Christmas in Denmark pt.1

Roast goose, flæskersteg (aka pork & crackling), red cabbage, caramalised potatoes, smoked salmon, risalamond (aka vanila rice pudding) is what makes up the important lunch/dinner on Christmas Eve. Oh, and make it dark at 4pm and 4° outside and you have a Danish Christmas! Personally, I think Australia is getting the better deal on Christmas.

Washington D.C.

A quick trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the International Security Forum Annual Conference. A very interesting 3 days looking at all the various fields of Information Security - too many interesting speakers on to see them all, I learnt a lot about forensic investigation of USB Memory devices and saw some depressing statistics on what kind of information is found on Hard Disks bought off E-Bay. Thrilling stuff!

A very nice dinner inside the National Building Museum but other than that, not really much time to look around really, just an hour on the mall... just long enough to take a picture of the Lincoln.

A Night At The Opera

This week has been one of cultural experiences!

Saturday we went to an art auction run by the on line bidding company lauritz.com - we'll see how many paintings we win next week!

Monday night Cristina and I went to Tivoli to see the Royal Danish Winds play. Cristina's good friend, Adam Simonsen, plays the clarinet in the quintet. The music was quite fantastic: four pieces (Bach, Ligerti, Hindemith & Nielsen), great playing by the five musicians (Obo, Klarinet, Fløjte, Horn & Fagot (which is really a Bassoon) and great sound in the Tivoli concert hall.

Tueday night we were off to the opera to see Tosca, accompanied by Cristina's mum, Berrit. Although the opera was of course performed in Italian, and even though the translated subtitles were in Danish... I think I managed to get the gist of what was going on: One guy is hiding in a church... his friend finds him and tells him to go hide at his place... the friends girlfriend arrives at the church and decides that his painting of the beautiful Madonna is a bit too much like the woman who lives down the road... meanwhile the bad guy in black comes looking for the guy who was hiding... he also has a thing for the friends girlfriend and decides that the friend is probably hiding the guy who was hiding, so he arrests him, which is convienient because now the bad guy can try his luck with the girlfriend... they still haven't found the guy who was hiding and the friend won't talk... the bad guy convinces the girlfriend that if he can have his way with her he'll free the friend (his girl'ish screems in the background kind of help her decide that this is a good plan)... so bad guy writes a pass for her & her boyfriend to get out of rome... he doesn't see the knife coming as soon as he signs his name (1st death)... meanwhile the original guy that was hiding decides, who knows why, to kill himself (2nd death)... the friend who helped him goes to the firing squad, who are meant to have blanks, and is shot (3rd death - fake)... the soldiers leave and the girlfriend plans to use the pass to get out of dodge... turns out they wern't blanks (3rd death - real)... of course she's upset so jumps of the city walls (4th death). So in good Operatic style, everyone pretty much dies... singing all the way.

As for the opera itself... 3½ out of 5. The Opera building is brand new and the theatre itself is quite nice and intimate. The Orchestra was a bit too strong for the singers and drowned them out a few times. The singers were quite good... but no Pavarotti here.

I Got A Job!!

Woo Hoo!! How easy is it to get a job in Denmark? Very, apprently! Well their unemployment is actually very low... only about 2-3%... so there are not a lot of candidates. That always helps.

NNIT (www.nnit.com) are the lucky ones... they are an IT consulting firm and I shall be joining them as a specialist IT Security Consultant. I'm very excited about both the role and the company. Every Dane I speak to about NNIT tell me that they are a great company to work for, that they really treat their employees well and their parent company (Novo Nordisk) are recognised as one of the top companies to work for in Denmark. As for the role, well Security is really the place to be at the moment withing the IT industry. There is finally a real focus on security by companies and many are finding that what they thought they had in place in terms of security has really been just window dressing. So many are now engaging real security experts to fix their problems and get them on track.

Hopefully I'm up for the challenge!

A Travel Marathon!

Copenhagen to Frankfurt - 1hr.
Wait in Frankfurt - 1hr.
Frankfurt to London - 1hr.
Wait in London - 3hrs.
London to Tokyo - 11hrs.
Wait in Tokyo - 10hrs
Tokyo to Melbourne - 9hrs.
Divert to Adelaide because of heavy fog - 1hr.
Refuel in Adelaide - 1/2 hr.
Adelaide to Melbourne - 1hr.
Holding pattern above Melbourne - 1hr.

Arrive home - 39 1/2 hrs after leaving Copenhagen!!

The trip was well worth it though - two very good interviews with respected, and related, companies in Copenhagen. So fingers crossed, something will come of this trip.

Getting Ready To Go

Here we go... T-1 month and 5 days.

Cristina leaves tomorrow, and I'll be following on Friday for a test run. My real departure is set for 16th August... just over a month away.

I've set up this "Blog" to record my sojourn overseas - the modern travel diary. I'll post the photo's of our daily life and record any interesting events, adventures and observations. And probably some of the boring stuff as well!

I'm going to miss everyone back here in Australia... and I'm sure you'll miss me too (I hope!). Maybe this can keep us all a little bit closer and we can make the "other-side of the world" not such a big thing.

Charlie