Once bitten, twice a moron

I went snowshoeing again today, and learned... again... that it was quite boring and is not really my "thing." It might just be the snowshoeing with middle-aged French people that got me the most -- stopping for a snack, arguing about the mountains or the direction of the wind, conversations about menopause...

 For the first time, I felt really fed up (j'en ai marre!) with my social situation. Sure, I've missed having friends and being around young people, but my middle-aged colleagues haven't bothered me much thus far, and have been great educators as far as Vosgien traditions and winter sports were concerned. So maybe it was the sickness (I have a touch of la rhume), the boredom, or the sunshine that made that final thread holding my social sanity together snap, I don't know, but I kind of lost it a little yesterday. I felt displaced throughout the whole day, both in my element (playing around in nature) and out of it. I couldn't relate to half of the things my fellow snowshoers were talking about -- hot flashes, technology misunderstandings, their children -- although I certainly tried, at the very least getting a few new vocabulary words and expressions out of it.

Besides feeling like a silly little girl the whole day (who at least kicked all their butts when it came to fitness), I did learn a bit more about mountain life and Alsace, which is where we were hiking the whole day. We passed a couple of ferme auberges, which are just like normal auberges -- mountain lodging, essentially -- but which also function as farms in the summer. At least 65% of their food must come from their own farm, meaning that in the Vosges, these places serve up mostly meat, dairy (cheese!), tree fruits and vegetables (apples, cherries, chestnuts, hazlenuts), and sauerkraut (choucroute). Every winter, the farmers herd their beasts down into the valley where it's warmer, and re-herd them back up into the mountains in the spring. Like all French traditions (this one is actually stronger in Switzerland), the herding is accompanied by a massive festival:

I wish I took this.

Hopefully I'll be here to be able to attend one!

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The landscape of southern Alsace:

Small Triumphs

I made falafel from scratch and it came out perfectly. Use your brain for the measurements like I did and attempt the possible: chickpeas, cilantro, parsley, onion, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, flour.

Both graduate school applications are DONE and SUBMITTED!

I found my score report today for the GRE and was pleasantly surprised: 98th percentile on both the verbal and analytical writing... 60th for the math (better than half, right?).

Told my students that Eurodisney isn't the only one.

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Funny conversation with my mom:

Me: They call me "Rachelle" at school.
Mom: Awwe, that's so pretty! I wish I named you that.
Me: Why didn't you?
Mom: I didn't know.

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I found the humming obelisk from "Space Odyssey: 2001"! Nah... it's just La Defense (Paris, Feb. 2010)

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Yeah... I'm listening to The Pharcyde (thanks, Don!). 

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Cool blog I found while looking for old pictures of Levittown (have to horrify the students somehow): Helquin Artifacts

God! I can't stand when people drown their natural body odor in cologne or perfume... the stench chokes me in the same way I feel asphyxiated by car fumes. Gross.

Le Petit Poucet

We have the story; the French have a noun. A petit poucet is a child (the child) that ventures into a forest and leaves a trail of breadcrumbs behind. It's nice to be able to use a perfectly-defined noun ("t'es un petit pouce, toi!") instead of a weak comparison ("you're like that kid from the story where…"). Language score: love-one, France.

But the bourgeois metaphors aside, let's figure out linguistically why the French language has such a highfalutin reputation. Get out your GRE vocabulary list and tell me what these commonly-used (as in, commonly used by my 7 year-old students) French words mean:

ameliorer (v.)
inondation (n.)
panoplie (n.)
tempete (n.)
draconien (adj.)
puissance (n.)
exiger (v.)
egalement (adv.)
mendiant (n.)
lumiere (n.)
tenir (v.)
flegmatique (adj.)
quotidien (adj.)
essayer (v.)
os (n.)
pueril (adj.)

Maybe draconien and puerile are more Le Monde than l'ecole, but for the most part, these words are in very regular parlance (voila!). I've had students complain about being wet from l'inondation (attn: hyperbole) and sales clerks wish me a cheerful merci egalement, while I essay just about everything in attempts to ameliorer my French. But can't I just improve my French? No.

It almost bothers me that these words are used with such fluency by my students. For an anglophone, learning "fancy" vocabulary words is like discovering the key to another, more precise language -- but it isn't. Par contre, it's learning synonyms for words in our own language that are already in use by pre-pubescent French children, who I doubt are somehow thinking on a higher linguistic level than college-educated, English-speaking adults. It's simply their language.

Almost 12 years of study, and the language fascinates me more than ever (and improves my English)…

Unrelated language question: does anyone know a word that is the opposite of "steep" (as in, a hill)? The only one I could think of was "gentle," but that doesn't feel right to me. Other languages are encouraged.

In other news, my April (and final!) vacation is planned. I wanted to get the tickets and all that out of the way so I could freely enjoy my final month and a half in the Vosges… (I'm holding out on an emotional blog post; I can already feel the ostrich egg of tears beginning to grow in the back of my throat.)

My itinerary: Brussels for five days, Amsterdam for six, Luxembourg for three. Daytrips to Bruges, Antwerp, The Hague, Rotterdam, and perhaps some traditional Dutch fishing villages (as suggested by my Dutch friend Brenda; see below photo) are all possible. Besides the gastronomic delights I'm prepared to experience -- fries, beer, chocolate, waffles, cheese, and ahem, coffee-shops -- I'm also quite excited to hear some Belgian and Luxembourg French. Different vocabularies, accents, grammar, linguistic influences (e.g., Flemish, Dutch, Wallon, Luxembourgeois). A weekend trip to Basel (Switzerland) is on my back burner, too. I want to get to all the francophone countries in Europe!

 

Out of the mountains and into the low countries.

Setting in, getting on

Aside from vacation recovery and its subsequent re-planning (BeNeLux, here I come!), life has been blustery and regular. I went skiing three times last week, since we had a mouthful of SUPERB snow: cross-country on Wednesday and Sunday, downhill on Saturday with Danny (pictures to follow, pending Danny's e-mail). It's nice to know how well muscle memory works -- I haven't seen a a pair of skis since the epic DAHS Ski Trip of 2005.

I resent enjoying sports that by necessity are labeled bourgeois: tennis, skiing, horseback riding. Why couldn't I just have played soccer as a kid?

C'est vrai?

So I know it's in French but if you want to translate it, here it is: http://sciences.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/03/02/depuis-le-seisme-au-chili-les-jours-ont-raccourci/#xtor=RSS-32280322

In sum, the earthquake in Chile was so large it threw off the rotation of the Earth and shortened our days by 1.26 microseconds! The 2004 earthquake in Sumatra did the same thing, by 6.8 microseconds.

I wonder if our days were a lot longer millions and millions of years ago?

How much does a microsecond affect plant life?

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I saw the documentary "Oceans" today with my school -- go!! It's certainly a film with an agenda, but one that you'll at least agree with. (You can be sickened by Michael Moore, but when it comes to animals, I don't think anyone can argue.)

Some highlights: a baleen whale's tail emerging from the water (one of the most beautiful images I've ever seen, actually); a baby sea lion crying; a crab fighting a lobster and getting its arm ripped off.



[I didn't know this was a Disney production until I found this trailer! Kind of makes me like it less...]

From one of my students right before the film started, in French: "Rachelle, the movie is in French, will you be able to understand it?"

EDIT: the movie was created and directed by a French director and crew, but Disney "adapted" it for American audiences... gross.

Really?

http://coffeepartyusa.org/