Back home

OK, the conference in Copenhagen is over, and I'm back in one piece. It wasn't THAT bad. Professionally it was very interesting and productive, and the non-work stuff was OK as well. Still, I'm pretty damn exhausted. Hopefully, I should be having an extra-long weekend next week.

Still, it was good to see my colleagues from other offices, although I do quite often feel like an odd man out. They speak Swedish with each other, and they usually default to Swedish when talking. And I don't speak Swedish. At all. So I have bunch of people having a lively conversation around me, and I have no idea what they are saying. Every time we get together they do ask me "so, how much Swedish do you know?", and then they proceed to speak Swedish to each other. No, I don't think that they do it on purpose, it's just very easy for them, since Danish and Norwegian are basically Swedish with a twist. So you have about 10 people from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and two from Finland. And one of the Finns is a native Swedish-speaker. So it's natural that they speak Swedish. Still, it can be quite annoying, and it does make me feel that I don't belong there. I don't think that I can ever reach the same level of bonding that they have with each other, since they can speak with each other a lot more easily, whereas speaking with me requires an extra effort on their part.

Anyway, like I said, the event was professionally very productive. It seem that about two years down the road there are some VERY interesting projects coming up in the Firm. Projects that I would just LOVE to be part of. I talked with one of the experts that flew over to talk about them, and he said that one of the problems they have is that the Firm doesn't really have that much expertise on those areas. To which I replied: "Well, I do". Ka-ching! With little luck, my job could get VERY interesting few years down the road!

As to the non-work-stuff.... I think I quadrupled my lifetime beer-consumtpion during the trip! I don't usually drink beer, but we went for a dinner in this restaurant which is famous for it's beers. And they served beer with the food. Lots of beer. I thought that maybe it's time to give it a shot, and I did.