Final Post-On the way home

Right now I am in a Delta International Flight going over The UK or England, Ireland and Scotland. In the last few days we have been visiting friends in Ebeltoft, Denmark. You should look at where this is on Google Earth. It is WAY up north. The sun only sets for a few hours of darkness between 11pm and 4 am. During the winter it is dark most of the time and many people have light sources that they sit in front of in order to get enough vitamin D and to fight of depression.

I did not write much while there but I did take pictures that I think are really interesting, so I have several blog posts that I plan to write on this plane trip and then post when I get online at home.

This is my final reflection for this blog. I just have a few observations and the sunset in Ebeltoft for this one.

* TRAVELING WITH AN IPAD

I was amazed at how many people were traveling with iPads! I saw them all over. Both local people and tourists seemed to have them.

I could do almost anything I wanted to with it, except flash, which is used in lots of surprising ways.

It was impossible to do all of the work on my blog without flash and there are a few things I did not figure out. I needed to borrow the professor's laptop to get the embed code to post theYouTube videos to the blog. I never did figure out how to get a sound file into the blog from the iPad, even when I recorded the sound on the iPad.

Since I did not have my own computer along and did not want to sync with another computer and lose my stuff, I could not figure out a good way to download things from another computer to mine. Since there is no USB port the only way to get new content is to download it directly. (I only had problems with this when I wanted to get my Audio book files. They were too big to download directly, but there was no way to transfer them from the professor's computer to my iPad.

* WHAT I COULD DO ON THE IPAD

I downloaded and read several books.
I learned to save a picture from the web to my photos so that I could us it. (keep your finger on the picture until you see the choices.)
I downloaded and played AngryBirds.
I listened to things I had downloaded to my iPad.
I tweeted and read my twitter feed.
I did email.
I Skyped with my family.

*WHY I DO THIS

I am extremely lucky to get to travel this way. I can see how the world is getting smaller and how important it is for all of us to understand one another. I think that the more we learn to know about and respect others the better our world will be. I hope that especially students, but also everyone can share and learn from my experiences. Knowing that I am going to be blogging about what I see and do gives me different eyes and better questions for the people and places that I see.

And now the sunset...

ARoS Museum

Arhus is the big town near Ebeltoft. I think it took about a half hour to get there by car. We went there especially to see a terrific art museum. One exhibit is a HUGE sculpture of a boy that is extremely realistic.

Another exhibit is an experience in color. A circular walkway has been built along the whole top of the museum. The walls are colored glass. As you walk through it you can experience being inside a color. The city outside looks a different color depending on where you are, but the strangest thing is that when there is a break in the color and the light shines in you see it as the opposite color on the color wheel! It shows how your eyes always adjust to light and correct, but since you are already in one color it changes your perception of the light outside.

The same artist created another exhibit where you walk through a colored cloud. A whole room is full of mist that is colored with lights somehow. As you walk through it you cannot see anything except color and when someone gets within about a foot of you they appear. It is a little scary and weird, but also cool.

Grocery Shopping in Denmark

Since I have looked at grocery shopping in other places I thought I would check it out in Denmark too. You can see the grocery store in the video. I am showing the bakery because our friends served us lots of great bread and rolls. They also told us that Danish people eat different sorts of pickled fish and we tried some.

Ebeltoft Assorted

This is actually being written in the United States! I have several posts ready to put together, but I was not able to get online, so I have finished the videos offline and also written while on the flight home.

It is great to hear from my friends in Whitefish Bay. I would still like to get a picture of you to put up on the blog so that others who look at it can see who you are! Here is a link I found to your school: http://www.wfbschools.com/schools/richards/ Let me know if that is the right link.

I was glad that you knew I had posted a QR code! There is a message for you in it. Were you able to use a reader to find out what it says?

This video just shows a few things that we did with our friends in Ebeltoft, Denmark that I thought were interesting. We went to a wild animal park. They have lots of animals there that we do not find in our part of Texas! At the park we saw reindeer, arctic fox, polar bears, wild boar, and musk ox. You see me feeding the reindeer! It rains a lot in Denmark during the summer. The double rainbow is one of the benefits of the rain. One other thing that they have a lot of is wind. The video shows some of the huge windmills that capture wind energy. It would not do them a lot of good to depend on solar energy because it is often overcast and raining, but they have plenty of wind!

I wonder how their longitude and latitude compare to Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin and Austin, TX. It is fun to look at Google Earth and put on the Grid to compare. In Austin we are at around 30 degrees North, Whitefish Bay is 43 degrees North and Ebeltoft is 56 degrees North!

Visit to Ebeltoft, Denmark

I have been spending the last few days with some friends in Ebeltoft, Denmark. It has been a very enjoyable time, but too short. Tomorrow I will post a few pictures of beautiful things I have seen, but today I want to show you something really unique that I have learned about Denmark. The Danish people are very proud of their country and flag. On birthdays they put the flag on the table and also put a flag on their door and many flags lining the road up to their houses to celebrate. My friend, Andrea explains this in the video and shows you some of the flags!

Ending the London Visit

This morning at 4 am in London it was raining. I know that because took a Taxi to a bus and now I am on a flight heading to Denmark. This is one of the strangest flights I have had. We had to pay to get our boarding passes printed and it was really expensive! There is advertising everywhere. There are posters on the baggage compartments and there are recorded advertisements for things that you can buy on board: food, drinks, duty free stuff, gift items, special items for today's flight and even lottery cards. This picture of a courtesy phone illustrates the quality of my experience this morning.

My visit to London should not end with such a discouraging note, so I will end this post with a few pictures of things I saw:

First a few pictures of London bridge. I was thinking about the song "London Bridge is Falling Down" so I thought I would put up a picture of it. I had forgotten that it had been purchased several years ago and it is in Arizona now! Here s a link to an article about it in Wikipedia. This pictures are of the bridge in Arizona and some children playing the game and singing the song.

Then there are a few pictures of Oxford. It is a very famous University town. We went there for a one day visit. It is very cute and small.

Observations in London

I have been trying to figure out how to find out about everyday life here in England. It is not easy because I do not have a guide like I did in Greece and I am doing more tourist things and being where tourists are. You can go to plenty of other blogs if you want to see things I have seen as a tourist like the Tate Modern Art gallery, the Thames River or the church called St. Martin in the Fields where I made a bras rubbing of St. George and the Dragon. None of that is really everyday life.

So you will just have to make do with the few observations that I have so far and maybe I will find other things in the next few days before we leave here for Denmark.

Today I have a short video of things that I have seen. First I have noticed that even though this is a big city people have really nice flowers around their houses. Also, people drive on the wrong side of the street AND there are lots of double decker buses all over town. Today I also saw something that was new to me. There was an M and M store and I have never seen so many M and Ms!! I tried asking one of the girls working there if she could tell about everyday life on a short video, but she is not allowed to do that at work. Oh well... I hope you like the video.



I am thinking that maybe you are not taking me seriously when I ask you to send in videos or pictures of your everyday lives, buy I really do mean it. What did you do on the 4th of July? Did you see any parades? If you don't live in the USA what do you do in the summer time? Do you have playground? Do you take ballet lessons?