Making it into 2011... hidden in a closet...

After our exciting but busy trip throughout some of Europe's principal cities like Paris, Brussels and Strasbourg, we opted to spend New Year's Eve at our place in Aarhus. A fine meal made of fresh crayfish with home made mayonnaise, als home made carrot soup, and a cake from one of the best patisseries in town. We also had our bottle of Henriot champagne that we imported ourselves from France, naturally...

The big event associated with New Year here in Denmark is private fireworks looking like professional ones, and coming from pretty much every other household. Of course the peak was from midnight until 2am on New Year's Eve, but we started hearing them quite frequently after sundown (around 4pm these days) since December 30th, and way until January 7th or 8th. And on December 31st, people did not even wait for sunset to start lighting their firecrackers. On that day we heard the first bangs around noon.

With this increasing agitation outside, we quickly learned that Sascha was in need of special attention and care. Apparently fireworks are a well-known cause of stress for pets that can be quite traumatizing. Q knew this about his old dog, but we never really had a chance to witness this with Sascha earlier. Fireworks were not that common in Colorado (and more regulated). So we actually felt fortunate that we had decided to spend our New Year's Eve at home, in order to not make him any more anxious than he already was.

We actually found that the safest thing to do was to give him half a pill of the sedative we had gotten for him a year ago when we brought him to Europe by plane. Combined with organizing hiding places at the bottom of various kitchen cabinets, that seemed to do the trick. At least, he survived!

And so did we! From hearing the war-like explosions all around us at the turn of the year, we felt much safer to not have had to go anywhere... That may seem like an over-reaction, but we did hear on a daily basis the ambulance sirens shortly after the peak of fireworks festivals. We were also told that every year at least one house (only one?) gets set on fire because of poorly handled fireworks. Well, it was quite a windy night...

But fireworks were actually quite nice seen from the safety of our home, through our large windows. It was sort of non stop, so we'd regularly pause our meal to go check out what was happening. Sort of like a free show! Check out the movie to see what we mean...