Mild Amusement

Continuing with the theme of travel-related humor , Kazakhstan offered up a second opportunity for hilarity. The first time around involved a customs and immigration paper that I watched like a hawk. The second time involved some postcards, so it was far less official. However, it also led to more sustained laughter. As you can probably guess, I decided to send some postcards. I can't remember if this was my idea or the Mild Wife's idea, but I want to say that something she said inspired this plan. Specifically, I wanted to send postcards to our younger nephews and nieces. It seemed like a cool little souvenir, since it'd very likely be a unique gift. Also, they're old enough now where they'd probably appreciate receiving something in the mail. Even if they didn't actually know what the postcard said, they'd understand that the item was meant for them. As the Mild Wife has mentioned in the past, a little kid knows when something is for them, and they tend ...

Continuing with the theme of  travel-related humor , I recently had to travel to  Kazakhstan  and that led to more than a few chuckles. Now, Kazakhstan is not a place where I travel very often. It's in Asia, bordering both China and Russia, so it takes at least a couple of flights in order for me to get there. Essentially, it's far from home for me. To make things a bit more complicated, I don't speak any Kazakh or Russian, so I am very much a foreigner in that country. Sure, I'm very willing to try the food , but that doesn't quite help when trying to answer questions or hold a conversation. Similarly, I don't any of the local laws, because, again, I am a foreigner in that country. Given that I don't speak the language, this basically means that it is in my best interest to not run afoul of any regulations. I mention these two specific facts because they bring me to the focal point of today's blog post: the white piece of paper. When you arrive in c...

In the latest round of stories about our recent Argentina trip , I'm going to talk about pizza. It's not the first time that pizza has been the subject of a blog post , and it probably won't be the last time, either. It's just one of those dishes that shows up a bunch in life, y'know? First of all, I should start by pointing out that Argentina has its own special brand of pizza. There may actually be several of these varieties, but the one I kept hearing about was the fugazza . The first time I heard about it, the Mild Wife had had some during the day, and mentioned to me that it was both different than the pizza we got at home and tasty. Given that she liked it, I was more than a little intrigued. As it turns out, I was not the only one intrigued by this pizza. One of my other coworkers on the trip also had his curiosity piqued by this local pizza. I don't remember how it came up in conversation, but someone must have mentioned it at some point. Well, from ...

So, we were in Argentina for a while . Specifically, we were in the Buenos Aires area for a good amount of time. I normally leave off some of those details because I figure they won't really add too much to the story, but in this case, it might be relevant (I will allow you to decide). During that time, we got to explore a little bit and see a bit of the city. More importantly to the Mild Wife and me, though, that also meant we got to sample some of the food. We had actually scouted out particular dishes before we got there, so there was something of a list to try. Argentina is known for its steak and wine, so those were givens. However,  empanadas and medialunas  also made it on to the scout list, in part because the Mild Wife did a bit of homework (side note: in looking for good sites to link the two items in this sentence, I discovered a piece that says the pastry names are actually a form of political dissidence . Who knew?). Basically, we had a few items that we were i...

In case you've missed the last few blog posts, the Mild Wife and I headed to Argentina. Now, this was a work trip, so there were a few shenanigans related to speaking Spanish in the office . I was not the only one responsible for these language-related stories, however. In some cases, some of the others caused a lot of laughter when dealing with the fact that we didn't all quite speak the same language. In this particular case, the laughs occurred when we all went to lunch. Since the American coworkers  obviously didn't know the area as well as the locals, our in-country coworkers picked the place and led the way. All I knew before I got there was that we were going to a sandwich place. It actually took a decent walk for us to get there, though I didn't really notice this since I was busy making small talk with someone. I probably would've done the same thing if we'd been in the States, but I also figured I should make an extra effort to practice my Spanish....

Once we actually arrived in Argentina and managed to settle in to our hotel , it was back to business. In my case, that meant that I had to help train some of my coworkers on some technical work. There were actually a few of us that went on this trip, because several heads are better than one. The in-country coworkers hadn't seen this particular technology before, so we were just there to show them the ropes. However, this also led to the interesting fact that I had to communicate with these coworkers about software development stuff. In my case, this presented a bit of a dilemma. I had two languages to choose from. Now, I am fairly fluent in Spanish, but I think about my day to day job in English. English is clearly the easier of the two languages for me to communicate in when it comes to my day job. Of course, the exact opposite was true for my coworkers. They were far more comfortable with Spanish to discuss the work at hand. Sure, they could understand me if I spoke in Engli...

Let's continue on with our tales of the Argentina trip , shall we? In the first installment, I regaled you with the circuitous route our plane took to land at our destination. If you haven't already read it, we basically got re-routed to another country because visibility was poor and the plane didn't have enough fuel to stay in a holding pattern. It all worked out in the end, but it meant a longer trip than expected and more amusement than one would hope for on a flight. After all of that, we were happy to just arrive at our destination. We had some decent conversation with the cab driver, but even so, we just wanted to get to our room. First, though, we had to navigate one last obstacle. No, not the check-in process; that actually went smoothly. No, we had to use the elevators. I'm guessing that, like me, you don't generally think of elevators as a challenge, but there's a reason why I'm writing this post. There was a learning curve for this particular...