Living/Working abroad

I've been collecting examples for this post for awhile. Living and working abroad, silly things happen all the time:

• I help my ~17-year-old neighbor with his English from time to time. He had a big assignment coming up, and asked for my help translating an American sports documentary about steroids. The past few days, I have helped him translate such lines as: "And then the Hulkster ripped off that shirt." "He put him in the dreaded camel clutch." "We used to practice wrestling moves all the time - body slams, elbow drops, DDTs, double noggin knockers." "I drove myself to the river with a bottle of liquid lead, some sleeping pills and some Nyquil." I got some free cookies for my help!
• I was working on a proposal with a co-worker in a Word document. We had divided up the workload, and had just combined our two pieces. As my teammate was looking mine over, he casually mentioned the typo/extra space I had put between two sentences. I looked at him, confused as to what he was talking about. As any American school children would, I had put two spaces in between my sentences. My co-worker was shocked. He had been taught to put one space by the Hungarian school system. We laughed for a few straight minutes - talk about cultural differences.
• I bought curtains a few days ago, and muddled through semi-successfully with the first few steps. I was able to tell the shop keeper "My room is red and white. What color do you think?" and we picked out some good fabric. Now, despite my precisely drawn diagram of my windows, there was a little (a lot) of back and forth with the sizing woman. Thankfully, I was saved by an English-speaking shopkeeper who magically appeared and confirmed my suspicions that the sizing woman wanted to put curtains in the wrong place, in the wrong size and in the wrong number. Phew!
• I had a training session yesterday on formal (standing) presentations. I told my co-workers that one of my goals was to understand how I could adapt my style to working in Hungary - that is, if there were things I had been trained to do back home that would be distracting to a Central European audience. I gave my prepared presentation, and the facilitator asked people what they thought. Like a shot, the first thing out of everyone's mouths was, "Well, you're very American!" I learned that I used more gestures and was more colloquial than my colleagues. Watching them was really helpful! While it's clear that Americans may differ from Hungarians in presentation style, I learned that it can be just as important to know exactly where a person is from inside a country. Apparently, even Italians from Rome vs. Milan differ substantially on how much they like to ask questions, whether they want the introduction to be about the person/the topic, etc. Milanese folks take more after Germans.
• There are a lot of countries in Europe, and I still have a lot to learn about them. Last week, my principal pulled me and my teammate aside and asked for our help writing some materials concerning a Slovakian electricity company. Going in, I definitely knew more about Slovakia than the average American ... but I still needed to wikipedia some basic facts immediately upon my return to my desk. (FYI, the Slovakian currency is the crown - SKK.)

The parents arrive today for the weekend, and I'm looking forward to showing them around!