August 3, 2025 • 26 mins
Broadcasting from Denmark, surviving a series of misadventures. The wildly unpredictable Danish weather, breaking my phone twice, battling severe back pain and sciatica, because hello mid-life crisis. This one's a charmer. Discover fascinating Danish cultural nuances like the trust-based street markets in Aarhus and the peculiar two-hand door systems. Despite the sequence of unfortunate events, AI says I stay reflective and humorous. Tune in for personal stories, random thoughts, and more. Deeply appreciate your support. Until next week, stay awesome!00:00 Introduction and Welcome00:20 Weather Woes in Denmark01:17 Podcast Overview and Personal Updates02:20 A Run in the Forest Gone Wrong03:55 The Phone Fiasco07:18 Trust System in Denmark09:04 The Peculiar Danish Door System11:19 Battling Back Pain13:22 The Picnic Disaster
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:06):
Hi, hello and welcome to Get Another Expat.
This is episode 64 coming to youwith hopefully not too much echo
because I'm recording from a laptop in a big room being on
the go. It's the second week being in
Denmark and the journey continues.
And if the weather was as kind as the people here in Denmark,
(00:30):
then it would be a paradise. But the weather is just bananas.
It's more bananas than usual. This is what the Copenhageners
themselves say, with the weatherchanging every 10 minutes.
Crazy rain, flooding, strong winds.
And then all of a sudden it becomes sunny and you're like,
(00:51):
Oh my God, is it really summer weather?
And then you try to do something, 10 minutes later,
another storm comes. It's almost like an abusive
relationship when you say, OK, Ithink things are going better
now. I don't think he will do it
again. I think we have entered a period
of calmness. And then there goes another
(01:13):
heavy rain, wind, flood right inyour face.
Now for those who are tuning in and are new.
Hi, this is a podcast where I share random thoughts, news and
stories. My name is Hermes.
I'm Greek, usually living in Berlin, but not today.
(01:33):
Today we are in Denmark and thiswill be a very miserable episode
because I think I've been struckby a series of unfortunate
events. If any of you can do a any sort
of bad energy removal, if my grandma is listening and she
wants to do exematiasma, which is the Greek way of sending the
(01:57):
bad eye away, please do it. Because you know, when one thing
happens is chance with when two things happen, it's a
coincidence, but when more than three things are happening, then
it is a malevolent act. And this is what life has been
doing to me. But let's start from the
beginning. So here in Denmark, lovely
(02:22):
people, super kind, super helpful.
And the nature has been also lovely.
In one of these nature type of walks, we were in the forest,
which was right next to the sea.Very beautiful stuff.
You could smell the sea, you could smell the forest.
Everyone was running because this is what people do here in
Denmark. They run on the forest, they run
(02:45):
on the streets, they run on the lake.
They run with their pets, they run with their dogs, they run
with their babies. So there was running going on.
And for a moment I felt like I felt like running because
imagine this deep green forest with leaves, brown leaves out
your pathway. Hearing the waves from the sea
(03:07):
nearby, just the air felt so good.
And I decided I will run and I say it.
I grab my phone in my hand because I didn't want to have it
in my pants. And as I start running I think I
did 10 meters of running and as my hand moves up and down for
(03:28):
some reason it forgets to function.
Something like our six month baby and I just let my phone
drop. But it's not that I just
released my hand and my phone dropped with the gravity.
No, I literally smacked my phoneto the ground as my hand was
(03:48):
going up and down. The down was throwing the phone
on a rock. So this is what happened face
down. I have screen protection, but
the screen broke. Half of the phone became
unresponsive, and I thought, OK,that's not such a big problem.
I started getting creative to get around because if you cannot
(04:10):
use half of the screen, then we need to bring the things you
want to use at the part of the screen.
That worked and that was fun fora bit, you know, rotating the
phone for the items to change position or scroll through so
things go in a different place in the screen.
But then it started deteriorating more and more to
(04:30):
the place where I cannot pay foranything, I cannot reply to
messages. And as I was about to record
this podcast, I dropped my phoneand now I it's done.
If you're hearing this, some of you that know me, especially the
ones in Denmark, I reached out to people to to meet and
refresh. Now I have 0 phone, the little
(04:53):
percentage of a phone I had. I smacked it again.
So there it is. I am completely phoneless, which
means it's the little thing. It's not just the messaging and
I'm addicted to my phone, but just checking the weather.
Not that it makes sense here to try and check the weather, pay
for something, check the time, put a timer because you're
(05:13):
boiling an egg. I have nothing.
It's me and nature. It's me and the physical world
now. So this is one thing just as a
reminder, always make sure to backup your phone.
It really sucks and I believe everyone has broken a phone in
their life. So how was it for you the last
time you broke your phone? Did you have a backup?
(05:34):
Did you have to go to one of these repair shops and be very
stressed and scared about them getting all your photos or if
they mess up to fix it and then you're done?
If you haven't backed up in a while, maybe now it's a good
time. This phone is is backed up so I
think things will be fine. I have given my soul to Google.
(05:58):
A few years ago I stopped tryingdoing my own backups.
I still have a system in my big computer, but at some point I
just said yes to the cloud. And I know it has downsides, but
the upsides of losing a phone, getting a new one and then
having the exact same phone in amatter of minutes, That has been
(06:19):
a delight for someone like me that loses, breaks and destroys
their possessions. I don't know if I will buy a
phone here in Denmark. I expect it will be ridiculously
expensive. One of the interesting things of
being an encounter with a different currency is that most
likely you will spend much more because you tell yourself or I
(06:42):
tell myself that, you know, it'ssomething different.
It's not EUR, it's just crowns. It's like 60 crowns.
But what is it really? You know?
So I'm experiencing that. I am lost in the crown system.
My brain refuses to try and do the math and just wants to flow
blissfully in this Nirvana of not knowing how much I've been
(07:04):
spending. But no matter how much I have,
buying a phone from here, I think that will make me
bankrupt. So let's see how one week
without a phone will be. I will report on the next one.
Two more Danish things I wanted to report.
One is the trust system that exists here.
I will give you an example. In the city of Orhos that we
(07:28):
visited, they have this new trend on the streets.
We show it 5 or 6 different times around the city.
So they put out clothes in boxesor that IKEA hunger with the
wheels. You know that people using the
flea markets, so just in random places from the street, they
would be an IKEA hanger with dresses and shirts and all of
(07:50):
that next to it, a box with clothes.
And on top there would be a carton sign that says every item
is, I don't know, 40 Corona, here's my QR to pay me.
And this was it just in a randomplace in the street.
And this happened in a lot of places.
And it seems that it's a trend, which I really like.
(08:11):
You put out a system, you don't need AI or a robot doing the
work for you. You just leave it out there and
the clothes sell themselves. I don't know how successful it
is. And I would say judging by the
clothes, most of them, they weresomewhere in the 15 to 25 year
old range, mostly women's clothes.
(08:33):
But it was still a very interesting concept.
I've told you my problem. Nothing fits me in the flea
markets or these types of events.
I'm a big dude and the joy of second hand cloth market is not
one I get to experience but giveit up for or who's for having
enough trust so that people can just buy things on the on the
(08:55):
street that someone else leaves.I don't think that would work in
a lot of places. And the second thing I want to
report is that why, Danes, why do you have this weird system in
your doors? You need to fix your door
system. So I don't know why, but the
house doors here, they have a door handle, the normal 1.
(09:18):
And then they have a twisty second thing at the top.
And you need to turn both for the door to open.
So you need to put down the handle and then also turn that
thing at the top, which means that you need 2 hands to open a
door. And this is very problematic if
(09:38):
you're holding anything in your hands.
These things are like, I don't know, half a meter between them.
It's not that they are one next to each other.
So you could try to open the door handle with your elbow and
then use your wrist for the top part.
No, you need 2 hands. And I have to say, for such an
inclusive place like Denmark requiring people to be so body
(10:03):
abled in order to perform a basic function of opening a
door, I find that bizarre. And if you think about it, if
you really think about it, the average person in the world has
less than two hands. I let that sink in.
That's a smart pants thing to say, you know?
But if you think about it, people either have two hands or
(10:26):
very few people for whatever reason, accident, etcetera, they
will have one hand or none. So if you add up all the people
in the world, the average personwould probably have something
like 1.9 something hands. So technically saying that the
average person has less than twohands is a valid sentence.
(10:47):
Even though it sounds weird, I didn't want to be so annoying.
I find these types of things annoying, but there it is.
I said it. Danes, please make doors open
with one hand. As someone who doesn't carry
bags, as someone who goes to thesupermarket and believes it will
buy three things and I end up with 13 things in my hands
(11:07):
trying to walk on the streets, Iwould really, really appreciate
if I can open the door with one hand.
Given that you have been warned that this is a mostly selfish
episode with a lot of complaining, I will go into the
next topic, which is the topic of my life or one of the big
(11:32):
topics of my life, and that is back pain.
I hate back pain. I have back pain.
Who else from the audience has back pain?
Raise your hands. I don't know what happened in
life because I was a very athletic person, but sometime in
my 20s I had a herniated disc inmy back.
And that means that every now and then, when I am too careless
(11:56):
in how I use my body, how many things I carry, if I don't
stretch too much, if I stay without doing any exercises for
a long time, my back pain comes to remind me that I cannot live
a normal life anymore. It comes in different forms but
the main one is the sciatica. I don't even know if it's cold
(12:17):
like this. This is how I read it when I see
it. The sciatica is a back pain,
nerve pain that extends down thelegs and it basically is not a
paralyzing sensation but it is very overwhelming.
It takes you over and I have different times in life where
the herniated disc just wakes upand decides to remind me that I
(12:41):
cannot live worry free. And every time I bend and every
time I carry something, I need to remember to do it in the
right way, otherwise an accumulation of mistakes that is
invisible to me will come later on to hit me with the form of
pain. Now I've done different
(13:02):
exercises, but it's so difficultto stick to doing these things
every single day. I forget about it.
When the problem is not there, Itend to not do anything about
it. But now extra weight plus the
baby is just too much. And this is what happened
yesterday. My buck decided to give up.
(13:24):
We tried to do a picnic here in Denmark, because if you need to
meet a lot of people and show them the baby, I thought, what's
the easiest way? Let's just do a picnic, invite
all of our friends and have thishitting multiple birds with one
stone event. Why is this such a bad
expression? Isn't there a better expression
(13:46):
of ticking a lot of boxes with one?
Whatever. So we say.
We do this picnic and we scout apark.
We find a great spot underneath many trees.
We go there. The weather prediction was 25%
chance of rain. Not great, not horrible, but
it's Denmark, how better can youhope it is?
(14:08):
So we go there, we're carrying alot of foods, drinks, balloons,
the baby, the essentials. We set the place up and then we
also see that it has picnic benches that you can just sit
and eat. And my girlfriend asks me, hey,
are these like mounted to the ground or can we bring 1 here in
(14:29):
our little great spot underneaththe trees?
So then we do that. I push these big benches
thinking that I'm invincible. And as we wait for the crowd to
assemble, the craziest storm happens.
I'm talking about massive amounts of rain.
That's not a 25% coverage type of rain.
(14:52):
This is 100% of 100%. Even though when we arrived
there was a little bit of rain and a little bit of drizzling
and our spot was solid, it had three big overlapping trees.
I felt so smart and proud when Ifound that spot.
And we thought we were safe because the little showers and
the drizzling, nothing was coming through.
(15:14):
So we told people to come and there we are now with the worst
storm of the storms getting soaked to the bone.
The baby's creamy. We are wet everywhere.
All of our stuff we brought are wet.
The baby stroller is wet, the foods, our bags, everything.
So we're trying to call it off. Now imagine my phone is not
(15:37):
working. Remember I broke my phone so I'm
trying to tell people not to come.
But it's raining so the phone isalso wet.
And it's just the amount of inability hit a critical point.
And this is when we decided to of course call everything off.
My girlfriend with the baby leaps first and I stay with the
(15:58):
stroller to collect all of the wet stuff and come home later.
This might have been one of the most miserable moments in my
life. Having to take all the balloons
down and having to pack all the wet stuff again.
All the ducks that had surrounded our picnic area that
we're really hoping for a big picnic and they were quite
(16:21):
curious for all the food we had brought.
I tried to keep all these ducks away while we waited for our
friends, but once the storm came, I defeatedly gave them
some of the bread. The ducks won.
They were very happy. The short rivalry of me and the
ducks might be another story, but just know that they won.
Everyone won that day besides me.
(16:43):
I was a total loser. So as a loser, I collected all
of the wet stuff, including myself, and I dragged my sorry
ass to go get a bus. Now that's when the second part
of the storm hit, and I'm talking about flooded streets
where you don't see the pavementanymore.
I'm waiting. They're cold.
(17:03):
At some point the bus says 13 minutes to come.
I wait there patiently. When the bus comes, guess what?
He's full. It's a full bus and I have a
baby stroller filled with all ofthe stuff I was carrying.
It's a very heavy baby stroller.Try need space and they look at
me, I look at them. The rain is pouring, the bus
(17:27):
driver leaves. And I know that for my dear
listeners in Greece that is it hurts you less because in Greece
you kind of you don't know when the bus will come and if it
counts, it can be very full. But one of the little joys I get
to experience in the central north part of Europe where I've
brought my life for a better life is that I can have trust in
(17:50):
the system. I can have more trust, try
trusted that a bus would come and I could be able to go.
I had to take the next bus. And as I'm in that bus, being
wet to the bone, carrying all the stuff miserably, the rain
starts pouring down so heavily that the bus driver almost
cannot see anything and I cannotsee from the windows.
(18:12):
Left or right is just the waterfalls of water falling and
then it hits me. I don't know what stop I need to
go to and I'm good with orientation so if I could see
outside I think I would have figured it out.
But my phone is not cooperating because it's broken.
I cannot get the right patches as I told you that I can get it
(18:32):
around sometimes and the water is pouring so much that I cannot
see anything. I take my best chance at the
stock and as the as the bus arrives, you can see many waves,
tsunami waves that the bus is bringing because the entire
street is flooded. And I the door opens and I hear
(18:53):
the rain, like the loudest rain I've heard.
And I try to exit with a stroller and an umbrella.
My leg goes 20 centimeters into this lake that has been created.
I try to get the stroller up in the pavement and because there
is so much water, I don't see that there is a step.
(19:15):
I fall down, the stroller falls down with all of the stuff
inside. One wheel goes off, which by
design the wheels can go off. But this didn't happen by
design. So not only the normal part of
the wheel went off, but also an extra plastic thing.
But I didn't know at the time what it is, if it broke, how to
(19:35):
get it back. There I am.
It feels like I've been to the Greek waterfalls of Neda and
Polylimnio and the amount of water that is pouring down on me
from the heavens is exactly the same.
I think it was the peak of the storm.
There are thunders literally falling in very close distance
(19:56):
and there I am trying to understand how to lift the
stroller with one hand and try to go underneath while it's full
with stuff inside. So I cannot really.
Take everything out. It's it's I cannot see from the
rain and try to fix that wheel back.
So there I am bending in pain getting all the water that was
(20:18):
definitely the lowest of the lowthat I had been because I got so
desperate. I cannot fix this.
I cannot. I don't even know how to dry the
baby stroller later. Everything we have is wet.
My headphones, my passport, my phone, my earbuds, my.
I don't know everything I own. But I took some deep breaths.
(20:40):
I calm down. I might not feel.
Investigate by lifting half of the stroller with all the stuff
inside. I found the way I put that wheel
back. I arrived home having to cross
literally mini lakes of water and when I see mini the entire
St. was a lake and the sidewalk you couldn't see it so when the
(21:02):
car was driving by it was causing waves that were just
hitting you almost up to the a bit below the knees.
I was hoping that Denmark has a drainage sewage system that is
not connected with the Swatch because random knowledge time.
A lot of cities have a system ofdrainage for the rain that if it
(21:23):
gets over floated it how do you say it gets mixed up with
sewage? So these two things float up.
If they float too much, one floats into the other.
And then the water you get on the streets is also water that
has sewage stuff. And this is very common in
almost all cities that you can imagine.
(21:45):
You can look it up how they've designed it.
I think Tokyo is one of the few that has fully separated the
flooding, how it happens and howit interacts with the shorts.
I was just hoping Denmark has done the same because I'm
floating in this water. I go back home as miserable as
you can imagine. Take everything off, carry all
the white stuff inside the stroller.
(22:06):
We left it at the entrance and it made a huge lake of water
because it was dripping everywhere.
So this is live? I had a shower and then what has
happened since then is that my herniated disc has woken up.
It said, you know what, buddy? I see that your phone is broken.
I see that your picnic didn't work.
(22:27):
I see that you're almost sick from pneumonia, having all the
cold rain dry on you, carrying everything.
You think it's my time to shine.I think it's time to remind you
that I also exist so you can putall your other problems into
perspective. And this is what it did.
(22:49):
So I've started now to do all the exercises and the stretches
I should be doing in general. And it's very painful.
And at this point, having lived one entire day with this super
strong sheiatic and nerve pain, if you have anyone in your
circle that has chronic pain, huge respect to them.
(23:11):
You should have huge respect to them.
One day of this type of pain makes me so Moody.
Like it just it's a it distorts everything.
It's very difficult to enjoy. It's very difficult to converse.
It's very difficult to joke because it's constant level of
pain just takes a lot of you andit's invisible.
(23:33):
It's not the sharp pain that youcan complain about or experience
at the very surface layer. It's a weird vibrating,
pulsating nerve type of pain that's hiding inside of you.
So yeah, I just wanted to say that out there, anyone with
chronic pain, huge respect. I think there is a lot of
(23:56):
mindfulness to learn from peoplewho live their lives like like
that. And yeah, this is it.
This is me recording with two ibuprofen that I took.
This is the only reason why a minute to make this recording
because otherwise I cannot even sit straight or walk or exist.
(24:18):
So good luck to me. I hope I see brighter days and I
hope you. I hope you are the yink to my
yank. Everything goes through phases
and harves different balances, so I hope that at least my
suffering can give you some enjoyment for being able to jump
(24:39):
and kick a football lift the couch.
Ciao isn't sure of these precious moments because you
don't know when they go away allright, this has been it
different type of episode. If you're tuning in for the
(25:00):
first time, thank you so much for tuning.
If you made it this far, know that I love you.
You're the best and this is the reason why I do it, because some
of you enjoy to listen this, no matter if it's informative or
silly or stupid or sometimes it gets too personal, other times
it's only news. But this is it, weekly, from now
(25:23):
and forever. Consistency is more important
than quality. You will never be ready, so just
do it now. This is what I tell to myself
and this is what I tell to you. I have been Hermes.
You have been you. Until next week.
I wish you all the best. If you like this show, rate it,
follow it, subscribe your grandmas until next week.
(25:46):
Ciao.
Hi, hello and welcome to Get Another Expat.
This is episode 64 coming to youwith hopefully not too much echo
because I'm recording from a laptop in a big room being on
the go. It's the second week being in
Denmark and the journey continues.
And if the weather was as kind as the people here in Denmark,
(00:30):
then it would be a paradise. But the weather is just bananas.
It's more bananas than usual. This is what the Copenhageners
themselves say, with the weatherchanging every 10 minutes.
Crazy rain, flooding, strong winds.
And then all of a sudden it becomes sunny and you're like,
(00:51):
Oh my God, is it really summer weather?
And then you try to do something, 10 minutes later,
another storm comes. It's almost like an abusive
relationship when you say, OK, Ithink things are going better
now. I don't think he will do it
again. I think we have entered a period
of calmness. And then there goes another
(01:13):
heavy rain, wind, flood right inyour face.
Now for those who are tuning in and are new.
Hi, this is a podcast where I share random thoughts, news and
stories. My name is Hermes.
I'm Greek, usually living in Berlin, but not today.
(01:33):
Today we are in Denmark and thiswill be a very miserable episode
because I think I've been struckby a series of unfortunate
events. If any of you can do a any sort
of bad energy removal, if my grandma is listening and she
wants to do exematiasma, which is the Greek way of sending the
(01:57):
bad eye away, please do it. Because you know, when one thing
happens is chance with when two things happen, it's a
coincidence, but when more than three things are happening, then
it is a malevolent act. And this is what life has been
doing to me. But let's start from the
beginning. So here in Denmark, lovely
(02:22):
people, super kind, super helpful.
And the nature has been also lovely.
In one of these nature type of walks, we were in the forest,
which was right next to the sea.Very beautiful stuff.
You could smell the sea, you could smell the forest.
Everyone was running because this is what people do here in
Denmark. They run on the forest, they run
(02:45):
on the streets, they run on the lake.
They run with their pets, they run with their dogs, they run
with their babies. So there was running going on.
And for a moment I felt like I felt like running because
imagine this deep green forest with leaves, brown leaves out
your pathway. Hearing the waves from the sea
(03:07):
nearby, just the air felt so good.
And I decided I will run and I say it.
I grab my phone in my hand because I didn't want to have it
in my pants. And as I start running I think I
did 10 meters of running and as my hand moves up and down for
(03:28):
some reason it forgets to function.
Something like our six month baby and I just let my phone
drop. But it's not that I just
released my hand and my phone dropped with the gravity.
No, I literally smacked my phoneto the ground as my hand was
(03:48):
going up and down. The down was throwing the phone
on a rock. So this is what happened face
down. I have screen protection, but
the screen broke. Half of the phone became
unresponsive, and I thought, OK,that's not such a big problem.
I started getting creative to get around because if you cannot
(04:10):
use half of the screen, then we need to bring the things you
want to use at the part of the screen.
That worked and that was fun fora bit, you know, rotating the
phone for the items to change position or scroll through so
things go in a different place in the screen.
But then it started deteriorating more and more to
(04:30):
the place where I cannot pay foranything, I cannot reply to
messages. And as I was about to record
this podcast, I dropped my phoneand now I it's done.
If you're hearing this, some of you that know me, especially the
ones in Denmark, I reached out to people to to meet and
refresh. Now I have 0 phone, the little
(04:53):
percentage of a phone I had. I smacked it again.
So there it is. I am completely phoneless, which
means it's the little thing. It's not just the messaging and
I'm addicted to my phone, but just checking the weather.
Not that it makes sense here to try and check the weather, pay
for something, check the time, put a timer because you're
(05:13):
boiling an egg. I have nothing.
It's me and nature. It's me and the physical world
now. So this is one thing just as a
reminder, always make sure to backup your phone.
It really sucks and I believe everyone has broken a phone in
their life. So how was it for you the last
time you broke your phone? Did you have a backup?
(05:34):
Did you have to go to one of these repair shops and be very
stressed and scared about them getting all your photos or if
they mess up to fix it and then you're done?
If you haven't backed up in a while, maybe now it's a good
time. This phone is is backed up so I
think things will be fine. I have given my soul to Google.
(05:58):
A few years ago I stopped tryingdoing my own backups.
I still have a system in my big computer, but at some point I
just said yes to the cloud. And I know it has downsides, but
the upsides of losing a phone, getting a new one and then
having the exact same phone in amatter of minutes, That has been
(06:19):
a delight for someone like me that loses, breaks and destroys
their possessions. I don't know if I will buy a
phone here in Denmark. I expect it will be ridiculously
expensive. One of the interesting things of
being an encounter with a different currency is that most
likely you will spend much more because you tell yourself or I
(06:42):
tell myself that, you know, it'ssomething different.
It's not EUR, it's just crowns. It's like 60 crowns.
But what is it really? You know?
So I'm experiencing that. I am lost in the crown system.
My brain refuses to try and do the math and just wants to flow
blissfully in this Nirvana of not knowing how much I've been
(07:04):
spending. But no matter how much I have,
buying a phone from here, I think that will make me
bankrupt. So let's see how one week
without a phone will be. I will report on the next one.
Two more Danish things I wanted to report.
One is the trust system that exists here.
I will give you an example. In the city of Orhos that we
(07:28):
visited, they have this new trend on the streets.
We show it 5 or 6 different times around the city.
So they put out clothes in boxesor that IKEA hunger with the
wheels. You know that people using the
flea markets, so just in random places from the street, they
would be an IKEA hanger with dresses and shirts and all of
(07:50):
that next to it, a box with clothes.
And on top there would be a carton sign that says every item
is, I don't know, 40 Corona, here's my QR to pay me.
And this was it just in a randomplace in the street.
And this happened in a lot of places.
And it seems that it's a trend, which I really like.
(08:11):
You put out a system, you don't need AI or a robot doing the
work for you. You just leave it out there and
the clothes sell themselves. I don't know how successful it
is. And I would say judging by the
clothes, most of them, they weresomewhere in the 15 to 25 year
old range, mostly women's clothes.
(08:33):
But it was still a very interesting concept.
I've told you my problem. Nothing fits me in the flea
markets or these types of events.
I'm a big dude and the joy of second hand cloth market is not
one I get to experience but giveit up for or who's for having
enough trust so that people can just buy things on the on the
(08:55):
street that someone else leaves.I don't think that would work in
a lot of places. And the second thing I want to
report is that why, Danes, why do you have this weird system in
your doors? You need to fix your door
system. So I don't know why, but the
house doors here, they have a door handle, the normal 1.
(09:18):
And then they have a twisty second thing at the top.
And you need to turn both for the door to open.
So you need to put down the handle and then also turn that
thing at the top, which means that you need 2 hands to open a
door. And this is very problematic if
(09:38):
you're holding anything in your hands.
These things are like, I don't know, half a meter between them.
It's not that they are one next to each other.
So you could try to open the door handle with your elbow and
then use your wrist for the top part.
No, you need 2 hands. And I have to say, for such an
inclusive place like Denmark requiring people to be so body
(10:03):
abled in order to perform a basic function of opening a
door, I find that bizarre. And if you think about it, if
you really think about it, the average person in the world has
less than two hands. I let that sink in.
That's a smart pants thing to say, you know?
But if you think about it, people either have two hands or
(10:26):
very few people for whatever reason, accident, etcetera, they
will have one hand or none. So if you add up all the people
in the world, the average personwould probably have something
like 1.9 something hands. So technically saying that the
average person has less than twohands is a valid sentence.
(10:47):
Even though it sounds weird, I didn't want to be so annoying.
I find these types of things annoying, but there it is.
I said it. Danes, please make doors open
with one hand. As someone who doesn't carry
bags, as someone who goes to thesupermarket and believes it will
buy three things and I end up with 13 things in my hands
(11:07):
trying to walk on the streets, Iwould really, really appreciate
if I can open the door with one hand.
Given that you have been warned that this is a mostly selfish
episode with a lot of complaining, I will go into the
next topic, which is the topic of my life or one of the big
(11:32):
topics of my life, and that is back pain.
I hate back pain. I have back pain.
Who else from the audience has back pain?
Raise your hands. I don't know what happened in
life because I was a very athletic person, but sometime in
my 20s I had a herniated disc inmy back.
And that means that every now and then, when I am too careless
(11:56):
in how I use my body, how many things I carry, if I don't
stretch too much, if I stay without doing any exercises for
a long time, my back pain comes to remind me that I cannot live
a normal life anymore. It comes in different forms but
the main one is the sciatica. I don't even know if it's cold
(12:17):
like this. This is how I read it when I see
it. The sciatica is a back pain,
nerve pain that extends down thelegs and it basically is not a
paralyzing sensation but it is very overwhelming.
It takes you over and I have different times in life where
the herniated disc just wakes upand decides to remind me that I
(12:41):
cannot live worry free. And every time I bend and every
time I carry something, I need to remember to do it in the
right way, otherwise an accumulation of mistakes that is
invisible to me will come later on to hit me with the form of
pain. Now I've done different
(13:02):
exercises, but it's so difficultto stick to doing these things
every single day. I forget about it.
When the problem is not there, Itend to not do anything about
it. But now extra weight plus the
baby is just too much. And this is what happened
yesterday. My buck decided to give up.
(13:24):
We tried to do a picnic here in Denmark, because if you need to
meet a lot of people and show them the baby, I thought, what's
the easiest way? Let's just do a picnic, invite
all of our friends and have thishitting multiple birds with one
stone event. Why is this such a bad
expression? Isn't there a better expression
(13:46):
of ticking a lot of boxes with one?
Whatever. So we say.
We do this picnic and we scout apark.
We find a great spot underneath many trees.
We go there. The weather prediction was 25%
chance of rain. Not great, not horrible, but
it's Denmark, how better can youhope it is?
(14:08):
So we go there, we're carrying alot of foods, drinks, balloons,
the baby, the essentials. We set the place up and then we
also see that it has picnic benches that you can just sit
and eat. And my girlfriend asks me, hey,
are these like mounted to the ground or can we bring 1 here in
(14:29):
our little great spot underneaththe trees?
So then we do that. I push these big benches
thinking that I'm invincible. And as we wait for the crowd to
assemble, the craziest storm happens.
I'm talking about massive amounts of rain.
That's not a 25% coverage type of rain.
(14:52):
This is 100% of 100%. Even though when we arrived
there was a little bit of rain and a little bit of drizzling
and our spot was solid, it had three big overlapping trees.
I felt so smart and proud when Ifound that spot.
And we thought we were safe because the little showers and
the drizzling, nothing was coming through.
(15:14):
So we told people to come and there we are now with the worst
storm of the storms getting soaked to the bone.
The baby's creamy. We are wet everywhere.
All of our stuff we brought are wet.
The baby stroller is wet, the foods, our bags, everything.
So we're trying to call it off. Now imagine my phone is not
(15:37):
working. Remember I broke my phone so I'm
trying to tell people not to come.
But it's raining so the phone isalso wet.
And it's just the amount of inability hit a critical point.
And this is when we decided to of course call everything off.
My girlfriend with the baby leaps first and I stay with the
(15:58):
stroller to collect all of the wet stuff and come home later.
This might have been one of the most miserable moments in my
life. Having to take all the balloons
down and having to pack all the wet stuff again.
All the ducks that had surrounded our picnic area that
we're really hoping for a big picnic and they were quite
(16:21):
curious for all the food we had brought.
I tried to keep all these ducks away while we waited for our
friends, but once the storm came, I defeatedly gave them
some of the bread. The ducks won.
They were very happy. The short rivalry of me and the
ducks might be another story, but just know that they won.
Everyone won that day besides me.
(16:43):
I was a total loser. So as a loser, I collected all
of the wet stuff, including myself, and I dragged my sorry
ass to go get a bus. Now that's when the second part
of the storm hit, and I'm talking about flooded streets
where you don't see the pavementanymore.
I'm waiting. They're cold.
(17:03):
At some point the bus says 13 minutes to come.
I wait there patiently. When the bus comes, guess what?
He's full. It's a full bus and I have a
baby stroller filled with all ofthe stuff I was carrying.
It's a very heavy baby stroller.Try need space and they look at
me, I look at them. The rain is pouring, the bus
(17:27):
driver leaves. And I know that for my dear
listeners in Greece that is it hurts you less because in Greece
you kind of you don't know when the bus will come and if it
counts, it can be very full. But one of the little joys I get
to experience in the central north part of Europe where I've
brought my life for a better life is that I can have trust in
(17:50):
the system. I can have more trust, try
trusted that a bus would come and I could be able to go.
I had to take the next bus. And as I'm in that bus, being
wet to the bone, carrying all the stuff miserably, the rain
starts pouring down so heavily that the bus driver almost
cannot see anything and I cannotsee from the windows.
(18:12):
Left or right is just the waterfalls of water falling and
then it hits me. I don't know what stop I need to
go to and I'm good with orientation so if I could see
outside I think I would have figured it out.
But my phone is not cooperating because it's broken.
I cannot get the right patches as I told you that I can get it
(18:32):
around sometimes and the water is pouring so much that I cannot
see anything. I take my best chance at the
stock and as the as the bus arrives, you can see many waves,
tsunami waves that the bus is bringing because the entire
street is flooded. And I the door opens and I hear
(18:53):
the rain, like the loudest rain I've heard.
And I try to exit with a stroller and an umbrella.
My leg goes 20 centimeters into this lake that has been created.
I try to get the stroller up in the pavement and because there
is so much water, I don't see that there is a step.
(19:15):
I fall down, the stroller falls down with all of the stuff
inside. One wheel goes off, which by
design the wheels can go off. But this didn't happen by
design. So not only the normal part of
the wheel went off, but also an extra plastic thing.
But I didn't know at the time what it is, if it broke, how to
(19:35):
get it back. There I am.
It feels like I've been to the Greek waterfalls of Neda and
Polylimnio and the amount of water that is pouring down on me
from the heavens is exactly the same.
I think it was the peak of the storm.
There are thunders literally falling in very close distance
(19:56):
and there I am trying to understand how to lift the
stroller with one hand and try to go underneath while it's full
with stuff inside. So I cannot really.
Take everything out. It's it's I cannot see from the
rain and try to fix that wheel back.
So there I am bending in pain getting all the water that was
(20:18):
definitely the lowest of the lowthat I had been because I got so
desperate. I cannot fix this.
I cannot. I don't even know how to dry the
baby stroller later. Everything we have is wet.
My headphones, my passport, my phone, my earbuds, my.
I don't know everything I own. But I took some deep breaths.
(20:40):
I calm down. I might not feel.
Investigate by lifting half of the stroller with all the stuff
inside. I found the way I put that wheel
back. I arrived home having to cross
literally mini lakes of water and when I see mini the entire
St. was a lake and the sidewalk you couldn't see it so when the
(21:02):
car was driving by it was causing waves that were just
hitting you almost up to the a bit below the knees.
I was hoping that Denmark has a drainage sewage system that is
not connected with the Swatch because random knowledge time.
A lot of cities have a system ofdrainage for the rain that if it
(21:23):
gets over floated it how do you say it gets mixed up with
sewage? So these two things float up.
If they float too much, one floats into the other.
And then the water you get on the streets is also water that
has sewage stuff. And this is very common in
almost all cities that you can imagine.
(21:45):
You can look it up how they've designed it.
I think Tokyo is one of the few that has fully separated the
flooding, how it happens and howit interacts with the shorts.
I was just hoping Denmark has done the same because I'm
floating in this water. I go back home as miserable as
you can imagine. Take everything off, carry all
the white stuff inside the stroller.
(22:06):
We left it at the entrance and it made a huge lake of water
because it was dripping everywhere.
So this is live? I had a shower and then what has
happened since then is that my herniated disc has woken up.
It said, you know what, buddy? I see that your phone is broken.
I see that your picnic didn't work.
(22:27):
I see that you're almost sick from pneumonia, having all the
cold rain dry on you, carrying everything.
You think it's my time to shine.I think it's time to remind you
that I also exist so you can putall your other problems into
perspective. And this is what it did.
(22:49):
So I've started now to do all the exercises and the stretches
I should be doing in general. And it's very painful.
And at this point, having lived one entire day with this super
strong sheiatic and nerve pain, if you have anyone in your
circle that has chronic pain, huge respect to them.
(23:11):
You should have huge respect to them.
One day of this type of pain makes me so Moody.
Like it just it's a it distorts everything.
It's very difficult to enjoy. It's very difficult to converse.
It's very difficult to joke because it's constant level of
pain just takes a lot of you andit's invisible.
(23:33):
It's not the sharp pain that youcan complain about or experience
at the very surface layer. It's a weird vibrating,
pulsating nerve type of pain that's hiding inside of you.
So yeah, I just wanted to say that out there, anyone with
chronic pain, huge respect. I think there is a lot of
(23:56):
mindfulness to learn from peoplewho live their lives like like
that. And yeah, this is it.
This is me recording with two ibuprofen that I took.
This is the only reason why a minute to make this recording
because otherwise I cannot even sit straight or walk or exist.
(24:18):
So good luck to me. I hope I see brighter days and I
hope you. I hope you are the yink to my
yank. Everything goes through phases
and harves different balances, so I hope that at least my
suffering can give you some enjoyment for being able to jump
(24:39):
and kick a football lift the couch.
Ciao isn't sure of these precious moments because you
don't know when they go away allright, this has been it
different type of episode. If you're tuning in for the
(25:00):
first time, thank you so much for tuning.
If you made it this far, know that I love you.
You're the best and this is the reason why I do it, because some
of you enjoy to listen this, no matter if it's informative or
silly or stupid or sometimes it gets too personal, other times
it's only news. But this is it, weekly, from now
(25:23):
and forever. Consistency is more important
than quality. You will never be ready, so just
do it now. This is what I tell to myself
and this is what I tell to you. I have been Hermes.
You have been you. Until next week.
I wish you all the best. If you like this show, rate it,
follow it, subscribe your grandmas until next week.
(25:46):
Ciao.
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