Copenhagen and the area around it was our last stop in Denmark. First up we walked from the main train station to Kingosgade to see Mona and Rene, another set of host parents from when I was an exchange student in 1995. They still live in Odense but the timing didn’t work out for us to catch up there so we saw them while they were on holiday in Copenhagen, staying at their son Klavs’s apartment. Klavs & Anders were away overseas at the […]
Living with the locals
A Danish New Year’s (Denmark Part 2)
Maya and Johan live with their two boys (7 and 2) in a sweet little house in the small rural village of Ommestrup in Djursland. I had heard a bit about the house and the dramas faced after they purchased it. After discovering mould they had to gut the whole place and re-do it all! It was great to see them and the house looking so good now. We had some really lovely, relaxing, ‘hyggelig’ days here, including our 6th wedding anniversary. The 2 […]
A Danish Christmas (Denmark Part 1)
Never mind the dark, dreary days when it doesn’t get light until around 9am and darkness descends again around 4pm- a month in Denmark over winter meant experiencing a Danish Christmas with all its lovely traditions and food and lots of time spent with wonderful people. This was to be Antony’s first Christmas in Denmark and my seventh. We’d had enough sunshine in the previous 11 weeks of tripping around Israel, Jordan and Cyprus to carry us through the dark Danish December/ January period […]
Odense- My Other Home (Denmark Part 3)
It was just over 25 years ago that I arrived in Denmark as a Rotary Youth Exchange student. Little did I know that this small Scandinavian country and its people would capture my heart and play a major part in my future. I still remember bawling my eyes out at the airport when that magical year was over and I thought I might never come back. But I did come back – in 1999 for a few months, then a year doing youth work […]
Angloville
In 2016 Antony and I did 5 different Angloville programmes (and a Diverbo Englischhausen which I will blog about separately). All the programmes were really enjoyable and a great chance to meet locals. We can highly recommend doing these programmes if you are a native English speaker travelling in Europe! Participating in an Angloville programme usually means spending 5 nights in a resort or hotel in the countryside, where, as native English speakers, you receive all meals and accommodation for free. In return you […]
Workaway at a Wine Hostel, Georgia
A week spent in the stunning wine region of Kakheti, helping out at a wine hostel was just fantastic. We had missed the wine harvest by a few weeks so there weren’t any wine-related things to do (aside from drinking the wine) but we kept busy with various other tasks. Ucha was our host, a young Georgian guy with fantastic English and a relaxed and friendly personality. He opened up his home (which he shared with his father) to many travellers throughout the year […]
Workawaying in Armenia
We walked across the border from Iran into Armenia and got the visa for Armenia in just a few minutes. After the border guard had spent quite some time admiring our passports (first NZ passport he’d seen) we then had to wait for the exchange guy to finish his coffee break before we could get some local currency and a taxi to nearby Meghri. No-one was in a hurry. The taxi driver drove incredibly slowly and tried to convince us to let him drive […]
Couchsurfing in an Iranian Village
Aside from our first 2 weeks on Qeshm island, the following 6 weeks in Iran were almost exclusively spent staying in cities. There was one night in the desert and one other exception- when we couchsurfed in the village Nasrola Mahaleh, (near Fouman) in Gilan Province, with our host Hamed and his parents. This was quite a different experience and just wonderful. The village was in a green rural valley in the north of Iran. Cows and other animals wandered freely along the roads. […]
Iranian Village Wedding
We had the opportunity to attend an Iranian wedding party with our couchsurfing host Hamed. It was just across the road from our host’s house in the village of Nasroleh Mahaleh, near Fouman in Gilan Province. The bride was in a typical white western style wedding dress and had her hair unveiled (!!) but that’s where the similarities with weddings as we know them ended. There were hundreds of people there, it seemed the entire village was present, but instead of sitting around tables, […]
Touchy Feely Mohammad
In our two months of travel in Iran, we had one rather unusual couchsurf host. We arrived early in the morning after a night bus ride to his city and took a taxi to the house. “Mohammad” came outside and greeted us with hugs which was slightly odd given that we’d just met and we were in Iran where, out of respect, many men won’t even shake an unrelated woman’s hand- rather place their hand on their own heart. It was around 5 in […]