Sunday night was night number two of national dinners – this time it was a Bavarian/Tyrolean meal. Also quite delicious!
(I apologize, the quality of these photos is not the greatest).
A contented bunch.
Our cultural activity of the day Monday was watching the movie Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0961066/), which, it turns out, is actually a Swedish movie, not a
Danish movie. No one believed me that they were speaking Swedish, not Danish, despite that the events were taking place in Sweden, until we got home and looked it up. But it makes sense – if we’re learning the Danish language, why confuse us with Swedish? Whether Danish or Swedish, the movie was a masterpiece. Turns out, with a bit of research, it was even nominated for the Golden Globes foreign language film (but didn’t win). It’s not the happiest movie, that I’ll warn you, but I do think it’s uplifting in its own way at the end, and it certainly invests you in the story. I highly recommend it.
For dinner, I attempted to make my first ever homemade macaroni and cheese. I think it turned out alright…tasted good. Hopefully it’s good enough to display as an American national food in my American dinner (but if they don’t like that, I’ve never had anyone dislike the family chocolate chip cookies!). I think proportions might have been a tad bit off, as they measure things in grams rather than in cups (and besides having no scale, I’m stubborn and like my way of cooking!), but I did manage to find a 2 pint pitcher that marks off on one side liters and the other side U.S. Pints. So I simply have to estimate, and they do use teaspoons and tablespoons. The recipe nicely told me what to preheat the oven to in Celsius, but I’m not sure how good our oven really is here, so it’s also possible I did not cook it quite right, but it tasted fine to me (I’ll just have to wait and see the general reaction – strangely, I prefer the fake cheese of Kraft to any homemade macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had, no matter how delicious…must be the memories).
I also saw that I was not, in fact, charged for my flight screw-up. Apparently (I’m not questioning my luck), there must be a grace period of cancelling flights and not getting charged – as I cancelled it within seconds of booking the flight, it must have fallen into that grace period and/or did not register. Thank goodness!
An interesting fact – we were doing a reading comprehension exercise in which we learned that Copenhagen was the 5th most expensive European city, I believe, but the book is at least a year, possibly two years, old. Curious, I did some searching and discovered that the cost of living in cities has dramatically changed in the last year. Japan suddenly appeared on the top of the list, with Tokyo being the most expensive city to live in. But more surprising to me (and perhaps a little dismaying), Copenhagen is the 7th most expensive city in the world, beating out even Paris and London. Eep! I also learned that Boston is the 8th most expensive city in the U.S. – I must like them expensive cities!
Expensive cities, but Kraft mac and cheese... you are a contradiction in terms, my dear!
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