Had a great experience yesterday. My wife and I are visiting Duluth, Minnesota...her home town and a great place for fall color photos. We were walking through their famous rose gardens composing pictures and just enjoying an absolutely beautiful day. I happened to notice about 100 feet away another gentleman with a decked out SLR doing the same. After a few minutes I made it a point to walk up to him and talk photo gear.
I walked towards him and he noticed me coming. I looked down at his camera and noticed the Pentax logo on the front. Cool! He's a Pentaxian! Mine was a K10D and his was a K20D. He had a really nice Sigma lens and he looked at my 10-17mm Pentax wide-angle.
The only thing that was strange was that he didn't understand Engish...he was from Germany (in Duluth visiting his daughter)....and I can only understand a few German words and phrases. Never-the-less, we had the cameras in common and proceeded to show each other our lens collection. We "talked" for several minutes. We exchanged business cards and I wrote down the address to this forum. He seemed to understand and was pretty excited about a Pentax community. Hopefully he will join in and I might actually be able to talk with him through a computer translator!
I've had many experiences with folks from other countries including Germany and France (my family is originally from Germany). I even helped with a refugee committee in our local area helping folks from Vietnam and Bosnia relocate and help them get their lives started again. It's always fascinating hearing other peoples experiences even if you can't understand everything they are saying.
It just proves that Pentax is a language all it's own!