Hølbæk

Wednesday we spent a lovely day and night visiting Ingrid's "aunt" Ulla, a concert harpsichordist and organist.  She and Eli played much music together, and we enjoyed many fruits of her garden -- fresh potatoes, gooseberries, currants, apples, plums ...  and collected 231 slugs in a futile effort to put a dent in their truly impressive population.  Ingrid mused why our similarly sized banana slugs in Santa Cruz are so cute whereas these are rather hideous.  It would be great if we could find a good recipe for them.

The next day we headed back out to the Højby sommerhus, this time by way of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, with spectacular statuary and paintings. The special exhibit of Peter Doig was impressive, and the Henry Moore sculptures brought be back to my university classes in art history.  

Eli was sufficiently inspired by playing music with Ulla that he woke early today to begin composing a Sonatina in C for Clarinet.  Fortunately Klemens left the keyboard at the sommerhus, which has made that possible. I think he hopes to finish it before we return to see Ulla again. 

Today we spent in Hølbæk, at the Middle Ages Fair and Combat Tournament.  This has been Eli's dream to come to these games for a year and a half, and we organized our summer schedule around it. Unfortunately, they moved the combat tournament until tomorrow (although the fair was much fun on a very blustery day), so we will return tomorrow to see medieval "vikings" pound each other on the head with swords.  

I've made time every day for a while now to learn the birds of Europe.  This is much fun, since almost everything I see is brand new to me.  It has been years since I've felt I could spend time birding as I did for so many years.  Birding was my first love in nature, and regular weekend birding kept me sane through university and much of graduate school.  But it has faded over the years with competition for so many other things.  This year is my opportunity to get back to my roots as a natural historian, with so much new to learn.