Anarchist with an accordion

My friend Félicie sent me an email the other day, recommending I watch this video of Renaud's "En Cloque - Renaud is a French singer that Félicie described as "half rocker, half anarchist but very sweet." He made his name writing political protest songs.

"En Cloque" is a French slang terms for pregnant - this tune is about watching his wife progress through her pregnancy. I really have no idea what he's singing about - the lyrics riddled with slang terms I can't follow even with Félicie's helpful translations - but for some reason I can't stop watching this and getting bewilderingly emotional (it is a pretty little tune).

French anarchists obviously are a bit more multi-faceted than their English speaking brethren - I don't see Johnny Rotten sneering his sentimental way through an accordion based-tune about the miracle of childbirth.

French fried

_{The whole point of the bike trip was to see cherry and apple blossoms. We were too late, except for a row of rapidly browning blooms just outside the village. But look: infant cherries!}

One of the things I’ve discovered about learning and speaking a second language is that it is physically tiring to do for any length of time. It’s not just me – I tutor a couple of different people in English here: they consistently complain of exhaustion by the end of the lesson (cue joke about my personality having that effect on people).

This weekend, I organized a bike trip along the ever-famous rainbows and ponies trail with some friends of ours from Amynah’s institute. The initial group consisted of at least three native English speakers, one other who is more comfortable in English than French, and one French-preferring participant. By Sunday scheduling conflicts and illness had whittled this down to me and three French speakers.

I have gone through entire evenings when French was the only language spoken, and so, as we set out, was not at all thinking the language would be a problem. However, during dinner parties, one is not generally required to maintain a conversation for the entire evening – the dynamics of dinner conversation usually allow for some verbal down-time, as others tell a story, or launch into a debate to which others can be spectators.

On a bike trip with only four cyclists, this was not possible. We quickly broke up into two pairs – my friend Lama biking with a master’s student from her lab, while I led the way alongside their colleague.


_{Orchards near Westhoffen}

As far as I could tell, neither of Lama’s friends spoke a word of English. I therefore spent four hours, pedaling 44 kilometers through the beautiful Alsatian countryside, conversing only in French. The mundane requirements of bicycle navigation robbed me of the ability to wave my hands about to facilitate communication, and so I had to actually concentrate on using the correct tenses that I usually indicate by pointing forward (future), pointing forward and waggling my hand (future conditional), or waving over my shoulder (past). The amount of concentration I had to put into translating my many, many witty anecdotes into French for a new audience meant I nearly rolled directly into the Bruche canal several times.

In any case, by the time we all made it to Molsheim, the French overload and incipient sunstroke had left me a wrung-out mess, sunburned, incoherent, and craving a nap. In contrast, my companions were all fresh as daisies, despite never having biked over 8 kilometers at a stretch before in their lives.

_{* Of course, the fact that French was also the second language for all three of my fellow cyclists rather undermines my language-is-tiring theory. But I cling to it nonetheless, for otherwise I’d be forced to admit that my relative distress might have something to do with me being roughly 8 years older than them.}

A park to beat the band

Yesterday, Amynah and I decided to take advantage of the unexpectedly fine weather and make our way to l’Orangerie park, and “English stye” public gardens not far from the European institutions in Europe. It’s a beautiful place, but far enough of a walk from where we live that we don’t make it out as often as we would like.

As a result, I had missed, on my previous visits, an historical plaque explaining the origins of the manor house in the center of the park. Amynah and I both took a look at it at the same time, me labouring my way through the French, she zipping through an English explanation I didn’t notice.

“It was for the Empress Josephine,” said Amynah.

“What?” I looked at the French again – no mention of Josephine at all.

It turns out the plaque had two different, though related, explanations for the site (and perhaps even a third, but I didn’t attempt to decipher the German version).



In the terse English explanation, the park and manor house were built “in honour” of Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, the Empress Josephine. In the longer and distinctly more hard-eyed French version, the park and manor house were built “to gain favour with Napoleon.” In other words, less a tribute than a bribe.

After a quick jaunt around the park, we were lured back to the front of the building by the sound of drums. There was some sort of multi-cultural festival going on, and a troupe of musician/dancers from, I believe, Ghana were putting on a show (Amynah thinks they were actually from the considerably less-exotic suburb of Lingolsheim. But she’s an incorrigible cynic).



The drumming and dancing were very entertaining and athletic (look at the arms on those guys!) but they didn’t really work up a sweat until they attempted the almost impossible feat of getting French people to sing in public. The only other time Amynah and I went to a public concert here, the singer attempted the audience to join in for “Il est né” a catchy, easy-to-sing and French Christmas carol. They sat like stones. Here, one of the drummers tried to get a call-and-response chant going for a traditional African song. He didn’t stand a chance – despite heroic efforts, the best he could extract from the 100 or so onlookers was “mumbly mumbly mumbly ooooooh,” delivered with all the enthusiasm of someone asking for herpes medication in a crowded pharmacy. Finally, he gave up, and took out his frustrations about his maudits audience on his drum, to everyone’s relief.

Tongue tied twisted

I’ve been doing a lot of language exchanges of late, as well as taking a regular French class. In addition, at my former French teacher’s urging, I’m making some moves towards teaching English on a semi-professional basis here. As such, I’ve been thinking a lot about language.

The cliché in Canada is that the French and English are “Two Solitudes,” a phrase popularized by the novel of that title by Hugh MacLennan, that has come to signify the divisions between the two cultures. I prefer to remember that the phrase originated with Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote that: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”

While the whole is certainly a lot more positive than the bit MacLennan excised for his title, I can’t help but notice that while Rilke’s love requires protection, touching and greeting of his solitudes, it does not demand that they speak to one another. This was wise.

In a country where it is somehow perfectly acceptable to say "Je cherche le parking pour le weekend," and the foreign content of last year's Eurovision song contest entry was decried in Parliament, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would invent the English Doormat Prize, which names and shames those who pollute the purity of the tongue with English. So far, I am happy to report that they haven't discovered this blog.

As my far-more linguistically gifted friend David has already noted, communication is difficult when some of the concepts don’t exist in the other language. This strike-ridden, revolution-prone country apparently lacks a word for “cranky,” while the Anglo-Saxon peoples – a culture that created the laugh track and the music of John Tesh – have no easy way to express ennui.

However, it isn’t the foreign concepts that cause the real problems, it’s the faux amis - those words that should mean the same, but don’t. At a dinner this weekend, my friend Sebastien told us how, in his previous life as a video-game tester, he noted that the French version of sports game told players, once their team had been eliminated, that they were “Over seasoned” (while this might have been referring to the fact their goose was cooked, Sebastien advised his employers to modify it to better reflect the English “season over.”)*

Of course, Amynah still possesses the best language mix-up story of our time in France. It was her first week in her lab. She didn’t really know where things were, and so asked Audrey the technician where she could find some chemicals with which she could fix her cell samples. Audrey’s eyes widened, “Err… umm… at a pharmacy,” she replied in French. “At a pharmacy? These are pretty common things to have in a lab. Why don’t you have some here?” asked Amynah.

It was only after some confusion that Audrey conveyed to Amynah she had called the chemicals she needed “preservatifs” – and had thus asked Audrey for access to the lab’s supply of condoms.

* _{Similar confusion probably earned me quite a reputation in Toronto, where I was at a student journalism conference many, many years ago. A Filipino cleaning lady entered my room in the morning, where I was lying in bed, recovering from the party the night before. A quick glance told her all she needed to know: “So, you are over hung?” "Yep! Be sure to tell everyone you know!"}

All for one and free for all

Amynah is now back in Strasbourg, and has spent the last two days attempting to come up with a remark suitably cutting enough to encourage me to shave my nascent beard.* So far, she’s taken to calling me D’Artagnan, as in the Three Musketeers. That’s backfired, as I rather like looking like the kind of guy who could whip out his epée at the slightest provocation.



Anyway, shortly after her arrival, as we chatted in the cab on the way back from Strasbourg’s airport, I realized that I had spoken barely any English while she was gone. I had, of course, been over at Danielle and David’s place, but that barely counts as he’s British, and thus still clinging to some near-incomprehensible island dialect with only a distant relationship to English as it is spoken in the civilized world.

Otherwise, most of my socializing was conducted entirely in the language of Molière, as long as you believe Molière was a stammering bumpkin with a vocabulary of 400 words and no grasp of the future-conditional. I was quite proud of myself, frankly. It became natural enough to me that, by the end of the week, it was my default language in which to start a conversation - even when speaking to English speakers whose French was no better than mine.

Though, to be fair, much of my “French” conversation was conducted with people who were trying to improve their English, and thus spoke to me in English even while repressing their wincing as I mangled their language. My fragile comprehension skills were therefore subject to almost no duress at all.

Attempting to explain the ins-and-outs of English to none-native speakers really does make one realize how ridiculous some of our language actually is. My friend Félicie, for instance, cannot wrap her head around the expression “I feel like” meaning “I would like.” As she points out, “I feel like chocolate” would seem to imply that you’re made of chocolate. Her regular English teacher told her that “I fancy chocolate” would be a way to get around this, but personally I feel that’s so insufferably British it would be better if she just grabbed the chocolate without asking. People would understand.

Of course, my North American language biases do have their drawbacks. Earlier in the week I was having coffee with my friend Mirna, during which I complimented her on her collier - at which point she asked me for the English word.

“Necklace” I said, with perfect Canadian diction.

“Like…. N-E-C-K-L-E-S-S ?” she asked.

I explained that no, as funny an image as it may be, this was not the case, and vowed to improve my pronunciation. However, given that Mirna’s thinking of doing a postdoc in Canada, perhaps I should teach her the proper way to end a sentence with the word “eh?” and that “where’re y’at?” is a perfectly acceptable formulation. Working on another language has improved my English in other ways as well – French is a very precise language** which, I hope, has spilled over to my spoken English. As well, I remain forever grateful to Félicie for giving me the phrase “Big hugs on Amynah” which I think is a wonderful turn of phrase. Though I may be biased due to its subject.

* Photos of said beard will be posted when it graduates from “nascent” to “not laughable.”

** I say this despite that they have the same word for “spire” and “arrow,” i.e. flèche, which I’m pretty sure translates as “pointy thing.”

Where is the noisome dairy product please?

_{Don't be put off by the German at the beginning: worth watching}

The other day I noticed a piece of paper had blown in from the street into the entrance hallway of our apartment. On it, in blue pencil was written “Ou est le Munster, s.v.p.” Below that, in the same hand, was written “U E ló múnster sil wu plá.”

I pointed this out to Amynah, hypothesising it must have been given by someone to their visiting grandmother, with a phonetic approximation in her native language (Polish? Portuguese?) of how to ask directions to the Cathedral (which would explain why it was discarded in front of our apartment).

Amynah, on the other hand, thought initially thought it was some kind of strange art project : Munster is a Germanic word for Cathedral, but it’s also a kind of stinky Alsatian cheese (though, to be fair, Amynah believes pretty much everything out of the ordinary is evidence of the surrealist art conspiracy).

It’s been a weird week for language. I met up with my friend Caner on Tuesday, for our usual walk-around town and babble-bilingually language exchange. In the email to confirm the meeting, he had sent me an email saying that he couldn’t meet later in the week because he had to “Prepare his case.”

When we met, I explained that while the individual words in that sentence were correct, I assumed that as he’s planning on visiting Turkey next week, he meant to say he was going to pack his suitcase.

This led to further bewilderment on his part: he had thought that a suitcase was what we call a briefcase, reasoning that they were usually carried by men in suits.

Later in the same conversation, he asked me what the word for “cru” was.

“Raw,” I said.

“Ro-a,” he said.

“No… raw,” I said.

“Rar,” he replied.

I this point I started laughing, and explained to him the one of the French words I had the most difficulty pronouncing was “Roi,” which usually comes out of my mouth something like “raw.”

Thus, we spent the next couple of minutes, until our tongues cramped, attempting to nail this down:

Caner: “The “R” has to come from the throat [making elegant French choking sound]… roi!”

Me: Wah!

Him (attempting raw): rawer!

Me: Hhcraw!

Him: Raoer!

Me: Oauhwa!

The other folks on the sidewalk must have thought we had been raised by unusually inarticulate dogs.

_{* On a related note, I recently learned that “pas terrible” in French does not mean, as one would expect, “Not bad” but actually “awful.” Whereas “terrible” actually means something is good, in the same way that calling Shaft a “Bad motherf**ker” was paying him the highest of compliments. Nonetheless, I find it ironic that my language skill is so poor as to have led to me claiming to have excellent French for the last two years.}

Summertime, and the living's easy

_{What? This thing again?}

A point-form summation of a near-perfect weekend:

- Friday afternoon, biking through the Illkirch forest, then into Germany and up the Rhine to Kehl.

- Being hailed, in Kehl, by a street-side flower seller desperate to unload the last of his merchandise so that he could catch the Turkey-Croat match in the Euro Cup. We walked away with five bouquets for 11 Euros.

- Watching a three-person German bar band do a Robbie Williams cover in the pre-match party by the giant outdoor screen. Star of the show: the bongo-playing Jessica Simpson look-alike, complete with cowboy boots and Stetson.

- The band was followed by a pair of 12-year old bellydancers, who took it well in stride with the beatnik-cowgirl tried to steal their moment in the sun by returning to the stage with a live boa constrictor draped over her shoulders. All class, that one.

- Saturday we hit the local farmer’s market, then hopped on our bikes to hit an even larger farmer’s market not far from the university.

- Spent the afternoon napping and reading Le Monde which came with a supplement from the New York Times. The latter came with an index explaining such mysteries of the English language like “to hit the wall.”

- In the evening, we wandered the town, taking in the sights and sounds of the Fêtes de musique, in which every village in France is turned into a stage for every semi-talented bar band that ever plugged in a Stratocaster. We saw bands that sounded like The Cure, The Talking Heads, Thomas Dolby, The Pointer Sisters, Steppenwolf, The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols and Hole. We did not manage to hear anything that sounded like it had been recorded in this century* (or, for that matter, anything French) but the aural walk through my youth was refreshing nonetheless. Or at least it was, until about midnight, at which point I could have done with some sleep. It was not to be, as two of the main stages were set up in front of the Cathedral and on Place Gutenberg, thus ensuring that we got to hear U2 battling it out with Aretha Franklin all night long.

- Bleary eyed and ill-rested, we hopped on our bikes first thing Sunday morning, in order to rendez-vous with Amynah’s boss Brigitte and her husband for a hike. We ended up doing the same route as I had with Tasha and Travis a few weeks before, largely because Brigitte was tickled by the name my guidebook had breathlessly given it: “Witches and Bloody Sacrifices.” The hike was a delight (I will never tire of being able to picnic in the ruins of a 13th century castle) but the return home was even better. The temperatures reached 33 degrees Celsius yesterday, and so we were all quite happy to don our fancy Euro-Speedos (or their gender appropriate equivalents) and splash around in Brigitte’s pool for the remains of the afternoon. This was followed by a dinner of loup marin and rosé taken poolside.


_{* We did hear a cover of the White Strips' “Seven Nation Army,” but it sounded like something Bruce Springsteen would have done with the E-Street Band, complete with saxophone solo. This group also won the fun French-ism of the night award: “…I’m going to Wee-shee-taw.”}

Le week-end

Went to see our arguably competent doctor on Saturday, in order to get some vaccinations for some travel we might be doing next year. I mentioned to him that I might have had these vaccinations before, but had lost my records and couldn't recall. The good doctor, who seems to believe that speaking quicker will help me better understand his poorly enunciated French, launched into a long discourse on the nature of the drugs he was prescribing and their potential effects. In any case, I heard a lot of negative sounding French words, but lost the thread of what he was telling me pretty early on in his speech. Nonetheless, I sat, mind wandering, nodding and saying "Oui" at the appropriate junctures. I snapped to attention at the five minute mark when he reached his big climax: "But there's no proof of any of that." No proof of what now?

Later that night, unsure of how long I had to live, I went out Saturday night with my language exchange partner Caner to felicitate our mutual friend Sebastien, who will be a father in a little more than a week. We went to see a local football/soccer match. Let me tell you, nothing makes sitting in the freezing cold for two hours while being deafened in one ear by the shrieks of over-stimulated French children worthwhile like a final score of 0-0.

On a lighter note...

In French class yesterday we were doing an exercise to help us master the future conditional, in which we would ask each other questions like "If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?"

At one point, I was asked if I could eat any meal, with a dining companion of my choice, what and who would it be. Taking my role as class clown seriously, I answered duck (I do love me some duck), which I would eat with Kate Moss, adding "That way, there would be more food for me."

Later I was asked if I could be anyone in the world for 24 hours, who would it be, and what would I do. Again, thinking I was being clever, I answered Bill Gates, and I would give all my money to Mark Reynolds.

Topping me when his turn came, Gabor, my Hungarian classmate, answered without batting an eye "I'd be Kate Moss, and go to dinner with Mark."

First day and already hated by my classmates

So, French classes started yesterday. As part of a getting-to-know us exercise, my French teacher asked the motley crew that is my cohort about our travel experiences. For some reason, rather than asking me where I'd been, she asked me for a bad travel experience. I replied that I don't believe in bad experiences, just good stories. I then launched - in French - into this sorry tale.

My saga of suffering and woe was so well received, that she made it a homework assignment for everyone in the class to tell their own travel story for the next class. This includes me, despite my heroic efforts yesterday. Any readers have any favourites?