What it means to work abroad

A few days ago, I stumbled upon an article on The Local's website. According to this article I'm not the only qualified immigrant coming to Germany for a piece of the cake. Plenty of us find ourselves in the same situation. We move to a country with a 5.1% unemployment rate (lower than Canada 6.5%), we make a few friends to network, start looking for jobs and realize through the application process that if you don't speak German, your options are very limited.

As a native French speaker I pick up English at a very young age and consider myself lucky to be able to fluently discuss in both languages. Europe is different! The proximity between all of the countries is the cause of a cluster of languages. International companies are looking for people who speak Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Dutch and the list goes on.

Certain skill sets override the language requirements. I've see a lot of engineering and computer science jobs which require only English. Makes me think about a change of career path sometimes.

As far as I'm concerned, I still have to improve my German skills to be able to pierce through the Communications and Marketing field. I've been actively searching for a position in PR firms, Communications Agencies, bigger companies such as Yahoo, Amazon and a few local craft beer companies (everybody has a dream right?)

I'm currently looking at the job market and the internship dilemma. Stay tuned for my next post.

The History of the World Cup: Canadian Edition

In the coming days eBay and Amazon will see their profits rise from the purchase of football jerseys all over the world. Employers will see more and more employees with saggy eyes reeking of booze from last night's victory. For a Canadian living in Munich I'm being asked the same question over and over "Who are you going to cheer for?" Clearly not Canada is my answer. This pushed me to learn a bit more about the Canadian's place in the history of the prestigious, world unifying tournament.

The year was 1986, Mexico

Canada made their way to Group C with the Soviet Union, France and Hungary. This was the only year Canada ever participated in the World Cup. Although they didn't manage to score a single goal, they held the French until the end and Mike Sweeney got a red card, one can only assume he apologized for this.

Sweeney was sent off in the second game against Hungary,^[4] making him the only Canadian player ever to be dismissed at a World Cup Finals tournament.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FIFA_World_Cup

Special mentions

Diego Maradona from Argentina got himself 5 goals and the Golden Ball that year, Argentina won.

Also Sons of Andrew and band out of Edmonton, Alberta made a song dedicated to the unique Canadian squad.

There's a documentary on Canadian Journey to the World cup on Youtube called:
The Journey - 1986 Canada Soccer Documentary (pretty interesting, TSN)

If you're a collector, these are the ones you're looking for: