Personal: New portraits

Posted in Personal, Photography by Laura

I’d been admiring other bloggers’ beautiful and professional portraits for quite a while, and so I recently decided to get some nice pictures taken as well. I’d had enough of the occasional iPhone snapshot, and I remembered a post in one of the expat Facebook groups for Copenhagen about a photographer offering portraits. So I got in touch with her and we met in Nørrebro last week to take some pictures. We started out with some shots against a white wall in her apartment, before moving outside to Assistens Kirkegård to get some green in the background. She also showed me a lovely little store/ showroom called Karen-Copenhagen where one of her friends is selling vintage new and second hand clothes and accessories. If you’re looking to get some pictures taken, I can highly recommend Anna, she’s very sweet and nice to work with, and she really took her time to get good photos. I’m quite happy with the result, I feel that my personality comes across in them much better than in the studio photos most photographers like to take. Here are some of my favorites.

13May2014

Update: My very own picture wall

Posted in Interior by Laura

Way back in February, I wrote about wanting to create a picture wall in our living room, and I realized I haven’t really given an update on that! Well, I tend to have a million ideas and plans, and I also tend to abandon the larger part of them rather quickly. But this project I actually completed, and here is the result!

picturewall1

I’ve actually already changed one of the pictures in the frames, and I’ve added something new as well. That’s the beauty of the picture wall - it’s easily adaptable to taste, season, etc.

For my own picture wall, I decided to have a nice mix of prints and photos, and I added the two wooden letters for our initials L and M that we once got for a christmas present, to mix things up a little bit.

I found this classic “DANMARK” print at one of my favorite stores, Girlie Hurly (for a really nice review of the story, check out Melanie’s blog “Dejlige Days”), and I just love it. I keep wanting a Copenhagen map from Kortkartellet, but they only come in sizes too big for the picture wall. I’ll just have to find another place for it!

On the other side, we have my lovely “YapYap” print, a funny postcard in German (to balance out the Danish! It reads “Shh, is that a chocolate cookie calling?”) and a picture of the best pets ever to walk this earth (who both, sadly, passed away). They will always hold a special place in my heart, so I put them up there as well!

I’m always looking for new ideas and inspiration, so if you know of a great artist, let me know!

4May2014

Spring in Copenhagen: Everyday vacation feeling

Posted in Copenhagen by Laura

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to live near water, preferably by the sea. I don’t particularly enjoy swimming in ocean water, because it’s salty and weird stuff keeps touching my legs and the ground is stony or covered in sharp sea shell fragments ready to cut my feet. But I love being at the beach, I love the smell of sea water (if it’s not too strong, of course!), the fresh breeze and the sounds of the water, the waves and the seagulls.

During the winter, which can feel eternally long, it’s not always easy to see the benefits of living close to the sea. The fresh breeze that I enjoy so much in the summer turns into icy cold winds of almost storm-like speeds, there’s ice everywhere, and it’s usually a couple of degrees colder than in the inland. But as soon as the first rays of sun come out and the temperatures creep up, it becomes just lovely. It makes me want to wrap myself tightly in a scarf and jacket and take a walk at the seaside, taking it all in.

When I moved to Copenhagen, I luckily found an area (more by accident then by design) that’s sometimes called “Copenhagen’s Little Venice”: Sluseholmen. It’s famous for its architectural design (sometimes we get groups of architecture students walking through our back yard taking notes) and the little canals and bridges separating the house blocks from each other. It gets its name from the watergate (sluse) located nearby. My favorite feature of the area is the row of little red boat houses at the waterfront, home to Valby Boat Club, which pose a striking contrast to the modern, clear-cut architecture of the apartment buildings.

The area offers many more great details, for example our own “havnebad” (harbor bath), where you can sunbathe and swim for free during the summer. There are many, many places to secure your boat, in fact many apartments on the ground floor actually have little ladders down to the water and their own docking places. At the watergate, there’s also a small shipyard where people can work on their own boats. We have two resident pairs of swans as well as different ducks and seagulls. Unfortunately, there are also some jellyfish in the water in the summer!

In German, there’s a phrase called “wohnen, wo andere Urlaub machen” - living where other people spend their vacation. In the spring and summer, it certainly feels that way here!