In the Land of the Great Danes...

After planes, trains, and automobiles (I mean that quite literally…well, no, I’m exaggerating a little. There was only one train, two planes, two cars, oh yeah, and there was also a bus, and a 3 km walk) I made it back safe and sound to our little hill from visiting friends Mette and Teddy. You wouldn’t believe it by looking on a map that the short distance between Aarhus, Denmark and Taggia, Italy could take 14 hours to travel but it does.

Please forgive my absence from blogging. I was too busy learning. I learned so much that I didn’t have time or energy left enough to process and write. Let me see now if I am able to summarize a little of the what was covered in the integrated curriculum of the Knudsen/Oestergaard teaching team.

Here are Mette and Teddy, the teachers:














Here are some of the things I was exposed to. I won’t say that I “learned” them all because some will just simply take a life time to learn. These are not in any order of priority, chronology, or importance, nor will this list be all inclusive.

1. When you come across a question in life…always look up the answer immediately if you can.

2. In Denmark they eat cod trousers for breakfast.

Ummm, that’s a terrible photo but right there behind the butter is cod roe. It comes in sack like skin that is shaped a little like a pair of pants – thus the Danish name. It’s smoked and very tasty!

In fact they eat a lot of fish roe and, well, a lot of fish in general in Denmark. It makes a lot of sense if you think about their geographical position.

3. Roe is the English word for eggs of a fish. (Maybe that’s not new information for a lot of you but I learned that. One of the things I love about living in and visiting countries where English isn’t the first language is how much English I learn)

4. How to crochet. It would be sacrilege, here on a knitting blog, to go into this in depth so I won’t. (WRONG! I’m sure I will be sneaking in a few pictures of new crocheted projects in the future…I just don’t have any right now.)

5. Having a sense of humor when times are a little stressful is very effective for everyone. (Owning a full chef’s suit is also helpful, funny, and just a good idea for a lot of reasons)



6. How to pick up and knit around armpit holes and necklines (PROPERLY! I mean, so it doesn’t look like crap).

7. Generosity that comes from “because I want to” is the best kind of all. I was showered with gifts on the trip – both tangible and intangible. Here are a couple I can photograph:


(That’s brown sugar in those bags, in case you can’t read Danish. And that’s my foot with toe socks, in case you thought I had really short fingers)


8. It is possible for 4 mature and sane (relatively speaking) adults to find these three words worthy of so many jokes: snit; wennig; ausnit (sorry to any Dane reading this blog…I’m sure all three are misspelled) – roughly translated they mean, respectively, (v)to carve; (n)a sentence or a line; (n)part or episode of a story. In case you were wondering, it is possible, if you snit the language properly to get all three words in one wennig without need of an entire ausnit.

9. That Sudokus are extremely fun, highly addictive, and can seriously cut into a gal's knitting production.

10. Love, Strength and Courage are about the most important things that exist. If you can share them with friends, well, it just doesn’t get any better than this.