Culture in the Blender

…on your first job out of school, you see a presentation of ISO 9000 standards and are surprised to see that they changed eight years ago and you didn’t know. (Because you remember when your sponsoring company went through ISO certification when you were a teenager.)

Now that I’m driving to work for the first time in my life, I’ve spent a fair bit of time while I’m driving pondering the following: If you probably won’t be pulled over for speeding ~10 km/h in Sweden, is it true that American cops will overlook 10 mph of speeding? 10 mph is larger [...]

My parents just moved back to Sweden, after having been given a month’s notice that my father was no longer needed in the US. Other than the suddenness of the move – a confused Swedish HR manager is to have said “But don’t you own a house….?” when my father called – I am surprised [...]

Although I think we’ve all heard “home is where the heart is” as some kind of well-meant, but misguided attempt to shed light on a lifetime of thought in a few seconds, I’m starting to appreciate a second possible meaning to the proverb, one that might actually be helpful. My rub with the idea is [...]

After some thinking at the beginning of the year, I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my boyfriend and wanted to stand up and say so. In other words, I decided I wanted to marry him. I cooked up a proposal scheme (had to be flexible, since we live [...]

I’m homesick for China. I think anywhere in Asia would do.  Yesterday morning was rainy with a hint of fog, and I thought for a second that it was smog. I’m listening to Chinese music and wondering what’s in fashion. I want my morning bus to be one of the old Beijing buses with the [...]

I’m supposed to be writing my doctoral thesis (hence very few posts lately), but for some reason I can’t stop thinking about where I’m going to live after I defend. I will be done with my education and so for the first time in my life have some kind of decision about where to live [...]

A week ago, I flew to see my boyfriend and had to connect through O’Hare. Even without a snowstorm, there were weather delays – due to lightning this time. I brought along Ruth Van Reken’s book Letters Never Sent to read. While I can’t say that I recognized my own experience other than very occasionally, [...]

My parents are visiting me (easy as pie now that we live in the same country again), and talking about my research in anything except English is a little frustrating. Because I attended college in the States, I learned the vast majority of my technical vocabulary (in any field I know technical vocabulary in) in [...]

My local grocery store recently carried 油菜 (yóucài), which translates literally to oil vegetable. I have no idea what their English name is, if they even have one. I seized the opportunity and bought about half of them. Here, it is not uncommon that the checkout personnel do not know what various vegetables are, including [...]