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 I was old enough to know the difference between a mountain fold and a valley fold.  That’s not to say I’m that good at it (though I have converted over 250 used Post-Its into paper cranes while fidgeting through two months of daily team meetings).

I would never call myself an origami artist, because I have never come up with an original design, but I have a great deal of respect for those who are.  And that’s part of the reason I wanted to post this and help show off someone else’s creativity.

This is a gallery of origami creations folded from international currency.  And rather than the usual array of bow-ties and other creations that can be folded from a dollar-shaped scrap of paper, these models actually incorporate the faces of the heads of states and assorted celebrities pictured on the bills.

おりマネーがみ　インターナショナル
ORIMONEYGAMI INTERNATIONAL

I was amused to see some Norwegian kroner thrown into the mix.  Along with the foreign currency, the site also has a large collection of pieces folded from Japanese yen.  Unfortunately the captions are all in Japanese.

Ouch.  Compared to the cost of TsingTao back in Beijing: Double Ouch.

Just another friendly reminder from the Norwegian cost of living.

The piece outlines in very clear grammatical terms why Norwegian ought to be the easiest language for English-speakers to learn.  It talks about how English speakers have all the advantages of a similar vocabulary, English-like word order, and other grammatical parallels between the two languages.  While all this is true (and I do appreciate the familiar vocabulary), I’ve unfortunately found that word order and grammar are an extremely small part of having a practical knowledge of a foreign language.

In my opinion, pronunciation may be the single most important factor in learning a second language.  I have a feeling the original article targets only the written language, in which case pronunciation is a moot point, but the link I followed was from a travel blog, and travelers may find it difficult to depend on written language alone.  Of course it is possible, and I carried around a pen and paper in China for just this purpose (since my Japanese background meant I had an extra written vocabulary at my disposal), but if you’re going to resort to pen and ink, pictograms will probably get you even farther anyway!

Take, for example, the widespread internet meme:

I can has cheeseburger?

If you show up at a McDonald’s in any English-speaking country and ask, “I can has cheeseburger?” the person working the counter will probably give you a cheeseburger and point to the total on the cash register.  Success!  Sure, the word order was wrong, the subject-verb agreement was wrong, etc.  But you got the point across, and when you’re learning another language, successful communication is usually the ultimate goal.

Now imagine that you show up at the same McDonald’s after studying the English language extensively and say (phonetically):

Cowled I plessa hayva aah keysburjur?
["Could I please have a cheeseburger?" pronounced incorrectly]

I’m pretty sure you’d just get a confused look.  Assuming you managed to understand (or ignore) the first part of the sentence, what the heck is a “keysburjur?”  Okay, so using a hard K sound for “ch” may be a little extreme, but often I hear that soft G popping up unexpectedly among non-native English speakers.  So even if you get the grammar perfect, there’s still a pretty good chance that no one will understand you if you bungle the pronunciation.

And therein lies the first (and perhaps greatest) challenge of learning Norwegian.  It has one more thing in common with English, and that is its occasionally unintuitive phonetics.  (Please, someone, explain to me how “ky” can sound so much more like she than key?!)  No matter how much vocabulary you learn and how many irregular verbs you memorize, if no one knows that you’re trying to say you want chicken (“kylling”) it doesn’t really matter that you conjugated the verb right.

Now throw in the myriad dialects that are spoken all over Norway, and you have a daunting task indeed.  Even if you ignore the fact that they managed to develop two completely different Norwegian languages (Bokmål and Nynorsk),  the regional dialects can vary so much that Norwegians may have trouble even understanding each other.

Lastly, the single biggest barrier to learning Norwegian is the very same point the author makes for it being easy.  With so many similarities between Norwegian and English, most Norwegians speak almost perfect textbook English.  Add in the abundance of spoken English in American and British films, TV, and music, and you have 5 million Norwegians who speak English almost as well as I do!  This doesn’t create an environment conducive to learning the local language.

I often compare our time in Norway to our (much shorter) time in China.  In Beijing, where almost no one spoke English, without at least a few words of spoken Mandarin, you would probably end up starving to death (or find yourself confined to your apartment, subsisting on home-delivered pasta from Annie’s).  “Not dying” is a pretty good motivator for learning a language!  In Norway, on the other hand, you can find food, get around, and do just about anything you need to do without speaking the language at all.  All you need to do is ask someone (in English) for help, and you’re set.  Of course it may require a little lateral thinking (i.e. if someone at the grocery doesn’t understand “corn starch,” you can fall back on “the stuff you put in sauce to make it thicker”), but 95% of the time, there’s no problem at all.

This also returns to the pronunciation issue.  Norwegians speak fantastic English, and we fumbling Norwegian students speak terrible Norwegian.  Many Norwegians find it much easier to simply switch to English when they’re having trouble understanding a strange accent, thus foiling our attempts to practice.  Norway hands (can I coin that phrase?) will always tell you that the best response is to keep plowing on in Norwegian or to just tell the person that you’d prefer they speak Norwegian, but when you just want to buy a quick cheeseburger, it seems a little like overkill.

When we moved to China, we quickly learned that ice cream snacks and popsicles were the staple sweet snack among the locals.  A few times at Silk Market, we even heard the bargaining technique of “Just 10 kuai more?  Then I can buy an ice cream!”  And we often ended lunch by grabbing an ice lolly from the shop in our building before heading back up to the office.  No matter the season, it was always a time for ice cream, even if it was freezing cold out!

Here in Norway, the mentality is similar, and every corner shop has a freezer of ice cream bars.  The fruity popsicle variety is less popular than actual ice cream, and I’m not surprised given that the most popular ice cream brand Diplom-Is is a child of milk giant Tine.  Although ice cream bars are eaten year-round as in China, the variety does expand once the summer weather begins to creep in.  On warm sunny days, our afternoon trips to the store for soda and snacks often end with everyone finishing off ice cream bars as we walk back to the office.

I always enjoy trying all the different varieties, but the traditional ice cream sandwich is still my favorite.  Well…  it was my favorite.  The other day was one of the sunny pleasant early-summer days and I decided to grab an ice cream bar to eat on my way home from the supermarket.  Our local Meny stocks the Norwegian ice cream brand Hennig-Olsen as well as Diplom-Is, and I discovered a wonderful creation!  Like so many ice cream companies, Hennig-Olsen makes ice cream sandwiches, but they make a few different varieties.  I’d seen their strawberry variant before, but this was the first time I’d ever seen the greatest ice cream creation ever:  The pistachio ice cream sandwich!  Pistachio is one of my favorite ice cream flavors, so to have a combination of pistachio ice cream and ice cream sandwich?  I’m in heaven!

So as the weather warms up (the forecast is 28°C tomorrow), I’m looking forward to a great summer of grilling in the park, swimming in the fjord, and pistachio ice cream sandwiches!

Our company puts a huge emphasis on workplace safety, since some of the rig work is classified as the 5th most dangerous job in the world (okay, I learned that from American Idol last night).  But the safety thing trickles all the way down to us office staff.  In some locations, there are very real threats, like the possibility of huge tornadoes in Oklahoma or hurricanes in Houston.  But other offices I’ve worked at have their own unique safety risks.

In the wildlife department, the Austin office is way ahead, having been built alongside a nature preserve.  Although the coyotes tended to leave us alone, the snakes did not.  In the summer, they enjoyed basking on the sun-heated sidewalks, and it was not uncommon to receive snake warnings by email.  “A coral snake has been spotted on the sidewalk between buildings A & C.  Please use an alternate route.”  These were often accompanied by a link to the center’s snake identification page, so that we could learn to recognize the myriad species of poisonous snakes that lived around our campus.

Beijing was much more metropolitan with much less wildlife.  The biggest threat there was from the birds.  Mandatory minimum safety training at that office included “Avian Flu – Level 1.”  As this is a permanent certification, it still follows us around.  When we review the center-wide certification list here in Norway, there’s our “Avian Flu – Level 1″ right at the top of the alphabetical list!

Oslo doesn’t seem to have any of its own official wildlife threats.  We’re all annoyed by the Spanish slugs, but the only officially recognized local risk is walking in the winter climate.

Dinesh and Carissa’s wedding was beautiful!  Lucas was a groomsman and looked dashing, and the reception decoration was lovely!  Despite the scratches I got on my hands from trying to artfully pour cranberries into oversized glass vases, I still felt a few moments of nostalgia for the endless hours of planning and crafting that went into our own wedding five years ago (has it really been five years?!).

After the wedding, Lucas and I drove up to spend a few days in Sonoma Valley.  We tried so many fantastic wines that after only two days, we’d reached our customs (and luggage weight) limit!  People kept saying that it was the low season and that it was “pretty dead,” but it was still much more crowded than most of the places we visited in Margaret River!  I choose to believe that much of the staff was off for the holidays, thus forcing the remaining employes to handle more tastings than they would normally.  We did find a few wineries that weren’t overly crowded and we had a chance to chat at length about the wines and the region.

And since we filled our wine quota early, we had an extra day at the end.  So on our way back to the airport, we stopped downtown and did a little sightseeing.  We decided to explore Chinatown, which felt pleasantly familiar (though certainly more like Hong Kong than Beijing).  We enjoyed a lunch of jiaozi and baozi, and afterwards stopped by the fortune cookie factory, where we  bought a bag to bring back to the office.  Because there’s nothing more American than fortune cookies, right?

Actually, when I was trying to think of something to take back, I was stumped, because nearly everything American is available in some version in Europe, or the Europeans have tried it when they visited the US.  But fortune cookies?  Not so much.  The fortune cookie was invented in California and since Norway has its own less-than-authentic version of Chinese food, they haven’t bothered importing the American fortune cookie tradition.  Aside from the globalization of British chicken tikka masala and Tex Mex, most places import ethnic cuisine directly from the country of origin before localizing them.  Apparently the Sino-Norwegian restaurateurs never felt that their menus were short on dessert or prophecy.

And I’m happy to report that my effort was a success, as at least one of our (European) colleagues just tried his first-ever fortune cookie!

This whole incident got me thinking, even last night while I was feeling wretched.  This was so commonplace when we lived in Beijing that I probably had an upset stomach once every other week.  It surprised me both that it bothered me so much last night and that I had been willing to deal with this discomfort so often while we were in China.  I was also a bit startled to realize that it actually hasn’t happened since we’ve been in Oslo!  While I learned to take mild food poisoning and digestive issues for granted in China, their absence has become something I now take for granted here in Norway!

In Beijing it was a regular occurrence that fellow ex-pat colleagues would be absent from the office, and no one hesitated to chalk it up to diarrhea.  It wasn’t embarrassing; it was just a fact of life.  I got pretty used to being sick, and I actually consider myself lucky that I only ended up in the hospital once.  And that was just for the afternoon.  And really it was just because I was dehydrated.  And after a saline IV and some antibiotics, I was good to go (unlike one of my former colleagues who was hospitalized for days).  The thing that really stung more than the hospital trip was that when I told my boss I was leaving work early to go to the ER, she asked me to submit something I was working on before I left (true story; I kid you not)!

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 improve, paired with a group of jargon-laden managers, meant that you could have a field day with Buzzword Bingo.  It also meant that the trendy managerial catch-phrases became so unbelievably overused that they ceased making your teeth grind and instead made you struggle to suppress an inappropriate and involuntary chuckle whenever you heard them.

For example, the sentence, “Let’s discuss this after the meeting,” apparently went out of fashion.  With the project spread across three continents, a deluge of web meetings brought about repeated usage of the alternative, “Let’s take this offline.”  I imagine that this originally meant, “Hey, let’s stop wasting international long-distance charges, since we can discuss this locally after the meeting.”  However, it was used so often that a few people seemed to mis-translate it to “Let’s discuss this after the meeting,” and after a few months they were using it all the time, even for ordinary sit-around-a-table meetings!

The funniest of all, however, was “Air Quotes Girl.”  Somewhere she had picked up on foreign managers using fingered air quotes when they spoke.  However, as one of our project managers quickly realized, the local Chinese didn’t understand sarcasm.  At all.  He tried to explain it to them in a textbook kind of way, but you can imagine how well that worked.  You could see them trying to translate this kind of statement, and coming up with a general idea of what you meant, but stripped of all the humor and irony.

Now imagine someone who doesn’t understand sarcasm using air quotes.  We think she got the idea that air quotes indicated emphasis, because she would use them in the most unusual circumstances and air-quote the most unexpected words.  The créme de la créme was when she was talking to someone and said, “So you’re going to be on [air quote]vacation[/air quote] next week, right?”  He just stared at her confused, thinking “Am I fired, or something?!”

While the onset of the Beijing Olympics has induced a lot of nostalgia, the thing that actually prompted this particular recollection was a link to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.  Apparently a lot of people out there (and not just Chinese managers) just don’t “get” quote marks.  In some cases, the mistakes can really change the meaning and make it quite amusing!  For example:
 

Followup:  Apparently the iStockPhoto website has some confusion over quotation marks as well.  In trying to find an image for the original story, I searched for “air quotes” and receieved the following result:

You start with a large blossom-shaped blob of pink plastic that sits on (or next to) the cake with a small incendiary fuse sticking out of the middle.  No, it’s not really a wick; it’s a fuse.  So you light that thing as if it was dynamite, and it creates a big flame and then a little sparkler shooting up out of the middle of the flower bud.  While this is happening, little strings holding the petals closed burn through, and thanks to a spring-loaded mechanism, the petals slowly unfold to reveal little birthday candles on each tip, and the entire flower turns in circles while playing “Happy Birthday” through a little speaker.  I have to say that while it’s a bit ostentatious, it’s very, very cool!  I have to give credit to Lan, since the first time I ever saw one was when she brought one for my birthday.

The only downside is that there is no way to shut the stupid speaker off.  You can read more about my experimentation with the thing’s battery life in the above post, but in every single case that we’ve used one since, we’ve torn the thing apart to dismantle its inner workings and make it stop singing.

I recently found out that these candles are available in the US, and this website even has an instructions page that explains that the proper way to make the candle stop playing music is to cut the wire.  Unfortunately, I don’t often carry a pair of scissors when I go out to dinner, even for birthday celebrations.  I guess it’s something to remember for home, though.

I also found a report on consumeraffairs.com that outlines the many dangers of using these things:

The candle has an unexpected high flame and the plastic petals could ignite resulting in melting and dripping plastic. The ignited plastic could also spread to nearby combustibles and pose a fire hazard to consumers. The battery contained in the middle of candle could eventually explode.

I think you can see the validity of this risk in an image from the actual instructions mentioned above:

Compare the size of the flame to the size of the sheet cake the candle is sitting on.

(Maybe Lan was actually trying to kill me!)

And it appears that despite the recall, the website mentioned in the above report is still selling them, but at nearly double the original price (presumably to pay for insurance and legal aid for exploding birthday battery lawsuits).

If you’d like to risk death and buy your own incessantly-musical flower candle, you can find them here, here, and here.  Or here if you’re in the UK.  This UK site also has versions that play Fur Elise or a medley of Christmas carols!

This morning, during my morning coffee-and-RSS-feed break, I happened on a piece about ex-pats’ perspectives of the changing pre-Olympic Beijing.  The part that particularly amused me was that one of the ex-pat compounds has started requiring residents to sign in and out for security purposes.  One resident’s remarks:

“It’s a bit crazy,” he says. “The guards and I know each other by sight – I’ve lived there longer than some have worked there. But we have to play the game. I generally sign something like “Mickey Mouse” “Osama Bin Laden” or “Tim Horton” (a popular Canadian coffee house chain). They can’t read it anyway and it gives me a little lift.”

Ah, that makes me smile, because it’s just so China – following the rules just for the rules’ sake.  One of our own examples that came to mind recently was our experience at the Beijing airport, just after the US instituted its No-Liquids policy.

Lucas, Lan, and I were all on the same flight to the US, and when we got to our departure gate, they had a quick bag search set up for the US-bound flight.  Lan had a tube of lip gloss in her purse but no ziplock bag to put it in.  The Chinese security agent refused to let her take it, since it was “not in a plastic bag.”  The agent explained in broken English that Lan would be welcome to take it on board, as long as it was in a plastic bag.  I was thinking that I’d just put it in my own ziplock liquids bag until we were on the plane, but the security agent gestured to the Subway sandwich bag I was carrying.  I moved the sandwich to my carryon and gave her the bag.  She dropped Lan’s lip gloss into the (much larger than 1-liter) bag and Lan was welcome to board!  Now the rule had been enforced, and the offending lip gloss was “in a plastic bag.”  Of course the original intent of restricting the total amount of liquid was completely lost, but it’s the rule itself that’s important in China!