Prince Federik; once Denmark’s biggest man-slut?

Recently a friend complained about how party conversations inevitably kicked off with the question, “what do you do?” She didn’t feel the answer to that question was necessarily the most accurate portrayal of a person. “After all, people are more than just their jobs,” she commented. While I agreed, I couldn’t help but think that at the same time, what you’ve chosen to do for 40 hours a week does actually say a lot about you. And if you think it doesn’t, that’s probably interesting as well.

Another party question my friends who live overseas commonly complain about is, “where are you from?” Again, a question I am ‘guilty’ of asking anyone I talk to with an accent.

But these are just starting points. And as I said in my last post, the areas of which you are an “expert” in, and therefore a topic upon which you’re likely to know some interesting things about.

Last Friday I went to a party, and just by asking those two questions, discovered some fascinating things about the world:

• In the redesigns of The State Library and the local Surry Hills library, the architecture firms had to consider a group of key users: homeless people, who use the former to go on the internet, and the latter as a great place to catch some z’s.
• Australians waste a hella lot of water, according to someone working in water management. One of the biggest problems is that Australians like to maintain thirsty European-style gardens, rather than grow native plants which are much better suited to our dry climate.
• India is constituted by a crazy number of different cultures, associated by region, each with their own language. My taxi driver came from the Punjab region, which is located half in India, and half in Pakistan – with nothing dividing the two but a border. He says when you’re from Punjab, you’re more Punjabi than you are Indian or Pakistani.
• I already knew Switzerlad was split into the French, German and Italian speakers. And that in the German section they speak a derivative called Swiss-German. But I had no idea that Swiss-German is quite unofficial. It has little unity and is only spoken. All books, forms, signs etc. are written in official German. This Swiss-German was telling me that he could say one sentence to his brother in Swiss-German, and his brother could say it back to him in different Swiss-German. And Swiss-German and German are quite different, it’s not just an accent change, or a few different words. When I asked him to speak one sentence in German, and then again in Swiss-German, the two even had different sentence structure. Missing first-hand experience, I think Australians always grapple with the full extent of the world’s language diversity.
• Denmark is becoming increasingly right-wing. When I brought up the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, in which a Danish newspaper printed cartoons which were critical of Islam and would be considered blasphemous to most Muslims, this Dane was quite eager to give me his version of events. Apparently the newspaper had a long and notorious reputation for being offensive to Muslims. The country’s moderate Muslim organisations usually chalked it up, and tolerated these offenses, but this time they decided enough was enough, and began holding public protests … which quickly led to worldwide attention. This Dane, who believes that there is a great disjunction in the West’s portrayal of Islamic culture as fanatical to reality, says that the newspaper was well aware of how much shit-stirring the cartoons would invoke. In fact being deliberately antagonistic, and raising the ire of the Muslim world was all part of the plan.
• Back in the day, Crown Prince of Denmark Federik was a huuuuge player, and a regular fixture in the Danish nightclub scene. I was like, hangon, so he was just out and about in these nightclubs. You could freely go up to him? Yup, said this Dane. In fact he had been in the same nightclub as him several times. Which is why when the Prince married Mary, many Danish women were supremely disappointed. And not in a crazy, stalker way – but in a they-actually-had-a-shot-till-now kind of way.
• You’d think that in communist China the bureaucracy rules by iron fist across the nation. But in fact, regionalised laws and leaders still have a high degree of control, and many transactions are done off the books. For example, you slip the doctor a red packet (of money) if you want top-notch care and if you have a traffic accident, it doesn’t matter if the cop saw it happen, he’ll expect the participating parties to work out the story between them, which will become the official version of events. This was a fascinating discussion in light of the ongoing Rio Tinto case. And as this post points out, perhaps the time of “expat exceptionalism” is coming to an end.

(As always, one should take these “facts” with a grain of salt. In many cases they’re more likely to be opinions.)