As you can read here, I had a small accident yesterday involving a malign jellyfish. In reality it is quite a common thing to be burned once in a while when you live where I live. Most people have tried it like they have tried to be stung by a wasp or a bee. Local animals doesn't seem that frightening when you know what they are. But when North Europeans travel south there are things that they are not accustomed to.
When I was in South Africa ten years ago on the most important trip of my life, my family and I met a Swedish couple and their children who lived next to us in a rented house. One day they came to us to ask for advice. A spider had stung the mother and her hand and lower arm was swollen to almost double size. She thought that she had heard from the caretaker that it was probably an insect that had laid eggs inside of her. We were just as shocked as they were and advised them to go to the doctor at once.
It turned out to be a violin spider that had bitten her, a creature that is very common in South Africa and has a pretty nasty poison, but no eggs. For us Nordic people the locals were strangely undramatic about it. One of them said to us that they felt that North Europeans were squeamish when it came to insects ( I know - spiders are arachnidas). She was right of course - we live in a place where insects are small and die in early autumn. It is simply too cold for them here.
But my brother told me a funny story that shows the situation the other way around.
It was an Indian PhD in data science that were in Denmark to study. His family (wife and children) came to visit him and to experience the wonderful Danish summer. One day they had a picnic and after the meal they went for a stroll in the forest. Suddenly the Phd guy feels a stinging pain on his knee and then on his calf. He looks down to see if he has been stung by an insect, but no insect is visible. It hurts a lot and the family is attracted to his wailing. Suddenly they start to hurt too, there is no insect to be seen at all and even so the pain is getting worse all the time and the skin is getting red and blistered. They panic, running screaming out of the forest.
When he later told the story to his colleagues, they guessed that it had to be the stinging nettle. A very common plant that we take for granted. The Indian family on the other hand had never heard of anything so dangerous and exotic: poisonous plants that reacted by simply touching them - crazy, wild Scandinavian nature!
My friend
has started to write some posts every morning - #morgenseiten he calls it - morning-pages. Here is his explanation of the project:
It goes like this: you shall each morning write from the soul, anything going through your head.
He writes a lot more, but this is the essence :) (Read his first morgenseiten post here)
I have decided to try the same. I write from the top of my head every morning or late morning if I have been sleeping late. I only correct typos and make a headline afterwards. Else everything is left as written. Expect some of it to sound like stage directions.
