Elephants.

sorry for the blur!

One of the guys in Mike's lab went home to India over the holidays and brought us back these elephants. Aren't they great? It's a good thing we don't have a flat screen...because where would they live?

Blogs, Broccoli, and other things.

After a proloooonged absence, I am back and ready to post again. There are many things to cover, including but not limited to: Sweden, Detroit, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Texas, art, design, movies and broccoli.

Check out our broccoli! I am so impressed with it and almost don't want to cut it. I can't believe that it didn't freeze. It is so happy and growing, growing. Amazing.

The Fall.

My new favorite film. Absolutely gorgeous visually and a sweet story. The cinematography is amazing! And the costumes are incredible! Set in the 1920's, an injured, heartbroken stuntman and a little girl become friends in a sanitarium in LA. He creates a story for her involving bandits and evil soldiers and a princess, while trying to get her to smuggle morphine from the dispensary for him because he can't go on without his true love. Even without the plot, the imagery is worth it. Love, love, love it!

Chalkboard walls.

found here at The Willows Home and Garden blog

In our next house, which will probably be a rental, I will make up for painting the walls by doing this. The possibilities are endless!

Road Trip.

The Gothenburg Ibis
The afternoon we picked up the car we made it to Gothenburg, Sweden. This trip we stayed at several Ibis hotels because they are affordable and everywhere in Europe. This Ibis happened to be a boat! It was nice and we had dinner there in the hotel and went to bed because the next day was going to be long. We got up early and left Gothenburg with our destination being Bergen, Norway on the fiords. We bought the Europe maps for our GPS and it worked perfectly! I was amazed. It would have been very difficult without it. And, we bought an audio book online and listened to it through our GPS all day. It would have been somewhat brutal to only be able to listen to Norwegian radio for 12 hours. Yes, that's right. 12 hours. I think that our top speed was 40 miles an hour. The roads were crazy, but there wasn't very much traffic so that was a good thing. And the tunnels! One tunnel we went through seemed like it corkscrewed down into the mountain forever. We just kept going round and round. A couple of hours outside of Bergen we realized that we had to take a ferry to keep going. There was some stress for a while because we didn't know how late the ferry ran and if we were going to have to sleep in the car to wait for it. Thankfully, it was still running and we were able to keep going. We had a hotel reservation in Bergen so we went straight to the hotel when we arrived and crashed. Long drive! I think I will save our adventures in Bergen for the next post because I have already gone on and on.

Malmo, Sweden.

It seems to be taking me a very long time to get through our trip. Oh well. Just to recap, we have already been to Amsterdam, driven through Germany and took the train/ferry to Copenhagen. After spending the night in Copenhagen, we took a train to Sweden over one of the world's longest bridges. We arrived in Malmo early, ready to pick up our car and begin our drive. However, the Hertz rental car office decided to not open until 3pm. So, we had some time to kill. It was so so foggy everything seemed like some kind of dream. And, we could barely see where we were going. We wandered into town and through it toward the old palace. Mike had been to Malmo before, so he knew where we were going. There is a botanical garden around the palace and it was just beautiful in the morning fog. The palace is a museum now and we went to the gift shop and then walked back to the square for lunch. It was cold and all of the restaurants have blankets draped over the chairs outside and heaters, so we ate outside. After lunch, it was finally time to get the car so we walked back to Hertz. Everything looked very different without the fog! We picked up our Volvo wagon and drove into the Swedish countryside on our way to Norway.

Copenhagen continued.

These things are hard to explain. They are part of the royal treasury and made from ivory and amazing! Most are from the 18th century and they are so intricate, with lots of little parts and pieces within pieces. Incredible.

The entrance to Tivoli Gardens.

Ok, so I found some more pictures from Copenhagen!