This is the blog of a Norwegian (Marianne, aka 'M') who moved to Australia in 2007 to be with Roger (aka R) and feels lucky to have escaped a comparatively communistic country with ridiculous weather!

I find it rather amusing that Usa's ecomony is going down the drain. "Oh we're so great, we're the richest and best country in the whole world!" Not so great now, are ya?

I also find it amusing that Bush addressed his little speech to 'citizens of the world'. Yes, cuz the world is so distraught that Usa is in trouble...

When you think about it, the current school system is ancient and useless. With the exception of reading, writing and basic mathematics, when was the last time you used something you learned at school?

For me, it was during one of my last tests at school at the age of 18 or 19. Since then I have not used this knowledge for anything.

School teaches your kid useless thing which he/she will never need outside of school or as an adult. What's the point of that? I always thought school was there to teach kids skills they need as adults. School is basically teaching kids to be scholars, not to be functioning adults in today's society.

Why are schools not teaching kids the things they need to know to have good lives as adults? Such as budgeting, money making, how to get a job, social relations etc.

Most people have no clue how to take care of their money. I have read books on the subject because I want to manage my money in a way that makes my life better, and gives me financial freedom. I'm not an expert on the subject, but at least I know the basics. And I can say that most of my immediate family has poor money skills, and when I tried to give advice in a forum on how to manage money, no one understood what I was talking about.

Isn't how to manage money an obvious thing to teach kids? It has to be the most important thing anyone will ever learn, and yet it's never even mentioned in school. (Hence why so many people max out their credit cards and end up in debt these days.)

School teaches woodwork, art, music, history, geography etc, all of which are near useless in adult life.

The current system holds kids back from learning what they are interested in. Everyone has to learn music. So the kids who are tone deaf hold back the ones who are passionate with a gift for music, because the teacher has to repeatedly stop and give the ungifted kids extra instructions. And of course these kids have no interest in music so they will never need or use these skills, so the system wastes the teacher's and kids' time.

How about changing the school system so that for the first 2 years, they teach kids to read and write and start teaching them basic money management skills. Then the kids get to try these other useless subjects which are currently taught, and they can pick one or two which interest them. They will have those subjects a couple of hours a week, the rest of the time they are taught life skills.

That would make kids more motivated, because they are taught skills they can use and things they are interested in. It will also make it easier for them to learn the things they are interested in, because the class room will be full of kids who are also interested in learning it.

Not to mention having a population which knows how to make money and how to stay out of debt will greatly improve any country's economy.

HALF to three-quarters of major Antarctic penguin colonies could be damaged or wiped out if global temperatures are allowed to climb by more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a report released today.

Article.

Usa is one of the few countries in the world still using the imperial system, and you then come across measurements such as 250 lbs, meaning 250 pounds.

Not only is it stupid to insist on using such an outdated and illogical system, but they make it even worse by insisting on abbreviating the word 'pounds' with 'lbs'. It doesn't make sense at all! Why wouldn't they just abbreviate it with a 'p'?

It's like shortening 'kilos' to 'abf'.

And to Usatians, it's not the 'metric and imperial system', it's the 'metric and standard system'.

Such ignorance.

After having lived in a non-communistic country for over a year now, how certain things are done in Norway makes less and less sense.

Such as how every Norwegian has a government appointed doctor. They graciously allow you to change your appointed doctor twice a year.

I think the appointed doctor system was meant to make the system more efficient and reduce the time you have to wait to see a doctor. So I think we can call it a massive failure - when I wanted to see a doctor in Norway I usually had to wait 3-4 weeks.

So that raises the question of why hasn't the system been declared a failure and abolished?

Another thing I wonder about is the fairness of this system. It does have strong communist tendencies when you think about it.

In Norway the government rounds up all the doctors and gives them all the same amount of patients. In theory, all doctors know the same stuff, but I don't think anyone believes all doctors are the same. You have the doctors who make you feel like they care and will put extra effort into solving the mystery of what's wrong with you, and then you have the doctors who make you feel like you've inconvenienced them and send you home without bothering to solving the mystery.

So how is it fair that shitty doctors have the same amount of patients as great doctors? When a doctor has more patients than another, it's usually because they deserve to have more patients.

Giving all doctors the same amount of patients removes everything competitive in the system, and there's no reason for any doctor to try to be better. They get the same amount of patients (=money) anyway.

In Norway, a drivers licence costs a small fortune. There are several mandatory courses you have to do before they let you take the test and the test itself is also quite expensive. It all adds up to about 10000 kr ($2000). You then have a licence for life - it doesn't expire until your 100th birthday.

That means if you get your licence at 20 and drive until you are 80, you pay $33.33 a year.

This is quite reasonable when you look at the Australian prices:



The main difference is that in Australia you only pay a small fee when you first get your licence, and then have to pay to have it renewed regularly. As seen in the image you can choose how often to renew it, and pay accordingly. If you renew it every 5 years you pay $14.21 a year.

Since most things here cost about half of what they do in Norway, the price seems fair.

But of course the Norwegian system is flawed. The $2000 you pay for your licence is only fair if you drive for at least 60 years. If for some reason you can no longer drive a car, or you leave the country, you pay more per year and get ripped off.

I got severly ripped off. I got my licence at 20 and left Norway forever at 25. This means I paid $400 a year. Or at $33 a year you could say I lost $1833.35.

There is also the issue of most 80 year olds not looking the same as they did at 20...

In Australia the most you'd ever lose is about $70. If you leave the country or can't drive, you simply stop renewing your licence.

I recently found out that part of the debris from World Trade Center was used to build a warship - USS New York:


They could have found heaps of more appropriate things to build, such as art, a memorial monument, something to symbolise hope/peace etc etc, but no! In true Usatian style they built a symbol of war and destruction. Cuz that's really what the world needs more of.

I don't know why I'm even surprised by that.

Basic English and grammar lessons, downgraded decades ago, will be restored in schools to boost students' slipping spelling and writing skills. Traditional lessons are to be reinstated nationwide after complaints that pupils struggle to form proper sentences and don't understand nouns, verbs, adjectives and punctuation. Schools will also revert to a focus on teaching the alphabet through sounding out letters, known as phonics, rather than by showing pictures on a card displaying the word beneath.

Ummm, what exactly have they been teaching them instead of basic English and grammar the last few decades? And whose idea was it? That's what I wanna know.

Article.

There are some new ads on tv these days, for white stag beer. I particularly like this one:

I love the Simon's Cat animations:) Here's the new one:

R and I were just going for our daily walk in the bush area along the river a few hundred metres from the house, and climbing up a tree I saw a wild koala.

I've seen wild kangaroos 2-3 times, but never a wild koala. I've patted koalas in the zoo, but it's not quite the same.. R told me the first time he saw a wild koala was 2 years ago. So he's lived here his whole life and only seen one once, while I've lived here for 18 months and already seen one. I feel quite privileged:)

It was very kewl, it was only about 10 metres from the foot path. Too bad I didn't have my camera on me.. Oh well, I know where it lives now so I might see it again:)

American helicopters have attacked a farm near the Syrian border with Iraq, killing eight civilians, Syria says.

Wtf is going on?! Usa thinks they can just march into any country they feel like and start executing civilians.

This is typical of Usa. It's like they're some spoiled brat who can do whatever they want - invade any country they feel like and kill 200000 civilians and no one bats an eye lid. No, let's just send our troops there as well in support of Usa. *God forbid* we don't support Usa in everything they do.

It's time the rest of the world puts their foot down and demand that Usa follows the same rules as the rest of us. I'd like to see what would happen if Norway suddenly decided to invade two countries on the basis of terrorism without any shred of proof.

In its fight against "terrorism" Usa has become the biggest terrorist in the world today, and has killed more civilians since 11/9 than all terrorist organisations in the whole world could have managed in 30 years.

Europe and Australia need to join forces and invade Usa and overthrow the Usatian government. It's the only way to keep the world safe. We can take them, there's heaps more people in Europe alone than there is in Usa.

Seriously.

Read the article here.

Yesterday R and I went for a ride on our bikes around the bush area near our house. Because we drive on the left in Australia, we keep left on the footpath when we pass people. Makes perfect sense right?

Well! It doesn't make sense to Usatians apparently. We passed a small group of them yesterday, and they insisted on walking on the right, and we had to move over to the wrong side of the footpath. And they had a dog, so they actually live here, they're not just visiting. But figuring out which side to walk on is too complicated apparently. Or they are just arrogant enough to think everyone should pass on the right, because that's what they do.

Yeah, makes their people come across as really clever, doesn't it. *Not*

Over the last couple of months, I've developed a complete aversion to eating meat. It's not like I've been eating much meat the last few years anyway, due to not having much money while I was a student and realising meat is expensive, so I avoided buying it.

I then realised how bad meat is for you, and it's still nice to save money, so I've only been eating meat once or twice a month, and only white meat as I haven't been able to tolerate red meat for years.

But I've noticed that every time I eat meat lately, it leaves me feeling nauseated and disgusted, no matter how good it tastes. Usually I'm unable to finish the whole meal. Up until now I've simply reduced the amount of meat I eat, but because the disgusted feeling seems to be happening more and more, I've now decided to go off meat completely.

It's simply not worth having tasty food if you feel sick the rest of the evening. So I'm not vegetarian by choice, I simply can't be anything else. Which is a good thing of course.

So last night I decided to get some vegetarian lasagne from the supermarket, because I've always like lasagne, but am now unable to eat the ones with any kind of meat in them. And it turns out vegetarian lasagne is yummy and I feel good about eating it because it's vegetables and I don't feel like I have to tolerate that there is meat in it.

Too bad so many frozen meals have meat in them, but I guess it's a nice opportunity to learn some new vegetarian recipes. I have a vegetarian cookbook lying around somewhere...

Here you can read more about why meat is bad for you.