Happy Halloween (Originally posted: Oct 29/2010)

I met a co-worker the other day and his english was fairly good but sometimes words came out of his mouth that made absolutely no sense to me. Blame it on the accent or the translation from Russian to English. In those difficult to understand times, I got by with nodding my head, smiling and laughing if he laughed first. Well, 45 minutes later I realize this guy is a talker and it only ended because I went for a pre-emptive laugh when I thought he was saying something humorous, turns out he wasn’t and he couldn’t understand why I was laughing. During the uncomfortable pause I took one last sip of my already finished coffee, looked at my arm where my watch should have been and told I should get back to work. All in all, it was a good discussion.

Note: To everyone I’ve had discussions with, especially from other countries, this isn’t how I deal with all conversations but sometimes you find you’re already in over you head and it’s better to go with it instead of saying you don’t understand.

Tonight my boss is hosting a Halloween party, which is set up mostly for the Ex-pats since this holiday isn’t celebrated the same way here, or most places in the world, than it is in North America. The biggest problem I have to face is finding a costume which hasn’t been successul so far. Since they don’t really celebrate it there are no costume shops. I’ve toured around the malls and either I’ll have to splurge on a official Russian Kickboxing outfit from a sportsstore or just wear my Team Canada hockey jersey (of course I brought it.)