It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like… The Olympics?

Posted on 15. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Announcements, Blog, Musings & Inspiration
2 comments

It’s now official – I have received my accreditation form, so it’s really happening.
For all of February, I will be acting as bilingual liaison for the French Olympic delegation during their stay here in Vancouver for the Winter Games.

This is going to be a lot of fun. It also means that I expect to be spending most of my waking time at the Olympic venue, and I will only a have a few hours a day to look after my business.

What does this mean for you?

I’ll try to make sure that there is little to no disruption to the usual blogging schedule, so that you get the expat tips and support you need, three times a week.
Ideally, I’ll have all my upcoming posts lined up by the end of next week – needless to say, there’s a lot of writing happening at the moment!
There will be a few guest posts too, so stay tuned for more details.

What if you have an expat support call in February?

If you already have scheduled calls with me in February, you don’t need to do anything – your calls will go ahead as scheduled.

If you haven’t booked your calls yet and were thinking of starting expat support in February, I cannot guarantee that I will be available at a day and time that’s convenient for you, but I’ll try my best to make it work. So if you really need support ASAP, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can do – and if you hear a lot of French spoken in the background during our call, you’ll know why

Is this how TCKs feel?

You know what’s funny? I just had my first informal meeting today with both the French and the Canadian coordinators, and never in all my years in Vancouver have I felt so strongly like a cultural hybrid.

During our meeting, I observed how the Canadian “can do attitude” and culture of consensus was interacting with the French respect for hierarchy and more direct style of communication. It was a fascinating dance.

The most interesting part is that, although I could clearly see these cultural traits at play, I wasn’t interested in judging them – I wasn’t tempted to side with the Canadian way of doing things, or the French way of doing things. I could see both sides of the issue, and the pros and cons of each approach.

It felt like being a neutral observer, and it also felt a little schizophrenic, as if my own cultural traits fell somewhere in between French and Canadian, but didn’t truly belong to either sphere.

Today, I think I experienced firsthand the way TCKs see the world.

I can tell February is going to be an interesting month…

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Emmanuelle

Images by Miss Barbaranov (top) and Ryan Chen (bottom), both via Flickr Creative Commons