Number One

Last night was the final evening for our running clinic. I’ve only attended about half of the sessions, but I have managed to keep up with running alongside the rest. There’s a lot to be said about the motivation (or perhaps, peer pressure) you get running with a group of people, as opposed to running on your own and stopping whenever you feel like it. I find I push myself much harder when running in a group.

For our final session, we were expected to run 10 minutes, walk a minute, run another 10, then walk one, then run *another* 10. Thirty minutes of running… holy crap!! But I did it! I thought for sure I was gonna die -- or maybe throw up -- during those very last two minutes… but, considering I’m writing this blog post now, it’s safe to assume that I didn’t die. (I didn’t toss my cookies either, btw.)

What surprised me most was that I managed to keep a decent pace and eventually found myself running up at the front of the group. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose. Of course, that’s probably because I didn’t get a stitch in my side to slow me down like some of the other gals did. Yikes… those kill…. And once you slow down like that, it’s really hard to pick up the pace again.

Another oddity I should mention is that apparently I have totally transparent skin… If you’ve ever read any of Janet’s sex blogs you’ll sometimes see that she’ll make a little comment to tell me to stop blushing. It’s true, I blush faaaar too easily. Even when something isn’t really that embarrassing at all, my face always turns bright red. Ugh. I hate it!

So, with my prone-to-redness skin, as you can imagine, after thirty minutes of running in the beating hot sun, my face was as red as a radish… Aaaaand believe it or not, it stayed red for a good hour afterwards! Seriously! I think there’s something wrong with me. How can that be normal? I looked like a freakin’ radish with lips. And it’s *only* my face. My neck, my arms, everything else stays as white as white can be… but all the blood pools in my face. When the red wouldn’t go away, J thought I was about to take a stroke or something, even though I felt perfectly fine. Of course, he always worries like that.

Anyhow, the point of this little story isn’t supposed to be about my freakishly red skin – I just wanted to say that I was kinda proud of myself yesterday. When I started this running clinic I really thought that there was no way in hell I would be able to run for thirty minutes in 8 weeks. But I did. Yay me!

Number Two

Okay, so this story has nothing to do with me, and I’m certainly not trying to make any sort of political or social comment, I just found it very interesting and pretty funny.

I’ll start by saying that I work for a Canadian company that merged with a US company about two years ago – but there’s a still real lack of product knowledge across the board. Company A knows about their products, Company B knows about ours, and neither of us really fully understands the others.

Now, the guy who sits across from me is in charge of webinars – a.k.a online training – for our (Company B’s) products. But the other week, he was asked to go to Company A’s US office to do some onsite training with the employees down there. Well, I guess he made the mistake of telling the truth when going through customs. He probably should’ve said that he’s just going down for meetings at our head office – but instead he said that he was going down to do some product training. Gasp! Little did he know that by training our US counterparts on our Canadian products, he was actually stealing jobs from Americans!

Long story short, he wasn’t able to provide the training, customs marked up his passport, and now he has to get a work Visa which costs a ton of cash. Okay, so fair enough… now he is looking into the process of potentially getting a work Visa, but since he has a meeting (yes, an actual meeting, not a training) coming up in the US, he knows that he has to quickly get his ducks in a row before he gets stopped at the border again. So this morning he was on the phone with the US immigration department to ask a few questions… but the person who answered the phone had such a thick accent that my co-worker couldn’t understand half of what the guy was saying. After asking the gentleman to repeat himself a couple times, my co-worker just pretended to understand what the guy was saying before he hung up the phone laughing and shaking his head. Well, I suppose it *is* the “immigration” department…

Number Three

I know they say that you can get by in Europe by speaking English, but I really want to do my best to learn a bit of the language, because I think people appreciate the effort. So last night I started going through my little travel book on Austria and writing down some phrases I should know. Then I cleverly started stringing words together to form my own sentences. The one I was the most proud of, which I’m certain will also come in mighty useful is “Zwei rotwien, bitte.” (Two red wine, please.)

I took German in grade 10… but needless to say, aside from counting to ten and a few pleasantries (Bitte, Danke, Guten Tag, Auf Wiedersehen) my skills have faded completely. I guess as long as you know your manners, that’s all that really matters. I’m having a hard time trying to remember how to say Excuse me/Sorry, because I know I’ll probably be saying that a lot. The translation into German is a real mouthful and hard to remember.

Some other words I want to learn are for basic foods. When ordering off a menu, I sure don’t to make the same mistake I did at that Italian restaurant a few months ago and end up ordering veal again! UGH! I was so mad at myself! At least if I know what words to avoid, I should be safe. I read that Austrians are very picky about the quality of their food and apparently they have the most organic farms, (or so says the travel book.) So if I do slip up and accidentally eat chicken or pork or something, I won’t beat myself up too badly as long as I know the animal had a nice mellow life beforehand. I’m all for trying new foods, but I’m going to do my best to learn the language well enough so at least the new foods I try will be more veggie-based dishes.

So yes… I’m starting with learning a bit of German and next I’ll have to tackle some phrases in Italian, French, and Dutch. I'm sure I could get by just fine speaking English, but what fun is that?

Actually, I asked for a French/English dictionary last Christmas and out of all the languages I’d like to learn, I’m quite excited to practice my French the most. There was once a time when I used to be fully bilingual. I remember that everyone ("everyone" being my teachers) insisted on how important it was to know French because its Canada’s second national language n’ all that. Well, I’ve since learned that unless you’re working for the government or living in Quebec, it certainly isn’t as important as they make it out to be. The funny thing is the French we learned all through school wasn’t even the French spoken in Canada. Quebecers speak Franglais… a more slang French.

Anyhow, now long gone are the days when I could lapse into speaking French so fluently that I didn’t even realize I wasn’t speaking English. It used to really piss my parents off – especially my dad – who couldn’t speak a word of French. “Speak English!” he used to shout. Of course, there were a couple semesters in high school where I was speaking French for three out of four classes… so when I got home in the evenings, sometimes I just didn’t realize that I hadn’t turned off the French switch. I will say that knowing a second language definitely came in handy when I was on the phone and wanted to tell my other French Immersion pals something private while my folks or sister were in the room. Ha. Of course, fast forward ten years and now their French is just as rusty as mine. So yeah… I’ve started practicing again, and maybe by the time we reach France, je peux parler francais encore.