Brown Girl in London

A culture lesson

So it's Friday at 4:11pm and I'm finished this short work week in about 70 minutes. Today was one of those "manual labour" kind of days where I lugged box after box of catalogues around the office and assembled a shelf - which looks pretty decent, by the way. After this I'm walking down to Leicester Square to celebrate the 27th or 28th birthday of one of Supa's cousins - R. We're going to Ruby Blue and it looks like a nice place.

This week has gone by pretty fast which is nice. I find sometimes that weeks when you get a day off tend to go slow. Anyway, not much blog-worthy happened to write about. Except that celebration, and preferably celebration with alcohol, is clearly a part of the English culture, and while I knew that before coming here, I really didn't understand it until I started working here at KF.

In the 3.5 months that I've been working here there have been more bottles of champagne popping open than I have ever seen in my previous 28 years of life. In fact, I don't really remember ever having champagne before this. Anyway, it seems like everything is cause for celebration. (Oh look, while I'm writing this the office manager just passed us each a small box of truffles!) Just now we finished a celebration for the engagement party of a co-worker with champagne in lovely flute glasses. We already had a toast for the actual announcement of the engagement last month. Last Friday was champagne and strawberries to commemorate the intern's completion of her time here at KF. Once, in the early days I walked in on an impromptu "celebration" of sorts for another co-worker who broke up with her boyfriend and therefore had to move out of her flat.

I think it's cool - I mean it's celebrating the personal, acknowledging that these employees here are human and have lives outside of a company. It's weird though, because this is juxtaposed besides these exact same people who appear to be absolutely driven by their work. It's an odd work-life balance that I don't think has been achieved in Canada yet, or at least not by what I've seen so far in my experience, which I admit has been very limited. I mean I still am not a lover of work but it's cool, and I'm going to eat the milk chocolate truffle now because it looks just sooo yummy!

posted by RC @ 11:16 AM