Biking in Copenhagen

Here's a blog about biking in Copenhagen, it's great. Every time I go to Kobenhaven, I am always amazed at all of the people biking, I wish it was like that in the US. It's no coincidence that the Danes are tied with the Dutch for the happiest people in the world, they get to ride their bikes all over!

In Boston, we have a similar blog, inspired by the Danes, you can read it here.

Trip to San Jose this week.

I travel to San Jose, CA quite often for work since my company's division is based there. This week, I had a red eye flight from SFO-BOS on Thursday night, but before that, I made my way to Oakland to see the A's take on my home team, the Minnesota Twins. My friend Maria, who is my old roommate Anthony's girlfriend, joined me at the game. This is what $20 gets you for seating at the Oakland Mausoleum on the morning of the game on Stubhub, nice! The twins lost in the end, but it was fun to wear my Kirby Puckett jersey in another ball park. I just barely made my 11:20 flight back to BOS, but slept the whole flight back. Gotta love the exit row.

Norway back to Denmark Via Sweden

On Sunday, August 17th, Tore and I took the Norwegian Booze Cruise ferry from Langesund Norway back to Copenhagen. Here's the route. It was a 3 hour ferry ride, cost for both of us and the car, just about $20. They make their money off of Norwegians buying duty free liquor!Here's the ferry.


This is Sweden, obviously.

To the Homeland.

Being more than 50% Norwegian, it is surprising that no one in my immediate family has been to Norway. Luckily, I had the chance for a quick, 24 hour blast to Norway this weekend. I traveled by overnight train from Odense to Sandefjord, Norway, where my friend Tore picked me up. We spent the day on a little road trip from Sandefjord to Rjukan, Norway. This is the place where the Nazis were producing heavy water for their atomic research in WWII. Luckily, the British special forces did some cool sabotage and sunk the boat containing their heavy water. Yeah, England! Anyway, it was beautiful up there. On the way back, we drove over a mountain pass, and past an old church that's about 1000 years old.

We headed back to Langesund, Norway, where we spent the night with some friends of Tore's. Our mode of transport was Tore's kick ass 1986 M5 BMW, most excellent for small narrow mountain roads, and we took turns driving it on the route.

See more photos here.

HC's House

Here's Hans Christen Andersen's house. Complete with a Prius.

Odense, Denmark

This week, I've been working in Odense, Denmark. Odense is the birth place of the world's authority on mermaids, H.C. Andersen. This is a picture of the downtown walking street, or "strasse" as they call it in Europe. Lots of Danish flags, they love flying thier flag almost as much as Americans do. I like it.

This week I'm working with the University of Southern Denmark. They are going to be using the Mass Spectrometer to analyze pefluronated compounds in the plasma of people who live in the Faroe Islands. What are PFCs, you ask? They are compounds like Teflon, the stuff that makes your pan non stick and your coat waterproof with GoreTex. Where do people from the Faroe islands get it? From eating pilot whales. Interesting. Don't judge, they've been doing it for about 600 years now. Plus pilot whales aren't really all that rare. Not that I want to try any.

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