Dishwashing

Why is it that every time i go to the kitchen there's some really hot blondie with big titties washing dishes? i confused. i happy.

Food

I'm off to cook some pasta now, with tomato sauce and gammon cubes. Even though the microsoft buffet is good, the mediterranean belly still craves some good old home cooking every now and then. Its the first time i'm really gonna try cook something, because previous evenings have been just slopping together a toasted sandwich or some cuppasoup.

Skål !

Skål !

Thats what you must yell before you down your pint. It just means cheers and its pronounced "skoll".

Oh and just for the record, there are no vikings left in Denmark. My dreams of returning home triumphantly in a viking hat and with a bagful of stolen shot glasses have been completely shattered.

Cars

I really miss driving and my MBC206. All 206's here come in black or grey only, so i'm feeling nostalgic. I'm missing my woman too :(

SWEDEN

Oh great sweden.

Today i went with Hakkim (South Africa / India), Gabriel (Canada) and Stephanie (Switzerland), all IAESTE trainees at MS, on a day trip to Sweden. Its just a train-ride away, about 40mins, and the train travels underneath one of the longest bridges connecting Denmark to Sweden, across a dark blue sea which doesnt look too inviting. We walked around the town of Malmo for a few hours, first dropping in to visit St. Pitirs Kirke (St. Peter's Church). Malmo is more quiet than Copenhagen, and cleaner too, with less traffic and wider spaces. The temperature was a nice -1 but the sun was shining and it was cloudless. We walked to the edge of the park which meets with the sea... it was great to just sit on the bright green grassy knoll and look out across the dark blue sea at Copenhagen, lying in dark smog and with dark grey clouds all above it. I see why many choose to live in Malmo and just go to CPH for work.

We then visited the Malmo Museer, set in a funny looking castle made of red bricks with a great frozen moat around it. The castle architects must have been mighty pissed when they realize that a moat is pointless in Scandinavia... its frozen solid most of the time. This was one weird museum, it contained rooms of very random stuff.. some related to medieval life in the castle, others dedicated to other cultures and the history of sweden. It was all very confusing, and in swedish. There was an art, maritime, technology, history, and natural history museum all rolled into one, with a wine break in between. I dunno what the wine was, but it was sweet and left a nice taste in your mouth. The bloke behind the counter said he's not selling it, even though i wanted to buy a bottle to take back with me.

A trip to Burger King where i ordered 2 doublee whoppers and a large fries... cost me Lm6 (shite). Sweden is even more expensive than denmark (EEK) and beer is more expensive too as i later found out. Anyways, 3000 calories later, Gab and Steph decided to go back home so Hakkim and i set out for a long walk around the shopping area and cafeterias. Espresso House served us giant mugs of hot coffee and chocolate muffins, just what the doctor ordered for a cold winter day. We then had a few beers down the local pub whilst eyeing the beautiful blonde swedish muffins who were way taller than us. I'm talking about six foot four or something. They probably thought i was a hairy midget with a speech impediment. I've been in Scandinavia a week and i still can't speak a word in their tongue.

Hakkim and i were on a mission to analyze and compare the women. Yeah, both Danish and Swedish chicks are damn HOT with a capital H, but men must have a favourite. Always.

Final verdict: Sweden > Denmark.

First day at Microsoft

Holy shit. Its been one looong day!

The neighbours woke me up at 6am to celebrate Allan's birthday. Now all of you who know me fully understand the consequences of waking up Mike before his time (ie. 11am). I was grumpy, tired, and looked like some undead character out of Night of the Living Dead.

So as tradition dictates, you wake up at 6 with your mates and invade the kitchen. You then proceed to eat tasty bagels and pancakes with butter and jam and cheese and anything else you can scrape off the back of your fridge. You do this repeatedly for about 2 hours whilst drinking loads of beer and shot after shot of Gammel Dansk, a Danish spirit which tastes somewhat like a digestive liqueur mixed with horsepiss. Its an aquired taste, and by 8am i've acquired it.

I got washed and changed and met the IAESTE guy outside, still abit drowsy, and we took bus and train and bus to Microsoft's grand palace in Vedbaek. This is a quiet seaside village north of Copenhagen, and the Microsoft area takes up a good part of it.

I met Andries Roux, Test Manager, who directed me to my place and told me what i'll be doing. Nice guy to have as a boss, and he as well as all the other employees look like very experienced and talented people. Now i'm really feeling out of place in a suit, because in Denmark you just wear casual clothes to work. I met the team i'm with, who's names i can't pronounce anyway so i wont bother mentioning them. Apparently there's also another 10 IAESTE trainees working at MS.DK.


[Geek Rant -- just skip this if you don't have thick glasses, crusty underwear, pimples, and have never met members of the opposite sex]

Apparently i'm in the MBF Devtools Entity Mapping team. Let me explain. MBF is MS's new Business Framework, a plugin which will be part and parcel of the new Whidbey release and will come into its full culmination in VS for Longhorn. This framework is an amazing set of tools, all very graphical, for creating business applications rapidly and securely, by using drag-and-drop entities, relations, properties, and other elements with automatic code generation and automatic mapping to tables. Its going to be an awesome tool guys, mark my words! My job is apparently to test some shit here n there and to perform daily test runs, apart from some other stuff my test lead Jan Jakobssen will be giving me.

Microsoft is BIG. There's a giant corporate intranet with literally thousands of pages connecting all the teams and products together, and they've got tons of internal software systems working in unison to help development and the company move forward in general. So much to learn, so much to do, and all so confusing on your first day! My desk also has a huge Fujitsu TFT and a fast computer, as well as a nice thick book about the framework which i suppose i have to learn inside out within the week. Sweet!

On a lighter note, i also found out i've got BUFFET LUNCH and breakfast, plus free drinks and sweets all day long, cake on thursdays, and leftovers in the evenings. If you're lucky, you'll get wine and champagne on fridays: leftovers after the conferences they hold there (yay). So yeah, i'm in heaven. MS really knows how to create a perfect working environment for its 800 employees in Copenhagen. Its not about giving out freebies, its about making sure everyone is happy. A happy employee is a productive employee. A happy employee is a faithful employee.

One thing which impressed me is the amazing sense of belonging and will to work which these guys have. Its like everyone is rowing the same boat, happily working overtime to reach deadlines, congratulating teammates on achieved milestones, and really working intensely towards the final deadline and release of the product. Its great to work with people who are there to work because they love it, you can really see it on their faces. This is where i belong, not in some shit-hole with minimum wage where everyone does his best to leave earlier and steal stuff from the office, outputting the minimum possible quality work and trying to sound clever and bombastic.

Its going to be great! I love this place already and don't want to go back to any other shitty job.

Transport

Taxes are so high, even up to 60%, but you get what you pay for. The city is clean and directions are everywhere. Plus there's an excellent welfare system and things like free health insurance for all. The transport system is well organized, but i just can't understand how to use it.

You can get around with bus, night bus, metro, or tog (trains which come in different flavours, like inter city, regional, etc). Shit, everything is so confusing... the place is divided into zones and there's buses of diferent colours representing different routes, plus timetables with what seem to be the times when buses pass, and belive me, if a bus arrives at 2:42, it does. The entire transport ecosystem works like clockwork and the people in the city swear by it.. its just so efficient. Pity i can't figure out which goes where or what all these train numbers mean.

I just bought a 30-day all-transport card for about Lm60 which is rather steep. Still, its better than buying a per-trip card since i'll probably get lost and catch twice as many trains and buses until i figure this place out.

Encounter of the first kind

So today i met the neighbours. All nice people with friendly smiles, despite seeming abit quiet.

There's Soren, Ulrich, Karen, Jonas, Allan, and some others from upstairs who's names i just can't pronounce. These people speak funny.

They're all studying in the nearby university which is split up in different buildings, and they all drink as much beer as me which is worrying really. The beer here comes in so many different flavours. These guys normally drink the cheapest one (Harboe Pilsner) which can be bought from the local supermarket for less than 2 Kroners (about 9c) !!!! I'm in heaven. There's other beers populating our "beer fridge", some of which having over 8% alcohol content... neat ! Apparently, beer aint so cheap from the bars though, costing as much as 30 times as much. I will be drinking at home from now on, which is what everyone does anyway here.

Orienteering

Just back from looooong walk across Copenhagen, freezing my nuts off on a 6-hour walk and trying to figure out the place, the roadsigns, what people do, the language, and the size of the map.

I am Mike's frozen toes.

I'm starting to miss Erika. Mike is in need of some good lovin'

First day in Denmark

So its Saturday night and my first day in denmark. I slept like a log last night, right until about 11pm, after which i went to Netto -- the local cheap supermarket -- to get food for the weekend. Mike can't survive without food. Even crappy food costs alot in Denmark, so just bought the survival essentials to keep me going until i figure out the place. Everything here is pre-packed and there isnt such a big choice... i'm already missing Smart supermarket.

Armed with my trusty map of Greater Copenhagen, i then went for a walk to figure out where i live. There's snow everywhere from the night before. In big clumps by the roadside, in neat rows on each side of the bike lane, against the wall near the pavement, and allover the grassy parks. Most shops were closed, but i was able to pinpoint the most important outlets: barber, grocer, pharmacy, bus stop, Dominic's Pizzeria, travel agency, cheap booze shop.

Copenhagen is written Kobenhavn and pronounced 'Koobfenhawn' or something like that. These people speak funny.

My apartment is really nice. Its one out of a few hundred rooms in this brand new student dorm, only 8 months old, called Industrial Colleggiem or something. Construction is of thick wooden beams and concrete walls and floors all throughout, and plenty of glass from floor to ceiling to let in as much light as possible. Quite neat actually, and looks very modern. The room actually belongs to this girl, Isa Damgaard, but she's abroad and sub-letting it to me until she returns in April, so its nice and comfy since its been lived in. I've got a real comfy wide bed, a TV with English and Danish channels and enough porno to keep me entertained for awhile, a telephone, desk, heater, loads of shelving, internet, a bathroom and some real nifty lighting. I'm sharing a kitchen with the other rooms on my floor, about 8 people, and a nice big steel kitchen equipped with fridges and freezers and microwaves and ovens and all a gourmet like me needs to survive. There's also a communal lounge area with big puffy armchairs and TV/Playstation (yay).

Arrival

12:50pm
Flight to Frankfurt
Flight to Copenhagen
Train to Central Station
Hour wait
Walk to bus stop
Bus to Tagensvej
Walk to Radmandsgade
10:50pm

I am mike's tired spine.

My very first memory of Denmark was the biting cold. I stood at the edge of the railway track at Central Station, breathing out puffs of thick white mist and shivering in the night air. The light rain was falling on the tracks, which didn't seem to bother anyone. It must have been about 1 degree celcius at the time, the icy wind tearing at your face and turning your ears into bright pink lumps of meat. The train slowed to a halt and the doors opened as i gripped my luggage and other belongings. With a sigh, i stepped onto the silent train heading to an unpronounceable town: the past behind me, the future uncertain.

How it starts

In the year of our Lord two thousand and five, a young man left the Maltese shores in search of adventure and a better life. This is his story...