Long Etrangère

The road goes ever on and on/ Out from the door from where it began/ Now, far ahead the road has gone/ And I must follow if I can/ Pursuing it with eager feet/ Until it meets some other way/ Where many paths and errands meet/ And whither then I cannot say. J.R.R. Tolkien

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Location: Metro DC, United States

All stories are true. Some even actually happened.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

bus-1 etrangere-2

Last night someone informed me that the front gate was broken and that no one would be able to leave until someone came to fix it in the morning. There is a back entrance to the building/parkinglot; however, you have to go through the part of the building that’s closed off to us students to get to it. But I was determined to make every effort to get to school before I called in with the lame excuse that I was locked in.

The wall around the parking lot is rather high. There are no sturdy enough branches on the willow by it to use to climb it, and even so, I didn’t like the idea of a 10-15 foot drop onto the concrete after I got to the top.

Finally, someone arrived to open the office around 7:30. The Intendante, a very friendly woman, shook my hand warmly (trying to welcome the bisou-shy American, I’m sure) and said goodmorning but I was on a mission. Running down the street, I barely made a metro, which allowed me barely to make the 7:40 bus. Success is heady.

Robert, the guy who welcomed me the very first night I was here, happened to be on the bus with some of his friends. We exchanged stories about our vacations (apparently he drank way too much and was still sick when he showed up to school the third. Is the Fidel Gastro, as Ringo calls it, really the flu?) (he was also calling me tu but as I never see him in class I let it slide. Usually students are supposed to use the more formal vous with teachers). He had broken up with his girlfriend. She had slapped him several times and his friends kept telling him this wasn’t normal. It wasn’t until she scratched him hard enough on the face to draw blood that he could stop justifying her actions to himself and say hey, something might be wrong here. In his words (I think) c’etait le goutte de l’eau qui a fait déborder le verre (it was the drop of water that made the glass overflow)

Good for him. He’s a sweetheart. I hope he finds someone who deserves him soon.

Had a mini French lesson today in the Salle des profs concerning /u/ and /y/. The one is more or less the oo sound we use, and the other one, which to the untrained ear very closely resembles it, can be likened to an “ee” sound made with rounded lips. Both are very commonly used sounds. And there are lots of words and phrases that differ only by this sound, so it’s important to know the difference. For example, the words for over (au dessus) and under (au dessous). So if someone tells to put the book under the desk and grab a chocolate kiss from the jar on top of it, you need to listen closely. These words also form an expression that means “helter skelter”- Sens dessus dessous (which when Ringo pronounced it sounded just like “sans tsoo tsoo.” )

Apparently a former assistant from years past liked to play off the English ignorance of these sounds and would thank people saying “Merci beau cul” (Thanks nice ass).

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