29

Today I’m 29. Older and wiser.

We just got back from a trip to Venice which was Adi’s birthday present to me and a surprise. His first successful surprise All his other attempts were destroyed by my curiosity or my mother’s care to call me and make sure my house is clean (the surprise he intended was an unannounced visit)

We stayed at a lovely hotel and walked the beautiful streets and little bridges of Venice, it was amazing.

I got so many calls this morning from my whole family starting with all my 20 cousins to parents and grandparents. All wishes ended with: “and now… a baby” and then silence from my end… So I’m really getting older it seems…  

Oh, and I also got a “Happy birthday and bank account change notice” mail from my bank. Now that I‘m 29, I will pay bigger interest on any credit that I might take…

This evening on the metro …

- The Turkish guy who was sitting across me started crying while talking on the phone. I reacted as any other compassionate human being, turned my head and pretended I hadn't noticed. Turned out though he just had a really bad cold and that’s why his eyes were watery. Not such a good news for me since I was sitting very close to him. Good thing I turned my head when I did ...

- A middle aged Asian couple got caught without a ticket.They pretended for 10 minutes to be looking for the ticket in the woman’s purse. When the train finally stopped at a station and the doors opened, they became the fastest Asian couple I’ve ever seen. Got caught though … unfortunately – I was kinda ruling for them …

- At the next stop, five teenagers were having their picture taken at the metro (?!). All of them were very loud and happy. They were all photographed showing the finger to the guy who was taking the picture. A lady was watching them candidly and smiling, like a mother would watch her son playing in the sand. Seemed kinda funny considering they were all flipping her…

Happy new year!

Fact #3 about Denmark: Danes and karting mania

Today we had one of the best team building events at work. All of us headed for a karting race in Copenhagen and raced there in teams of two for about 3 hours. It was the first time I ever tried the go-karts. Bumper cars and racing against children in small karts doesn’t count.

Anyway, although in real life I am a really sucky driver, to my great surprise I was quite good at karting. Probably because speeding and bumping into others was OK here. And I also suspect the fact that there weren’t any distractions along the lap also helped, most of my accidents on the road were because I got distracted by something else .

But continuing along the title of this post, all the Danes in my team were really good. It seems karting is a big hobby in Copenhagen and people are doing it on a regular basis. There are even special clubs at work places for people to join and go kart racing every other week. It’s a bit ironic I thought as most of the Danes and Danish government advocate (actually the government enforces it through their huge taxes on cars) for less and less cars.

The kart racing is also pretty expensive as most things in Denmark, but usually if there’s a club at work for this, the company will pay for part of the expense.

So, yes, a really fun event today, did not love the (a bit) dirty suits and heavy helmets very much but at least it was better than the last event where we had to wear sumo wrestlers suits

Funniest baby–Jack Jack from The Incredibles movie by Pixar

Divorce rate

Last post started from the thought of the upcoming office Christmas party which generated the thought about divorces which drove me to look up divorce rates in the Nordic countries. Not very surprisingly, the divorce rate in Scandinavia is the highest in the world. Only Norway has the lowest divorce rate among Scandinavian countries at about 42%.

• Sweden 55%
• Finland 52%
• Denmark 46%
• Norway 42%

I forgot to look up Iceland, but anyway…

So basically we could safely assume that almost half the marriages will end up in a divorce. This happens in Scandinavia where people marry usually very late after they’ve already been living for years together and had several children together. If a marriage is to happen so late, we would assume is very unlikely to end up in a divorce. And it still does, for 50% of the marriages.

In the 50% that’s left of the marriages we can still assume that there is some percentage that don’t get along and would end up in a divorce if it wasn’t for the kids or other things that make them reconsider the divorce. But those people are still unhappy and on their way to divorce so we could assume that actually the percentage of marriages that fail is greater than the ones that succeed.

With these percentages in mind, I’m thinking that “until death do us part” doesn’t make much sense anymore besides it actually being a stupid old phrase. Turns out there’s a greater chance that something else will get in the way before death gets there. So maybe the whole attitude towards marriage it’s not the right one.

Seems that marriage does not have the same significance it had hundred of years ago (at least not in the developed countries, we should not forget that India still has a 1.1% divorce rate ).

Marriage it’s not a bond for life anymore, but more a way of celebrating the fact that after a long time spent together, two people are still able to love each other and be part of each other’s life. And that’s actually quite an accomplishment.

With every more year spent together people should be happy and grateful that they are still together. If you think like that it’s much harder to take your partner for granted as it usually happens in marriages (because of the “till death do us part” thing). If you scratch that phrase and replace it with “till we are not happy together anymore”, then since you know that your partner will leave you once he/she’s not happy anymore or you could do the same thing, I think it’s going to be much easier to appreciate and be grateful for your partner and your happiness.

qed

Fact #2 about Denmark: Best time to buy a house

This is funny, but as Homer would say: “It’s funny cause it’s true”.

One of the first things I learned after coming to Denmark was that Danes get very very crazy at the Christmas parties, crazy drunk that is. And when you’re drunk like that most of your inhibitions disappear.The result is that married people end up having sex with other married (but not to each other) people from the aforementioned parties.

Thus, the best time to buy a house in Denmark is after Christmas because that means that the wild Christmas party sex happened and people are getting divorced and in a hurry to sell their house and split the earnings.

I guess this was true mostly before the financial crisis, but you never know …

The Big Bang theory

So last Sunday was a lazy lazy Sunday in which I started watching “The Big Bang theory” after one of my geek friends couldn’t stop talking about it …

A bit annoying at the beginning, it turned out to be the funniest shit I’ve watched in a long time. Going to my top favorite comedy series along South Park.

Four geeks and a girl as main characters along with some other sporadically appearing characters most of the them from the geek side also or just the odd kind of people side.

My favorite bits: when Howard (Jewish engineer with a Masters from MIT who still lives with his mother) and Raj (Indian astrophysicist who cannot speak when girls are present unless he’s drunk)  are confronted by Leonard’s mother about their imaginary homo marriage. Her theory is that because these guys could not get girls they have created a gay marriage between them to compensate for their need for affection. Of course the guys are desperate to prove her wrong (because of course they’re not gay).