Poker

The work at the poker establishment is turning out well so far. The main benefit is that no one else speaks Danish, so they can't tell what a butchery of the language I'm conducting. We'll see how long that lasts. Some day I can tell that one of the customers will write back and say I should have just written in English since I can at least spell properly in that language, and they all speak it at a university level. But so far not so. (Actually the poker set seems to be quite challenged at writing in their own language, so that might be my real saving grace)

The main annoyances are the Norwegian tranlator who works every day, so he hogs the easy Danish assignments, translating from Danish TO English. That I can do. But no, I get the Danish FROM English assignments. The other annoyance is that its one of these places that can monitor your activity at all seconds, so they're slowly clamping down on my visits to TSN, the mall, and the drink stand. Fortunately, they can't fire me (who would take care of the huge Danish constituency?), so they can just annoy me by mentioning these transgressions, rather than actually doing anything about it. Also, I have to get up at 6AM two days a week, which is quite a departure for the grad school type. It is gratifying to realise how much I've done by the time I usually get up though.

Tomorrow Ross Hornby is visiting the IES. He's the ambassador or "representative" from Canada to the EU. The research team is going to have to wow him with our incisive questions, since he's totally one of the people involved in the field of EU-Canada relations. We even vaguely knew him back in Brussels, when I talked to him for at least a minute or two along with six other cowed interns. He has a husband (I don't think its a coincidence he got assigned to Brussels and not Kingston) who was a super charmer — everyone was wildly impressed by his command of our names - surprising how little it takes to win people over. Unfortunately he probably won't come to the afternoon lecture for students at UBC.