space area with people’s backyards, a little soccer field, among other things. So it is great to be downtown yet to see the trees slowly turn green. Our apartment is on the first floor from the street side, but that ends up being garden level on the other side. Our apartment ends with a door that opens to one of these yards, which is almost in the sun all day (see photo).

Other than that with about 800 feet of surface area, our place is quite big by Aarhus’ standards, and for what we are paying per month ($1,100). It has hardwood floors throughout, and came with some rather useful furniture, if not of the best quality... Oh if you could see that old yellow leather couch! Reminds Q of used cowboy chaps... But the high point when we first arrived was the tiny bathroom (train/plane size of course) which is at the end of a hallway, with no window. On top of that the bathroom and the shower are really one single space, i.e. the floor of the bathroom floor is the shower floor, you know, European style... The mold that had consequently been growing behind the sink, the toilet, and inside the drain over years of poor maintenance made Chrysa really unwell at first. Luckily lot’s of cleaning and the purchase of a dehumidifier/air purifier were able to reverse that. We just loved the irony that after living in dry Colorado for several years we were thrown right into having to deal with the exact opposite problem: too much humidity!

We have been living at this place for about a month now, and brought our cat back with us after a trip to France over Easter. So it feels good to be all together again. Sascha is definitely enjoying the opportunity to sit by sunny windows and to go outside day or night (no danger to be eaten by a coyote any longer ;-) (see photo). We should be here until October, when it will be time to move to yet another place (hopefully with a larger bathroom, but it is a challenge here, so we will keep you posted...).