jesdan

I thought it was finally time to sit down and write an update of what has been happening with us as the blog page has been gathering dust since November last year. I’ll try to keep it to the point, but it does require that I go all the way back to the beginning of December, so you may want to grab a cuppa before diving into this. At the beginning of December, I packed my “ABAYA” (cultural dress) and headscarf and flew off to Saudi Arabia. I had to get special permission to get a visa as normally married women are not allowed to visit the country without their husbands. The purpose of the visit was to attend the 1st Annual Saudi Arabian Audiology Congress which was held in Riyadh. For a first time conference ... read more

Hi all. It's Dan writing this blog about our latest weekend trip in the Mediterranean. We were looking forward to our trip to Malta as the cold weather here in Denmark is making its presence felt. Sure enough, we landed in Malta on a Friday with a pleasant 25C and lots of sunshine. Apart from New Zealand last year, we have not hired a car on any of our trips – we don't really see the need. This allows us to experience a bit more about what life is like in the places we travel. We stuck to this pattern and took the bus from the airport to our hotel in Sliema. This was a bit tricky, because the information we found on the Internet turned out to be wrong, but we managed to get to ... read more

I realised the last few blogs have all been about trips we’ve been taking in Europe and I figured it was about time we wrote an update about our lives in Denmark. It’s now October and coming up on a year since we arrived in Denmark. I can’t believe how times flies. The summer is now definitely over and we’re left wondering if this year’s winter will be like the last (lots of snow). The apartment we live now has pretty much everything we need, except an outdoor setting for our balcony, which we now don’t need because it’s going to be too cold to use it anyway. Our cats arrived back in mid-June and they have settled in nicely. We’re lucky to have a wonderful neighbour upstairs who babysits them when we go on our ... read more

Last weekend, Dan and I flew to London to join the fighting and get a free pair of sneakers…..just kidding! We had planned the trip to London some time ago and it just happened to coincide with the London Riots of 2011. Luckily, I think most of it had stopped by the time we arrived and apart from seeing a few dodgy people walking around in new trainers :), you wouldn’t have known that anything had being going on. We arrived into Stansted airport via our Ryanair flight at about 10:30pm and proceeded to wait in the long queues to get through immigration. It seemed like every tourist in the world had just arrived in London and this was soon confirmed the following day by the number of people with cameras wandering around when we got ... read more

I never thought I would ever have had the opportunity to go to Middle East, but in late April I had the chance through work to go to Iran, Dubai of the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. I think I was the only one in the office to actually agree to visiting these places, but I’m glad I did as it really is an eye opener to visit these countries. On Easter Sunday, I headed to Copenhagen Airport and flew via Istanbul in Turkey to Tehran in Iran. There are certain dress rules in Iran, so before getting off the plane, I had to cover my hair (not completely, but it is the law that women cover their heads) and of course I’d made sure I was wearing appropriate attire (long sleeve shirt, trousers and over ... read more