it takes like 2 weeks to just download the blockchain from scratch...
That's odd, it takes me under two days from a clean install.
Maybe he lives in Niggeria or something?
takes 2-3 hours per month for me. running stock reference client. maybe something is off. let me know

It used to take a long time, back in early 2013. The reference client used some terrible flat file database system and it was basically disk I/O bound trying to download and validate transactions. The newer version switched to a different database type that is considerably faster, and typically network bound.