My French is broken. I have lived in a French speaking country for nearly a decade and my French is broken. I can read Balzac and Zola and I can ask for a novel by Jules Verne in the bookstore, but I cannot understand my plumber, the satellite guy, the post person, most shop keepers, and even the daily newsreader on the TV. My French is broken or rather my French ear is broken. For ten years, I have heard nothing but one continuous noise emanating from any Belgian French speaker within five feet of me. Each and everyone sounds like the "adults" in an old Charlie Brown animated film, "Wawa wa wa wawa wa wa.." I cannot find the beginning or end of a single spoken word and I know the problem is mine, or rather my ears'.
I have tried to remedy the situation, with endless radio and TV. I've attended endless expensive lessons, purchased workbooks and CD's, and downloaded mp3 files to play while sleeping. My last French professor recommended hypnosis and I think he was being kind while truly thinking I needed more in depth therapy to release some deeply held psychosis against the Belgian culture. This may also be true, as at least a dozen Belgians attempted to murder me by car during the first four weeks in the country, but that story is for another time or perhaps never.
The problem is my ear and I have to be patient and so starts September and another round of lessons. As per my teacher's recommendations, I tune in the French satellite again. There are five stations. If I'm lucky, once a week there will be something interesting between the endless talking heads, game shows and singing contests. Tonight, I hit the jackpot, a movie. The title is in French, "Celui qu'on attendait" and it translates roughly to "The one we were waiting for". This sounds vaguely promising. I'm expecting some old villager sitting at a rough table in a dark room expounding about the lost good old days punctuated by scenes of rustic village life, food, wine, broken trucks, shoddy electricity, shady government officials and the like. This is roughly what I get, except that the old man in this film is constantly screaming "Je voudrais aller a l'aeroport!" Well, I get that one sentence. It's been repeated at least five times. I must be making progress right?
Yeah, I'm making progress alright. It took 45 minutes and half the film to figure out this story is about an old French actor who some how gets lost in Armenia and an impoverished village takes full advantage of his situation in scenes of rustic village life, food, wine, broken trucks, flaky electricity and shady government officials. And the vast majority of dialog, in the movie directed by Serge Avedikian and fillmed in Armenian, you guessed it ... it's Armenian. Well, I now know six slightly different ways to say "I want to go to the airport.", maybe the universe is telling me something.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Today's Whinge
Many of my posts on Facebook are in fact whining and whinging because frankly..Facebook is my virtual wall punching apparatus. It's cheaper than hand surgery. So take this for what it is...it is whinging.
Today, full of optimism and energy, I hit the kitchen first thing. I cleaned out the frig, wiped the shelves, cleaned the stove top, cleaned the grease off the cabinets and finally, moved all the furniture out and scrubbed the floor by hand...with a scrub brush...and a bucket of rinse water. Oh man, did that room look good! Self-satisfied with the feeling that only comes with finishing off the endless boredom of daily household chore list, I went upstairs for my morning cleanup and since I had done all the hard and messy work of the day I was free to indulge in bon-bon eating and TV for the rest of the day because that's the lie all housewives tell the outside world. I put on some decent clothes and even pressed my blouse collar and then, I returned to the kitchen to rewarded myself with a large, milky, steaming cup of hot coffee.
With all that milk, I needed to warm my coffee up a bit more in the microwave. I stood at the kitchen window with my book in hand waiting for the microwave anticipating stealing about thirty minutes of a blissful reading in the sun on the terrace. "DING" I opened the vengeful white box, took out the cup and began my journey to the door. I failed to note the power setting on the microwave had been reset.
Super heated coffee exploded out of the cup halfway through my journey to the door. Luckily and unluckily, I had set my newest cookbook on top of the giant coffee mug so as to have a free a hand for the doorknob. This move saved me from spending any time in A&E. I am so thankful for that.
The book, however directed hot milky coffee laterally. The cabinets took a direct hit, my clothes, and then the floor. As a final punctuation, the book landed splat and directed the remaining liquid up my skirt, down my legs and into my shoes. I even put shoes on this morning, dammit, good leather ones, not the usual rinse and wear Crocs. Well, thinking, "no good deed...", I sighed deeply and in my damp clothes, I wiped up the puddle, tossed the book, wiped down the cabinets and the counter tops and finally, damp mopped the floor. Pleased I had, yet again, cleaned the room, I went upstairs to change my clothes.
Returning through the kitchen with a load of laundry ten minutes later and in some wool socks, I am now walking through cold coffee puddles. How can this be? Yep, the coffee had shot out laterally with enough force enter INTO the cabinets, taking a full thirty minutes to run though the pots and pans and cereal boxes, around the canned soup and through the dishwasher tabs to finally return to the place of lowest entropy, the floor, only to be taken up again by my wool socks and spread further through the garage into the laundry room. Well, here let me fix that for you...."no good deed goes unpunished, twice."
It didn't end with the coffee in the kitchen...I'm now up to my neck with a broken over-engineered German heating system that has been taught to speak French. The manual is in German, the furnace heater's computer controlled programmable climate control system speaks French, my plumber speaks Walloon. I speak English and I still haven't had my coffee.
The final irony to this day is that the ruined book was about Danish hygge.
Today, full of optimism and energy, I hit the kitchen first thing. I cleaned out the frig, wiped the shelves, cleaned the stove top, cleaned the grease off the cabinets and finally, moved all the furniture out and scrubbed the floor by hand...with a scrub brush...and a bucket of rinse water. Oh man, did that room look good! Self-satisfied with the feeling that only comes with finishing off the endless boredom of daily household chore list, I went upstairs for my morning cleanup and since I had done all the hard and messy work of the day I was free to indulge in bon-bon eating and TV for the rest of the day because that's the lie all housewives tell the outside world. I put on some decent clothes and even pressed my blouse collar and then, I returned to the kitchen to rewarded myself with a large, milky, steaming cup of hot coffee.
With all that milk, I needed to warm my coffee up a bit more in the microwave. I stood at the kitchen window with my book in hand waiting for the microwave anticipating stealing about thirty minutes of a blissful reading in the sun on the terrace. "DING" I opened the vengeful white box, took out the cup and began my journey to the door. I failed to note the power setting on the microwave had been reset.
Super heated coffee exploded out of the cup halfway through my journey to the door. Luckily and unluckily, I had set my newest cookbook on top of the giant coffee mug so as to have a free a hand for the doorknob. This move saved me from spending any time in A&E. I am so thankful for that.
The book, however directed hot milky coffee laterally. The cabinets took a direct hit, my clothes, and then the floor. As a final punctuation, the book landed splat and directed the remaining liquid up my skirt, down my legs and into my shoes. I even put shoes on this morning, dammit, good leather ones, not the usual rinse and wear Crocs. Well, thinking, "no good deed...", I sighed deeply and in my damp clothes, I wiped up the puddle, tossed the book, wiped down the cabinets and the counter tops and finally, damp mopped the floor. Pleased I had, yet again, cleaned the room, I went upstairs to change my clothes.
Returning through the kitchen with a load of laundry ten minutes later and in some wool socks, I am now walking through cold coffee puddles. How can this be? Yep, the coffee had shot out laterally with enough force enter INTO the cabinets, taking a full thirty minutes to run though the pots and pans and cereal boxes, around the canned soup and through the dishwasher tabs to finally return to the place of lowest entropy, the floor, only to be taken up again by my wool socks and spread further through the garage into the laundry room. Well, here let me fix that for you...."no good deed goes unpunished, twice."
It didn't end with the coffee in the kitchen...I'm now up to my neck with a broken over-engineered German heating system that has been taught to speak French. The manual is in German, the furnace heater's computer controlled programmable climate control system speaks French, my plumber speaks Walloon. I speak English and I still haven't had my coffee.
The final irony to this day is that the ruined book was about Danish hygge.
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