Walking in the Forest

Righty-o!
Upon request I will share with you the latest "news" at expo. Every day there is such incredible amounts of strange things that happen, that I am not entirely sure where to start. I gave you a little teaser in yesterdays post, so I suppose I will start there.

We had an interesting visitor two days ago at work. One of China's biggest movie stars, Maggie Chan, decided to pop by and check out our pavilion. I have to admit that I had no idea who she was but I still managed to become completely starstruck as I very unintelligently pranced and danced in front of her (note to self: when in presence of movie star, DO NOT DANCE). Thankfully I was not the only one. Team leader Øystein had taken upon the task of guiding her (I have a slight suspicion that he may have thrown a tantrum or paid someone so that he could be in charge of this task). The day before he came up to a couple of us and proclaimed, "do you guys realize who is coming tomorrow?? Do you know how much I loved this woman when I was younger?? Man... I think I need some chocolate". All in all, a good day at work. Oh yea, and the Austrian Prime Minister decided to show up unannounced but the Austrian security system attached itself to our speaker system making it sound like we were under attack or the pavilion roof was partially ripping at its seams. Needless to say we had to divert the PMs attention to another pavilion.

I know we talk about stamping an unusually large amount, but it is such a big part of our day, and a subject that causes so much aggression in our life that I just have to grind it into a powder that is so fine, hopefully I won't see it anymore. As I have already explained we have founded a 3 stamps/person rule. This for our visitors only means that they have to be creative. Two days ago there was a man dawdling outside our safety exit door where there is a very small opening underneath the door. Jeanette asked one of our chinese speaking guides to ask him what he was doing, and the diligent guide could after a few minutes of conversation report that he was waiting for his friend because he was going to pass about a hundred passports under the door...

In our private life we also encounter interesting and challenging situations. Cecilie from Bergen is a beautiful, cheerful and wonderful girl who went to get a manicure the other day. As she sat there she thought she was getting an abnormal amount of attention from the manicurists. She got extra pillows, a stool for her feet and a lot of pointing towards her abdomen area. After a while the two very excited ladies in the shop stuttered in perfect chinglish, "boy oh guhhr?". Confused and completely perplex her face twisted into a grimace that in Europe could only say "what the hell are you asking me? Are you calling me fat???", but in China this expression apparently translates into, "I'm not that far along yet, so I don't know". They followed with, "Husband Norwegian?" whereby Cecilie now nearly in tears could only reply, "yes". The final question before she decided to pretend to be on the phone for the rest of the torturous time was, "youh baby how many moths", "four" she replied without hesitation but with massive amounts of bitterness.

Why is it that when one person pees in the pavilion two more people just have to do something very similar. That's right. We've had our first experience with bodily fluids being dumped on our pavilion. One peeing incident in the fjord, one right outside the exit door, and an even more appropriate dumping of feces in the coastal area. I suppose the architects will be quite pleased when they hear this though. I don't believe I have fully explained our pavilion, but it is built up much like a forest with 15 trees as its pillars. The guests must have understood this and were simply respecting the architects wishes (perhaps not the cleaners wishes though...or the guides...).

On a final note Jeanette and I are also making great headway in making ourselves well-known at the expo site. We have become "this months customers" at Starbucks. Sad.
That's it for tonight folks!
Trine:D