Texting and driving laws should warn tourists - United Kingdom

The Danish politicians are looking into increasing the punishment for driving and texting.

The politicians hesitate and have not decided on what to do yet as any new expense for the industry will mean lost jobs. Forcing the firms to invest in hands free equipment could very well the factor which could prevent Denmark from recover from the financial crisis.
It would be difficult to find employees who want to work at all if they are cut off from their teams and social network during work hours. The overall performance in the firms will suffer.

We have been contacted by a number of former Danish employees who used to work in the United Kingdom. They have returned home because they have lost fate in a future in this country. Over there the punishment for driving and texting is very severe. We are talking cruel punishments which you should not expect to find in any civilized countries.

A Hotel manager - Kiera Coultas - got 4 years in prison just for receiving a text message minutes before hitting a cyclist who broke every traffic law possible. He jumped a red light and was by doing that a simple criminal.

Of course it doesn't give anybody the right to kill him but traffic laws are not invented for fun. He actions did however increase the chance for tragedy with 90%. Lights are placed in crossing because to improve traffic safety.

But because her phone was on, it led the jury to believe that she was in the process of replying to the message she received, and she got very severe sentence that will cripple for life for good. May she find comfort in the granddaughters her child will get because she will miss out too much of the childhood of her own child in order to truly say that she was a part of it.

It is an unfair sentence and people should not visit the United Kingdom by car or choosing to work in this country. When you are a foreigner you are double as exposed to the burden of the law. A Danish soccer player was even convicted for being colleague to a person who was involved in a minor traffic accident without deaths. We will make a blog entry on the injustice Mads Timm was exposed to later.

But back to Denmark and the possible toughen of our laws. Will they shot our industry down or will they give the industry time to outsource transport entirely to low-paid drivers from Eastern Europe. They are cheap and expendable. They are used in huge numbers already and are responsible for a large number of the accidents where Lorries are involved.

But are there drivers enough to take care of the rest of the driving needed to keep the country going?

This question is too hard to answer and the risk of being stuck in the financial crisis is too big. So the politicians should leave the use of mobile phones in cars alone.

The Czech republic is not ready for tourists

Some news speak of a story about 350 Danish High School students from Christianhavns Gymnasium who were kicked out of their hotel due to riots. However it isn't true. Not a single student were sent home.

The trip which were organized by the students themselves ran into some problems when the hotels they had chosen showed very little ability to deal with normal tourist behavior.

The behavior shown at the hotels is not a special phenomenon for Danish tourists. In fact The Sun had a larger piece about the problems tourist from the United Kingdom faced when they travel abroad. Some remember the culture clash which led to an arrest of a British woman and her boyfriend when they showed affection for each other at a public beach and in relationship to this story The Sun published this story explaining the problem.

The problems seems to be based on a huge difference in culture and education between the tourists and the native population. The obvious question is if there is such a big difference between a country like the Czech republic and Denmark. To this question the answer must be yes.

One of the most prominent politicians Denmark has ever produce - the former member of the European Parliament Mogens Camre spoke very clearly about how much difference there are between Danes and the population from some parts of eastern Europe. France 24 wrote on their homepage that he did hit a raw nerve in the question of expanding the European Union.

I guess what happened in Prague was that there were some kind of miscommunication between the Danish tourists and their Czech hosts. The native population were not able to understand the communication between Danes which obvious took place on a higher and refined level. They were simply not prepared to host foreign tourists.

It is a huge problem for travel agencies to find the right place to send out their guests. In this case it was a private trip arranged by the students themselves. The school did not send teachers to Prague. So maybe too little research had been done when choosing the destination.

It you look at the possible travel destination in Eastern Europe, one country are able to stand out. Bulgaria was worn down after some 50 years of communist rule. So in order to have interesting places for the tourists to see they built Sunny Beach. Today this area is the only interesting place to visit as there is nothing else to see but it is there. Bulgaria has built a model of how to attract tourists the rest of the countries in the eastern Europe could copy.

I hope that the high school students overcome their ordeal and the quite hostile environment they by mistake traveled to. While it seems hard at the moment it is a important lesson they have learned. Danes should consider things twice before choosing to either work, study or spend their holiday abroad. Not every place in the world is friendly to outsiders.

Protection of kids on other cultures

I happened to watch a Dr. Phil show.

A mother let her 10 year old son walk one mile to soccer practice on his own. One mile!

It meant that she was visited by a police officer who blamed her for poor judgment in her parenting approach.

An overreaction?

Yes like most Danes we believe that a society where you cannot let your 10 year old son ride a bike or walk to soccer practice just a couple of kilometers away is acceptable. If you have supply your children with bodyguards for such a short distance, there is something terrible wrong with the society.

On our webpage we have listed the stoller case as example number 6. More than 10 years ago Anette Sorensen - a that time a wellknown actor visiting New York was in the city with her boyfriend and her daugther in a stoller. They decided to eat dinner at a restraurant. Every expert in Denmark advice parents to leave their babies outside in the cold instead of taking the child inside for a nap. Smoking customers in a restraurant could damage the airways of the baby and increase the risk of Astma for the child later in life. Second the lungs of the baby needs to be developed and toughened. It is best done by letting the child sleep outside in warm clothes and in a secure stoller.

However the actor and her husband was arrested and charged for Child endangerment. The child was taken into protective care. It took a long and painful trial before they received a small settlement for the wrongful arrest.

The totally incomprehensible actions of the authorities placed the incident on our webpage. When we now learn that the security level in the United States is so severe that children cannot even do the most simple things without guards or other protection some might ask if the case still fulfill the conditions for being listed on our webpage.

The answer is Yes. Anette Sorensen was not adviced by the police that she had entered a nation gone to pieces or basically a warzone. They could have asked her to phone the embassy so they could have explained her the sad facts about the conditions in New York. New York back then was no place for tourists taking children with them. The same goes for the entire country today as the Dr. Phil show so clearly illustrate today.

But the travel agencies display no warnings in that regard. That's why the case needs to be listed on our webpage.