Kristine

I met Kristine through my work with UNDP. Originally from Norway, she has lived all over the globe with her diplomat parents, and is now the assistant resident representative in Belize and thus the highest ranking UN employee in the country. With our European backgrounds and UN experiences in Asia and Africa we have quite a few things in common.

She cracks me up all the time as we share multi-cultural anecdotes. She’s brilliant at imitating accents and her stories make me laugh out loud, like the one about the Italian guy visiting Belize, asking for a Ristretto (rolling r) in a Belmopan café. ‘A what?’ the Belizean waitress asks, ‘A Ris-trrretto’, the Italian asks again, louder now, rolling his r a little longer. The waitress gives him a blank stare and looks to Kristine for an explanation. He repeats his order, louder yet, as he honestly can not imagine anyone on this planet not knowing what a Ristretto is.

Or the anecdote from some years ago about a French UN diplomat, her superior at the time, of whom she had asked a not-so-silly question, something like: How are we going to put this into practice? His answer: “Ben (pronounce Bah, French for well eh), use your brain!” Merci, so much for French diplomacy.

Another thing that expats like to share is freaky stories about snakes, bugs, and scorpions, so I related my experience about the freaky room in our house (see my blog post May 2009). She too has scorpions in her house, and a brave cat named Storm that defies them, or tries to at least.

She comes home from work one day and she sees something moving under the carpet in her living room, and the cat is meowing and making funny jumps at it. Wow, that is a big scorpion, she thinks, or perhaps a mouse, or, God forbid, a rat? From her bookshelf she takes (and I quote) ‘the only appropriate book for this kind of action, the fist-thick biography of Pol Pot’, and slams it on the bulge in the carpet. Disgusted, she carefully lifts the carpet to find…

...her mobile phone on vibrate.

Ha ha, good one Storm!