Heading Home!!!!

We have completed a long, intrigueing, exhausting trip and cannot wait to see your smiling faces!!! we also cant wait to share all of our amazing memories with all of you, with not to mention 800+ pictures of our amazing adventure.

for all of you who we wont see when we return right away we will post some more interesting pictures and memories when we return from our short time here in Sweden, since we have had 2 long exhausting days in Sweden we were not able to share with you, we will be updating soon!!

Time to come home... we are more then ready but have really enjoyed our amazing adventure and are so very thankful to have been able to experience these countries even though at times our moodswings resemebled menopause thank you all for reading, we love you and cant wait to see you!!!

xoxoxoxoxo

I hope I get Zuccini on my plate!

The famous words before the most horrific meal of our lives! Thoughout this entire trip one would expect to have outstanding meals and amazing food here... unfortunately we were sadly mistaken!  We arrived in Lolland, Denmark yesterday and stopped for a quick lunch at Liva, much to our surprise we recieved chicken instead of fish and their famous potatoes and vegetables. It was amazing and we fully indulged trying to make up for the lack of food we sufficed during every meal we have had.  Thus began our high standards for Lolland and their food! We were much intrigued and with a full stomach ready to finally gain some knowledge of the sustainable proccesses they have in place here on this island.  (finally some well know sustainability..supposidly the basis of this trip)  Lollad is home of one of the worlds largest off shore wind turbine farms, among other things.  They are very open to expirementation with different energy sources such as hydrogen for residential energy and algae growth for biomass energy.  It is amazing the different thought process they have here, and how they achieve their ideas on the topic.  It is much more feasable considering the size of the island and population, but in turn very advanced compared to many other places in the world.  There are a few downfalls to the experiements done here, they are very expensive and don't fully get the return on their investments.  Although this is a downfall, this has never stopped the island of Lolland's ambition. 

Let us quickly brief you on Wind Turbines and why they believe in the usage here,

Wind power accounts for 20% of the national electricity consumption in Lolland and they are ambitious about reaching 50% by 2025.  This in turn has created many jobs for the community during this economic crisis.  The wind farms they have here in Lolland produce more electricity than the town uses, so they transport the exccess energy to neighboring countries, such as Germany.  This being said, it is considerably more expensive to place wind  turbines at sea than on land.  So why the heck did they decide to put 72 of them out there??... this is because, an offshore wind turbine on average produces 1.5 more times more power than a similar land-based wind turbine.  Winds are more frequent and stronger offshore.  Also, good locations for land turbines are almost all taken and hard to comeby.  The offshore turbines do need to have an enviornmental assesment report done before they are placed in order to make sure the ecosystem is regularly registered.  Although, the construction phase does temporarily loose bottom living fauna and blue mussles, the base of the wind turbines will allow for excellent growth sites for algae and will function as artificial reefs, and provied more habbitats for animal and plant species to have good living conditions.  The turbines are normally placed with a concrete base that extends and is stabalized within the waterbed, but more recently they have created a system where the turbine is floating and three anchors are placed at the bottom of the ocean to hold it in place, this is more effective and less dissruptive to the sealife.

Ok, we are not in a classroom... but we thought we would share a little bit of wind turbine knowledge that we have gained.. and no it has not been completely boring this entire trip! We were able to hug one.. yes hug a HUGE trubine on shore..an eering feeling for us turbine huggers but we were soon soothed by the sound they made.  We will show you pictures of this amazing structure along with the offshore farm that we were finally able to see when the clouds ceased.

Oh.. and then Dinner.. Remember our expectations of the wonderful food here in Lolland? Just take those expectations and mix them up with a bunch of peas and meatloaf (vegitarian style)... That is the only thing we could think it could be.  I would imagine it was not edible.. but we did not take the chance, instead we americans kindly mushed everything together so it appeared we had eaten some and then graciously put our napkin over the entire plate so you could not see our mess underneath until you reached the kitchen.  We nicely demonstrated our culture that night! your welcome!- we just don't stomach peash.. lets just say our stomaches did not sit well when we went to see the algae farm the next morning... so much for amazing food.

Hope you enjoyed the lecture as much as we did! At least we are finally learning somewhat of the sustainability we came here for.

Pusher Street!!!!!

We cannot even describe to you what this street consist of and the town that accompanies it (Christiana) also known as "free town" hmmmmm...

well to start off, it is their anniversay weekend of the town so we went on a Sunday the day after a HUGE party had gone on the night before, to tour this lovely town/village. The first red flag was when you looked up from a pleasant walk to a man walking with blood all over his face walking towards you!! ahhhhhhhhhhhh then it all started when you walked underneath the brick structured arch into happyland. we were guided up a staircase that was straight out of a horor movie.. no lighitng, graffiti everywhere and metal stairs use your imagination....not to mention the arama you would smell the night after a raging party! yuck we ended up in a somewhat normal art gallery where we were soon to learn the history of this small town....

the tour started off with an explanation of not having cameras visible on what they call pusher street, for pararnomral tendecies that the residence held, so we began..'

Lets start by descrbing the houses, they are unique and shack like and were painted in bright colors, we have no comparisons in America or at least in Colorado. This was an expereince we have never encountered and to be quite honest hard to describe. considering we could not take pictures of pusher street we will to describe our expereince the best we can otherwise we will post some pics soon and you can form your own opionon of the rest of this town.

"no photo" " no photo" was the first words we heard before entering this horrifying run down street. then we were lead into a street covered in dirt, trees, live music and oh yeah pushers!!!! our tour guide warned us by saying there is so many people there because they would go there and get way to silly to find their way home!!! as you walked on the street everyone would stare and we soon found ourselves walking through a crowd of people listening to one man with guitar singing on a stage, this is how it is everyday here. As we finally surfaced from the pushers we were greeted with a long narrow staircase to a body of water and dirt path... images soon.... as we came out of the forest we were greeted with the backend of pusher street, this time around, our guide was gracious enough to inform us it might be in our benifite to breathe in for ten minutes as we ventured through... She was not lying.  All you could see coming at you were beer bottles, cockeyed smiling faces, and stray dogs.. and don't forget the little kids! yep, kids.  We have never had such an overwhelming sence territory and curiosity in all of our lives, lets just say we didn't stick around for lunch.  No worries mom's .. We made it out alive and have absolutly no intent of ever doing drugs!.. it was quite an amazing experience to say the least.  We hope to never walk down another Pusher Street again.  It was inlightning to see they way these people lived and we are intrigued by this different and unintended use of sustainability.  This trip would not have been as meaningful without this chaotic street.!  We hope you enjoyed this adventure as much as we did  and can imagine what we experienced.  Pics soon..

leaving your imagination to the rest! ha ha ha   Love you all!

Spoiled????

The meaning of this word translates in different countries we have come to learn.  The people here look at Americans as being very spoiled, and we have had mixed reactions to our visit... but what we considered spoiled deals with money and material things, here we believe it stands for a way of life and the way you expect certain understanding for a lack of knowledge.  People expect you to be responsible for your own actions and tendencies and do not allow for a sense of blame.  An example of this that contradicts some American beliefs was demonstrated at one of the schools we visited, they do not have security and allow the children to run around carelessly, therefore if a child were to slip and fall down the stairs it would not be the building or schools fault.  It is up to the individual to take care of themselves.  It is interesting that they have these misconceptions of us and what it is to be spoiled considering they have a 20 dollar an hour minimum wage... and we're spoiled?  It has been quite an interesting culture shock.  Meanwhile, in our visiting we have noticed how impolite people are... we noticed that people would rather stop and stare or shove you than ask you to excuse them while they walk by you.. interesting right?  Our guide informed us that after the hippi movement here they lost touch of manners and do not treat people with much respect, they have recently started a movement here to improve their customer service and curtosy towards otheres.  Hopefully it kicks into action pretty fast....  and this is not only towards Americans it is worse among Danes. 
This has given us a different perspective and definite culture shock.. we are grateful to be experiencing and learing about a different way of living.

New post soon... next... Pusher Street (Im sure you can guess..)

A sense of design style!!!!!

Hello Everyone.....

so today it is Sunday and we are exhausted this morning!!!! Yesterday was fun!! we ended up going to the Danish Architecture Museum and was able to experiece some intense 3D models!!! We also happened to come across the exact location of the picture that we posted on our page before we left... despite our excitment for this picture we came to realize that this was the naughty side of Copenhagen.. go figure ha ha!!! We our now leaving for another crazy day of tours, we will fill you in soon!

ps.. our internet is not working in our room so we will hopefully be posting pictures soon!!

miss and love you all!!

Allison and Felicia

Bikes, Scarves and Cigs

Hey Everyone,

so... we have survived the plane ride, we didnt sleep for almost 20 hours with the time difference. right now its 830am and we are finally rested! so yesterday was an adventure to say the least, with no sleep and being in a different country was hard to grasp, by our 5th tour we were head bobbing and lost all control lol we felt horrible but we could not control it any longer. We met an architect and he took us around to the different schools they have designed that control their own environment, which was nice to learn and all products used were sustainable, our tour guide Marco is from Argentina and was quite the character, speaking "at least" 3 lanquages as he put it! He architectural frim which was JJW was intersting due to the fact they had no heirachy, all of the desk and furniture systems were exaclty the same for each employee, there was no cubicles they all worked in a open enviorment. The firm was not seperated by department and they were each thier own entity and each had their own specialty. We also toured the Queens Castle and felt like royalty. We felt like we were walking through a neoclassical book that we would read in history of architecture.

ps. we are trying to fit in by riding our bicycles with heels, scarves and a smoke in our hand to the cafe where we leave our babies in strollers outside while sipping our coffee at a nice little table indoors.

Oh..breakfast is calling! write soon, can't wait to read all of your comments!

Allison & Felicia

Leaving in the Morning!!!

Hey Everyone,

So the day has FINALLY arrived where we start our adventure!!! Tomorrow morning we will be on an airplane to Scandinavia! I checked and all of our hotels have free wifi so we will be keeping you all updated everyday we are there!!! We can't wait for what is about to come and we are so excited to share it with all of you! I hope you all follow and write comments!!!! Thanks so much for following!!! HERE WE GO!!!!!

Felicia and Allison