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.

Sunset

Its funny how these drizzly Vancouver days can turn out fine in the end.

UBC Campus with shipping to the right and the islands to the west.

a fundamental change.

I got a new job... I'm going to be working part time at an online poker company as their Danish language operative. Or at least I'll try.

lo siento, no entiendo

I almost got a job with the bank, but they needed a full timer, and I'm not quite willing to give them that with all of my onerous commitments at the institute. Plus the institute has now honoured me with my very own office. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, I have an office that I share with my colleague. Notice the professional terminology? Oh yeah, I'm moving up. We even have our own phone. Unfortunately I think the whole thing was just a backhanded ploy by the institute to make sure that we actually do some work, since they can now check how often we're in. I also have to attend the dreaded Monday morning staff meetings to help complain about the provost, and comment on how malevolent the University administrators are. (The director's in a bit of a tiff with them because they're moving us and the Pacific Institute to the third floor at considerable expense, in order to make room for some new institute, instead of putting the new institute on the third floor.)

The good news is that the pub next door has vastly improved the food this year, so I will probably actually be able to eat there on my lunch break.

I also noticed that the world press is starting to take much more note of the deteriorating political situation in Belgium. They still haven't been able to form a government after the election which happened back in June, and the country's pretty much split along linguistic lines. After my trip to the Belgian history museum and living there for a while, its my learned opinion that Belgium is going to split up sometime before I'm very old. Its already so decentralized they have almost nowhere to go but finally cutting it up. Really the only thing holding them back is what to do with Brussels. (I heard an interview with a polisci prof from Leuven who said that the real reason was an innate lack of courage and imagination on the part of Belgians... but I prefer to believe the Brussels story) Both sides want it; its mostly french, but its in Flanders really... I guess that's one thing the city is useful for: saving Belgium.