Summer turns me upside down, summer summer summer! It’s like a merry-go-round…because I seem to spend most of my time turning about filling up my eyes with green and growing things, with bright and blooming things, with the endlessly endless never-ending blue of the sky. There are pink paradise bushes blooming everywhere, we have dozens of hard green baby cherries on our cherry tree, the swans out by the highway are nesting, and the horse on the street before ours has a little brown skippity foal.
We scored super-big at IKEA today. Because it was Sweden’s National Day and just about everything is closed here, all the Swedes go to Denmark, where everything is open since it’s not THEIR holiday. They go to Tivoli and Bakken and Bon-Bon-Land and the Copenhagen Zoo. Or they go to their summer cottages and spend the day whacking weeds, who knows. Anyway, there were a lot of them at IKEA but certainly not the overwhelming hordes that we are used to bobbing and weaving through when we go there which, granted, is seldom. Today we went to buy a new sofabed for the playroom and 2 loft beds for the kids. And as we were standing there, in the bed section, looking at the loft-bed and deciding whether or not it was right, a family came up and greeted us.
They were the parents of a boy who went to school with Martin for a couple of years, but who have since moved. We stood there and small-talked for a moment, then they asked if we were buying a loft-bed and when we said we were, they told us that they had purchased one for their kid some time ago but it had turned out that he didn’t like it (their ceilings are shorter than ours and he was too hot up there) so maybe we would like to take it off their hands for half-price? Heck yes, you bet we would! SCORE! So we bought one and we’ll call them this weekend to go pick up the other one. With the money we saved on the 2nd bed, we bought 2 chairs for the kids’ rooms. And THEN, for bonus icing on the cake of saving money, the cashier who was ringing us up asked me if anyone had told us about the living room campaign they were holding right now? No, I said, we didn’t talk to anyone on our way through the store. Well! If you buy 5000 kronor worth of goods, you get a 500 kronor IKEA gift certificate! Woot!
We stuffed all the flat-pack boxes and the couch into the trailer that Anders borrowed from the Scouts and drove to his parents to park it in their driveway for the afternoon. The air conditioning in the Volvo is busted and it blows hot air if the car’s been sitting in the sun, so we drove on the highway the whole way there with all the windows down and the noise of the air rushing in drowning out the music. It was like zooming through a summer wind tunnel. We dropped off the trailer and headed for the train station to take the train over the Sound to Copenhagen. Yes! Us, too.
Martin had expressed a wish several days earlier to visit Tussaud’s Wax Museum, so we figured why not? It’s right across the water, we have the day off, and enough time had passed since both Anders and I had been there that we didn’t remember 1) how outrageously expensive the entrance fees were and 2) how BORINGLY AWFUL it was. GAH. 15 minutes of walking around looking at ancient stiffs that the kids mostly didn’t recognize and explaining who they were and why they were important enough to be interred in a museum. Neither child would venture into the Chamber of Horrors which is really the only reason to even visit the darn tourist trap in the first place.
I thought it was interesting that, aside from George Bush, Vladimir Putin and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, there was not one notable figure from the last 20 years. All of the celebrities were from the 70-80s or much, MUCH earlier. They had a whole room set up with a scene from the film Casablanca, for crying out loud. A classic it might be, but the kids had no clue and it was dated even for us.
There were no sport celebrities at all, which I also thought was strange, considering how huge some of them were in the 70s and 80s. Anders could remember seeing Björn Borg and Pele and Muhammed Ali in wax was when he was there years ago, but nowadays, it seems that sports figures don’t rank. It took us awhile to even come up with a couple of names of internationally known sports figures that might have been appropriate and we stalled after Tiger Woods and David Beckham. Maybe it’s because this dusty relic of a museum was not MADAME Tussaud’s but rather Louis Tussaud’s, her great-grandson. After taking a look at the Madame Tussaud website, it appears that HER museums are much hipper and more up-to-date.
We walked across the Rådhuspladsen (City Hall Square) and immediately displayed our total suckerhood by paying another exorbitant entrance fee for the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum. Does anyone else remember those Ripley’s drawings that were in the Sunday papers every week? I loved them when I was a kid. Now, the whole place just seemed dusty and out-dated, though the kids appreciated it, and that was really the only reason why we went. Thank goodness the Guiness World Records Museum was closed or we would probably have forked over another wallet-full of Danish kronor for that as well. Sheesh.
Then we walked with the rest of the happy summer tourist crowds down the entire Strøget shopping avenue, eating ice cream along the way, to Kongens Nytorv and then took the Metro back to Field’s super-mall where we had something for dinner that I know you’ll totally never guess! Guess what we had! Go on, bet you can’t guess what it was! haaaaaa!
Yes. Again.
Yes, I know.
So there you have it: perfect summer weather, shopping, scoring on saving money plus getting some for free, lovely touristyness in a great city, sushi for dinner and tomorrow is book group! *happy sigh* Oh! And I talked to my mom last night, and NO RADIATION NEEDED! YAY!