Today was the day my department goes offsite to discuss how our department is doing followed by some sort of fun social event. We spent the morning in a beautiful old house called Hvidøre on the coast of Denmark just north of Copenhagen.
Hvidøre is a Novo Nordisk meeting house that used to be a diabetes treatment center. Prior to that it was the summer home of Princess Alexandria and Princess Dagmar of Denmark. These two sisters were the daughters of King Christian IX. Princess Alexandra married Edward VII of England, and Dagmar married Emperor Alexander III of Russia. The two royal families would get together at this house every summer. In 1919, Dagmar (who became Maria Feodorovna when she converted to orthodoxy and married the future Russian emperor). had to flee Russia shortly after the murder of her son Czar Nicholas II and his entire family. After a brief stop in England with Alexandra she decided to settle in Hvidøre once again, to live there permanently until her death in 1928. The house was sold shortly after her death, and in 1937 was purchased by Novo Industry, at which point it eventually became the diabetic center and then meeting site.
This morning I realized the small park across the street from me is also named after Princess Dagmar...and I guess the hugging bears have something to do with Russia?
I apologize for the blurriness. Charlie is on a new collar and was pulling me away.
Hvidøre is known for its fantastic food. After a morning of discussing the things our department does well and the things we need to improve (by the way Kevin -- if you read this -- you would be proud, we scored low on social responsibility and I tried to suggest some service days...this was a foreign concept to Danes and met with mixed responses), anyway, we sat down to a buffet lunch consisting of barbecue "ribs" (Danish style. ie fatty pieces of fat on a rib bone with a tiny bit of rib meat) and cole slaw, raw salmon in some sort of fennel salad (DELICIOUS) veal fricasse, fried cod with dill and caper tarter sauce, some sort of white garlic soup, vegetable lasagna (Seinfeld, you have forever ruined vegetable lasagna for me **queue clip at end of post**), a large assortment of breads and cheeses and Danish strawberries and cream.
After lunch we headed further up the coast to Vedbaek where we all boarded a fishing boat for an afternoon of cod fishing in the Sound.
The pictures don't do it justice but it had been raining ALL morning and although it dried up for our trip it was incredibly windy out there. In fact, our trip was cut short by about 2 hours because we had a few sea sick passengers. But for the rest of us, the cod (or "torsk" as it is called here) was jumping. Many of us caught one, some caught a few. I was one of the lucky ones to bring a nice fish home to Collin. He is filleted it and is preparing it in some nice beer batter as we speak (or as I type, I suppose).
the finished product
and now for Seinfeld's "Vegetable lasagna"...also featuring a bit of the kroner conversation that contributed to some of Collin's excitement about moving to Denmark.
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