There is a very bizarre mix of things that interest me, and I’m always excited when two of those interests overlap (for example, last month’s mash-up of Halloween and Geek culture).
Today’s strange bedfellows are travel and origami. More specifically, foreign currency and origami. Along with the rest of my family, I’ve been doing origami since [...]
Lucas and I are in Stavanger for a class on geophysics for work, and last night we decided to have Chinese food for dinner. Since we can expense our meals, we opted to have a beer with dinner (a luxury we usually forgo at home). This was my bottle of TsingTao, which cost the equivalent [...]
Today I happened on a blog article titled “Why Norwegian is the easiest language for English speakers to learn.” What a depressing headline for someone who has been trying to muddle her way through learning the language for over two years now.
The piece outlines in very clear grammatical terms why Norwegian ought to be the [...]
BeijEnglish – Special Norway Edition!
It’s not often that I see amusing English translations around here, since Norwegians seem to speak better English than I do!
However, I have been notice a few oddities around our canteen lately. Usually it’s just little things that are a bit off, and even when they’re fairly bizarre, you can [...]
Back in the States, I never really lived in a place where single-packaged ice cream snacks were all that popular. We had them in the cafeteria in middle school, and I often treated myself to a Strawberry Shortcake bar for dessert, but the idea of grabbing an ice cream sandwich or an ice cream bar [...]
Yesterday, Shane blogged about a coyote incident at work in downtown Chicago. While I’ve never experienced anything as odd as a wildlife work risk in the middle of a sprawling metropolitan area, it got me reminiscing about some of the more unusual safety issues at our different offices.
Our company puts a huge emphasis on workplace [...]
We’ve been back from San Francisco for two weeks, and I’ve finally gotten the chance to post something! A technical glitch with my blog, followed by a poor attempt to fix the problem by upgrading the software meant that I haven’t even been able to post for a while. (And I was stuck with that [...]
There are a lot of things I miss about living in Beijing, but every once in a while, something will remind me of one of the reasons that I’m very happy not to be in China anymore. Last night was one of these occasions. I was fast asleep and dreaming, when I suddenly awoke at [...]
Floating around in my head, and slowly fading from memory, there are still a few classic tales from Beijing that I should really share.
One of the unintentionally funny things about our office in China is that the local Chinese employees were still a bit unsteady in their grasp of daily English usage. Their eagerness to [...]
I mentioned in the post about Lucas’s birthday that we used one of our exciting musical flower birthday candles from Beijing. In case you’ve never been privy to a demonstration of these fantastic contraptions, I will try to describe them well enough to do them justice.
You start with a large blossom-shaped blob of pink plastic [...]