biking with vikings

I am a Snake

at least I am after last night, as I played my first ice hockey game with the Rungsted Snakes!

Full disclosure: This is an “Old Boys” (over 35) Div II team and I am out of shape by most definitions of the word ‘shape’, but it went OK.  I didn’t score any goals but I was +2 for the night (one scored against while I was on, 3 goals scored while I was on the ice).

I’ve been skating with these guys in the mornings, three times per week, at 6 a.m. over at the ice arena (skøjtehal) in Hørsholm.  That means I have to get up around 5 a.m. to be on the ice by 6, but man, I haven’t had this much ice time since I was a kid. 

Last night’s game followed the typical pattern:  I started out skating relatively strong but ran out of gas pretty thoroughly by the 3rd period.  We were down 4–3 but pulled our goaltender and scored to tie it up with less than 30 seconds to go… what a relief.  I really didn’t want my first game with the team to be a loss.  There’s only a few games left in this season but I’m establishing a spot with the team so I can play next year.

It has been a few years since I’ve played at all.  I had knee surgery in 2003 and had to lay off for over a year.  And I got a minor pulled groin during the game as well… playing sports when you’re over age 40 is hard work.  But now at least I have a great training regimen and a goal to shoot for: Next season on the team.

I’m also glad to start making some friends outside of Microsoft here.  We’ve made some good friends from my Danish courses but it is still nice to meet others when you’re new in a place.  In fact, some of our dearest friends in Seattle are guys and significant-others I met through Seattle City League Soccer, so I’m hoping the same pattern holds again.

 

 

 

bitten by the hockey bug, and a week of firsts for Malcolm

there’s some good hockey drama playing out at the Olympics in Torino.  First (sadly) the US women’s team unexpectedly goes down to Sweden on penalty shootout, then little Schweiz (Switzerland) stuns Canada and “overachievers” Slovakia top the US mens’ team 2–1 even though the US outplayed them (IMO).  I wasn’t expecting that much from the US mens’ squad this time around, but still disappointing for them to lose when they were arguably better.  The Slovakian team is one of two undefeated teams (Finland is the other) so they deserve lots of credit!  A good place for hockey coverage is here.

Malcolm has caught ‘hockey fever’ as well so we got him his first pair of skates yesterday, and a helmet to cushion the inevitable falls:

There’s skating for kids at a nearby rink on Fridays where they get a little orange road cone to lean on and can shuffle around the rink.  He can have hockey gear once he learns to skate – in a few years.

This being Denmark there aren’t many good places for hockey gear so we had to drive to Rødovre on the south side of Copenhagen.  Unfortunately, unlike the US, there isn’t a big aftermarket for used sports gear for kids (like Play It Again Sports) so you’re sort of on your own when it comes to buying or selling used gear, which is a same as they burn through it so quickly.  According to people here it is because the tax is prohibitive. The women who runs the shop is a transplanted Canadian from Vancouver whose husband played professionally here in the Swedish leagues before they settled in Denmark.  It was really nice chatting with her about living in the Pacific Northwest versus here, their experience raising kids in Scandinavia, dealing with grandparents on diifferent continents and more.  Funny, I could spot her Canadian accent even when she spoke Danish .  But we got him hooked up with a helmet and some skates, and a cheapo stick and ball so he can pretend to play hockey…

Another first for Malcolm was his first ‘twitch’ game (OK not really very twitchy – it is Lego Racers 2 - but still a first).  We haven’t let him play video games up until now, but we will let him try this and see how it goes.  I’m guessing/hoping that the novely will wear off after a while, and if it doesn’t, we’ll limit the time he can spend on it.  There’s no way I’m going to let him sit there and become some fat, square-eyed kid when he can go outside and play… oh right, I’m sitting at the computer typing this, aren’t I?  Sigh…

And the last (and even more dubious) first for him this week was his first trip to McDonald’s.  It was not our doing… one of his classmates had her 3rd birthday party and they held it at McDonald’s so all the kids from his school went.

It’s funny how McDonald’s doesn’t have the same stigma here that it does in a place like Seattle.  We’ve never taken him there because the food is really just crap, but here, many people seem to think it’s kind of, well, good.  I think that is because there aren’t many other good, inexpensive and convenient options.

He came home with a little plastic toy (a tie-in to the new Disney Movie “Chicken Little” which just opened here – blech!) and lost interest after about ten minutes.  At least he isn’t clamoring to go back…

Watching the Olympics

I’ve always loved the olympic games, especially the winter games.  Here in Europe we get much better television coverage (nearly 24 hours per day on Eurosport, almost no commercial interruptions) than the horrible stuff in the States where 10 minutes doesn’t go by without them cutting to some human interest story/background on one of the atheletes.  It really is un-watchable in the US.  The only downside here is that Eurosport has this odd practice of broadcasting Swedish commentary on one channel (the right speaker) and Danish commentary on another channel (the left speaker) – I guess I’m supposed to shift balance over to one side to get only the Danish commentary?  And although I can understand some of the Danish commentary, I certainly don’t catch everything they’re saying.  Ironically the Eurosport channels come from Britain so the original audio feed was probably in English but I don’t receive that .

But the coverage is outstanding.  One station (DK TV2 Zulu) has all of the hockey games, so naturally I’m using MediaCenter to record them all and watch at least the highlights.  We watched skiing and figure skating yesterday and the opening ceremony on Friday was quite spectacular. 

Really you can only marvel at the atheletes at the Olympics, their discipline and natural abilities.  These are very focused and talented people.  There’s something magnetic about watching a human being perform physical feats as they do, like going to the circus, only better .

And given all the depressing news and culture clash lately, it is somehow reaffirming to watch national pride expressed on the playing field rather than through violent protest or warfare.

 

endnu syg (still sick)

In our house, we’re going on two weeks of what seems like an endless cycle of cold and flu symptoms ranging from achiness and general lethargy to violent coughing and congestion.  Yuk.

Thankfully Malcolm seems to be almost back to normal now, but Susan’s cough is so bad she can’t lie down and sleep, and I wake up with aches nearly every morning.  This is what it must be like to be 80 years old .

On the bright side, we booked our Easter travel to Italy (Cinque Terre here we come!) and I started playing ‘old boy hockey’ with some Danes, at least until this flu thingy derailed me.  And the days are getting longer, I hear birds of Spring outside again!  They’re a tad early, but it is still encouraging…

 

Support Denmark

[update: final word on this is best put by Ed Brayton on Science Blogs, via one of my hometown weeklies the typically controversial Seattle Stranger:

On the contrary, what's happening here is that a gang of bullies - led by a country, Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are forbidden, Christians tortured, Jews routinely labeled "apes and pigs" in the state-controlled media, and apostasy from Islam punished by death - is trying to compel a tiny democracy to live by its own theocratic rules. To succumb to pressure from this gang would simply be to invite further pressure, and lead to further concessions - not just by Denmark but by all of democratic Europe. And when they've tamed Europe, they'll come after America.

After all, the list of Western phenomena that offend the sensibilities of many Muslims is a long one - ranging from religious liberty, sexual equality, and the right of gay people not to have a wall dropped on them, to music, alcohol, dogs, and pork. After a few Danish cartoons, what's next?

and that is the final thing I’ll post on this – hopefully.]

I have watched with growing incredulousnes the tempest regarding the cartoons of mohammed that were printed in the Danish Jyllands Posten newspaper.

Are we really now so afraid of religious fanatics that we will self-censor in order to avoid random violence? 

The irony is, in any given week you can find the most illiberal ideas imagineable (the holocaust didn’t happen, let’s “push Israel into the sea”, comparing jews to pigs etc.) in the the arab press. 

Let’s just call it what it is, shall we? The cartoons are not the problem.  The stone age, theocratic notions and blind emotion that are behind radical Islam are the problem. 

Kudos to the media in Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway and UK that have reprinted the cartoons.  A big, fat raspberry to the cowardly factions in the EU, UN and especially the United States caving in to these troglodytes and calling for censorship – Have you forgotten what “free, open societies” means? And I hope that the UK (under the banner of preventing “hate speech”) doesn’t make it illegal to critisize religion.  That would be a dark day for all of us.

In case you want to see the cartoons for yourself - most of which aren’t controversial by western standards – you can find them here.

If you find the notion of censoring free speech abhorrent, as I do, you can add the ‘Support Denmark’ flag to your website – click on the Dannebrog below for more information: