My editor (mother) has informed me that my last entry was full of grammatical errors. My apologies, I tend to write these very quickly and neglect to read them over before posting.

Vacation

After barely making it to the train station and arriving with my shirt drenched in sweat, I boarded the train to start my 5 hour trip through the France countryside on my way to the Alps in southeast France.  It should be a beautiful trip and a great chance to see more of France. 

I'm looking forward to meeting up with my old friend I used to work with in Canada, despite the fact that he's British. 

I could write a complete entry on the last two days of this training course.  We had a consultant instructor hailing from LSU in Louisiana with a PHD in psychology to deliver material on 'coaching' as it is a significant part of our job role.  The only positive feedback I can offer for this guy is that he had plenty of energy.  In my 28 years have put myself in many situations that one could call wasteful.  I've spent full days laying on the floor of my apartment because laying on the couch was just too optimistic of a task to complete in a day but these 2 days were the most useless two days of my life.  As a outside consultant he would have to pride himself on being able to present topics to anyone in any company without having in depth knowledge of the company's organization or operations. 

Since his knowledge was limited on our org structure we spent the better parts of the sessions teaching him how we operate, our reporting structure and our role in the company.  The course was being held in a small room and I guess this guy was used to speaking in auditoriums or maybe even stadiums because he would get so aninmated and yell as loud as he could to make a point.  He also used the strategy of punching himself, slapping his own hands, pounding on the wall/tables for dramatic effect.  By the end of the day hands were completely red from constantly beating the shit out of himself.  The class found it funny at first but after a while
it just became annoying and frustrating.  He could tell we weren't getting involved so he continued to get more and more animated and use a louder voice to engage us.  He might do a lot of presentations for the hearing impaired.  The only joy I took in those two days was the incessant jokes resulting and humourous criticism from his presentation style.  There was no value from this part of the course, which was supposed to be the main draw for entire week.  It was a shame as the rest of the course was quite valuable.  I have to stop here on this topic before I get too negative, as awful as these two days were, without it, I would have been leaving Paris two days earlier so it's not all bad.  

As always, the fellow course-mates were top notch and we attacked paris as best we could.  I continue to add friends from around the world and I can't wait to take advantage of their friendship when I make a trip to their countries.  

Russian Humour Cont'd

To make a long story short, I met this petite girl from our training center today and my preconceptions of how such a person would talk/act were shattered as she gave me a great example of a Russian joke. 

There were three of us sitting around the table and a conversation came up of how tough the next two days of work will be for them.  Each of them had a lot of outstanding tasks, stuff they didn't want to, late nights, etc.  I chimed in, agreed with them and, with a straight face, said I as going to have a rough few days as well and I wasn't looking forward to tomorrow morning having to get up early and board a plane to Paris for and after a week of training have to spend another week snowboarding in the Alps. 

She responded to my sarcasm with 'Paris will be nice, and a nice place for you to die'.

touche

The Secret to the Russian sense of Humour

My sarcastic, awkward, dry and immature sense of humour has not gone over as well in Russia when compared to the US/Canada.  Of course the language barrier offers some challenges but I've been hit with blank stares of confusion when telling some 'jokes'.  

But, since I need my sense of humour to me through most situations in life I had to adapt and try to figure out how to make a Russian laugh.  With some people here it isn't so hard but there are some sticklers who make it very difficult for me to even get a smile from.  

One of the harder cases was the receptionist at my gym, very tough to crack using conventional ways but, in the end, it was a basic solution.  On Women's day I decided to learn how to say 'Happy Women's Day' in Russian and I was going pass on my well wishes to all the Russian women I saw from then on.  So, even though this receptionist usually gives me plain faced, disapproving looks i decided to say 'поздравляю с женским днем!!!'  (which is not an easy phrase to get out.)  Paste it into google translate and you can listen for yourself.

Well, this seemingly sincere statement turned out to be one of the funniest things she must have heard in the past year because not only did she start cracking up instantly but as I left the gym an hour later she still couldn't look me in the eye without laughing. I'm an international master of comedy. 

International Women's Day

Today is a International Women's Day, celebrated very seriously in Russia and is officially a day off from work.  It gets a bit complicated after that since, in Russia, they seem to always try to tie a day off into the weekend. In this particular case since today is the holiday everyone worked on Saturday so that they would have Monday off and the holiday becomes a Sun-Mon-Tues set of time off.

Aside from the time off, it is a tradition for the men to shower the women with flowers, chocolates, cakes, champagne, etc. I got caught off guard by not knowing the tradition and, since it's a day off today, all the gifts at work were being handed out on Saturday at work.  I wasn't going to be shown up by all the other guys in the office so I made a quick trip to the store and bought some Belgian chocolates for the women who I've gotten to know in my time here.

There was also a gathering held last night by our spousal association, partly as a send off for my boss and his family as they are moving soon, but also to celebrate Women's Day Eve and give everyone a chance to celebrate the great women we have here.  I have nothing but wonderful things to say about the families I've met in Russia and the always welcoming SSA (and I'm not just saying that because I know they're reading my blog ;)  For some reason they keep inviting the shy Canadian with no spouse out to their parties and I'm very grateful.  

So to all the women out there, in the words of a promiscuous male foreigner in Thailand after a night of risky decisions....

'Thank you for being a woman!'

There was a girl this weekend who overheard my english and asked me where I was from.   I started to answer when she jumped in and said,

'You are from Turkey?'
- Yes...Turkey.  It must have been my naturally Mediterranean looking skin tone that gave it away.

Only 8 days until the training course and I found out today it will be an old boss of mine who will be instructing.  Also, today I received the list of fellow participants in the course and it's common practice in our line of work to have a look in the online corporate directory and match the female names with some faces and see what to expect when I arrive.

This may sound like a juvenile thing that only a guy in the oilfield might do but, as a personnel representative here mentioned to me, the same thing was done by a few of the female workers here in the Tyumen office when they got word that a single guy was moving to Russia.  It was comforting to know it wasn't just the guys doing this but then i remembered which picture of me was being accessed for people's first impressions..

How can you resist a mug like that? (sporting the oilfield combover with winged tips for flare)

Thankfully there are two profiles which people can view, the corporate one where I had no choice in the quality of picture and a personal one where I was able to post a photo that was a bit less scary.