Et, si ça va!

2+/2+.  Needed a 3/3.  Another six weeks.  On the other hand, that’s about where I thought I really was.

Milestones

Friday I take my language test.  This is where I stalled out last time, not quite getting to the 3/3 I needed to get off language probation before I went to Cotonou.  You see, when you first join the Foreign Service, you’re on a five year time clock.  At some time before then, you need to get tenure, part of which is mastering (more or less) a language.

My brain and languages do not mix well.  I can get to a certain point, but the details of correct grammar as used on-the-fly defeat me.

I have no doubt I am better in French (particularly speaking) than I was when I tested before Cotonou, but the test is a crapshoot.  Who will be your evaluators?  What reading articles will they choose for you?  Which presentation topics will they offer?  Will you have the vocabulary to deal with them?

The presentation was what killed me last time, so I am preparing for it differently this time.  I’m practicing the structure more than the details.  As I drive, I give a presentation on a topic I haven’t done before.  It helps me think about how I would deal with that topic, and if I am missing any vocabulary (for example, I just looked up “steam engine” for my presentation on energy).  I give the presentations out loud, because your French is always better in your head.  I repeat and repeat the openings and closings so they become (close to) automatic.

Is language important to our work overseas?  Yes it is.  Is it the most important?  I don’t really think so.  Language is a tool, but it is only one tool.  It reminds me of when I was majoring in Journalism but couldn’t type worth a damn.  I almost wasn’t allowed into the basic journalism course because of my typing, but one  did, I aced the class, almost always being among the first to finish an assignment.  Why?  Because it’s not all about typing speed!  It’s also not all about language.

Nevertheless, this week, it’s practiquer, practiquer, practiquer!

Montreal Interlude

So, there’s a week between Christmas and New Year’s Day that a place like FSI has no idea how to handle.  Most people want to take vacation, but how to handle those who don’t?  Most of the instructors want to be elsewhere.

Well, there is unstructured study, but you have to physically do it at FSI, so, for example, if you want to spend the week practicing the language in, say, where they speak it (like Quebec…or France) you have to take leave.  Which I did.

I chose Montreal over Paris because it took fewer frequent flyer miles to get there.  My plan was to see the city, try to speak as much French as possible, and take a break.  I’d stay in a local B&B to speak French with the owners at breakfast and get a bit of local culture.

The results were mixed.

Ultimately, I won’t know the results until I pass (or don’t) French.  I did speak a lot of French and watch a lot of French TV (I’ve now seen the same Mythbusters episode in three different language versions).  I learned local TV news covers the same fires and car crashes no matter the language.  The B&B experiment didn’t work because the owner wasn’t interested in being a host, and pretty much left me on my own.  Overall, I think it helped, but not as much as it might have if a few more things had fallen into place.

Montreal was nice, but I think I like Ottawa better.  I think it’s more livable, although Montreal’s mass transit has a lot to recommend it.

You can’t trust the weatherman either place.  The forecast was (at various times) — mild all week, wind chills near 35 below, a foot of snow, freezing rain, and just about everything but sunny and 70 degrees (well, everything is Celsius, so that would be sunny and 21 degrees).

I did make a lot of use of French language television, particularly the news.  If you watch their equivalent of CNN, they’ll repeat the same stories several times over the course of an hour which helps you pick up understanding over time.  Watching US TV shows (NCIS, Stargate) dubbed into French gives you the advantage of knowing more of less what’s going on and using context to aid understanding the French.

Happy New Year!

Grand-mère s’est fait écraser par un renne

Okay, we finished it.

It seems that the French Department does a Christmas party every year and the classes are expected to perform something.  Thanks to all my classmates and a couple of teachers who helped make this more or less correct in grammar, rhyme and scan.

 

To sing along.

 

Grand-mère s’est fait écraser par un renne
En marchant chez elle la veille de Noël
Tu peut dire qu’il n’ya pas de Santa
Mais pour moi et grand-père, c’est Père Noel!

Elle avait bu trop d’lait de poule
Et nous lui avons dit: arrête !
Donc, en sortant d’où il neigeait
Elle a trébuché a’la porte sous la tempête

Quand ils l’ont trouvé le Noël
Sur la scène de son attaque
Des empreintes des sabots de renne
A travers son dos et aussi sur son sac

Grand-mère s’est fait écraser par un renne
En marchant chez elle la veille de Noël
Tu peut dire qu’il n’ya pas de Santa
Mais pour moi et grand-père, c’est Père Noel!

Maintenant nous sommes fiers de grand-père
Qu’il a bien pris tout cela
Il regarde un match de football
Lorsque il boit de la bière sans grand-maman

Ce n’est pas Noël sans grand-mère
Toute la famille est vêtue de’noir
et nous nous demandons encore
si nous pouvons ouvrir ses cadeau ce soir

Grand-mère s’est fait écraser par un renne
En marchant chez elle la veille de Noël
Tu peut dire qu’il n’ya pas de Santa
Mais pour moi et grand-père, c’est Père Noel!

Maintenant le dinde est sur la table
Et le pomme de terre purée
C’est une bougie bleue argentée
La perruque de grand-mère ressemblée

J’ai prévenu mes plus chers amis
Mieux surveiller prés de chez vous
ils ne doivent pas donner de permis
Á un homme qui conduit toujours un traîneau

Grand-mère s’est fait écraser par un renne
En marchant chez elle la veille de Noël
Tu peut dire qu’il n’ya pas de Santa
Mais pour moi et grand-père, c’est Père Noel!

French notes, sharp and flat

Sometimes I get in a mood in French class to translate something. Often it’s a short phrase that may or may not work in French (“In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King” worked. “Elephant in the room” didn’t.) The most challenging one I ever attempted was “Who’s on First”, which neither works linguistically or culturally.

This week, we were talking Christmas carols in class.  I headed off to the language lab and well…here’s what happened:

Grand-mère était écraser d’un renne

Grand-mère était écraser d’un renne

Cours sa marche chez soi la veille de Noel

Vous pensez qu’il n’ya pas de Santa

Mais pour moi et grand-père, c’est actuel!

I’m actually rather proud of this, because it rhymes and scans (the scansion takes a bit of work, but it can work.)

No, I have no plans to do the rest of the song.

All my life (and everything else) ‘s a circle

Sometimes things just strike me.  Last night I was watching a PBS special on the problems which led to the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers comedy hour…

and I realized, things really do happen in cycles.

For example, a dozen years before SNL, there was TW3 (That Was The Week That Was).  Started in England, it moved quickly across the pond to the U.S. providing a weekly dose of satire closely following the news and culture.  It even started “Live, from New York!”. There’s almost none of it available online (except some early Tom Lehrer) but here’s a short clip from Alan Alda about appearing on the show.

Long before Colbert was deadpanning his politics, there was, on the aforementioned Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Pat Paulsen.  He started out giving editorials.

And ended up running for President.

and running…and running…

I remember one time he ran in the NH primary as a Republican because “The Democrats already had enough comedians on the ballot.”

They say in a world like we have today, satire is dead, but there’s always an edge and people who will balance along it’s jagged edge…maybe a little bit over.

Deer oh Deer!

That’s not a typo.

Not my car, but the damage was similar

I was driving back from Sunday breakfast a few weeks ago, through a built up area with no woods within sight when three deer went running across the road right in front of me.  I swerved, but not enough and caught one of the deer on the right front quarter panel (and headlight).  If I hadn’t swerved, it would have been head-on, and the deer probably would have gone through the windshield.  The car was more or less still drivable (in NASCAR, they would have hammered out the fender, put some 200 mph tape over the damage and sent me out before I lost a lap ) so I drove to a nearby Toyota dealer (thanks Garmin!).  They weren’t open yet, but the guy opening up let me use their phone to call around.  Their repair shop was closed…the body shop nearby was closed…the rental car place was closed…I could get in touch with the 24 hour service at my insurance company.  I ended up having  to call a cab to get me home (expensive!).

Not my deer, but more or less what happened

To make a long story short, I got the car back today.  It took four tries to do so:

1. Drive to rentacar place where I got the car – wrong, return it to the one closest to the body shop

2. Drive to bodyshop – car needs to be filled up – top off gas

3. Drive to bodyshop – drop off rental, pick up car, transfer everything from rental to my car

4. Get to within half a mile of home before realizing garage door opener is still in rental – return to bodyshop to get garage door opener

But, I have my Prius back, which makes me happy because:

1. It’s my car.  It’s always better to use something with “my” in front of it

2. It gets 50+ MPG (really, it does!)

3. I get to use the HOV lanes, which cuts off at least 10 minutes each way on my commute

I’m ready to head to post.  Unfortunately, it’s not up to me.  I still have to pass French.  Next evaluation is next week.  Unless I have a VERY good day, that won’t be a 3/3 (although I think I’m speaking better than I did when I got a 2+ two years ago), so, early January is my new target.  Of course, I could be wrong.

What’s a 3/3?  FSI grades language knowledge on a scale from 0 to 5 where 5 is native fluency and 0 is…well…zero.  The first 3 is for speaking, the second is for reading comprehension.  We don’t have to reach any level of writing, although we pick up quite a bit since we have to be able to read the stuff.

If you do have to write in a foreign language, a few tips.  Microsoft Word has some nice tools which can help.  You can reset your spellchecker for other languages.  You can reset your keyboard to make it easy to type letters with accents.  Google Translate is useful for tweaking phrases and Word Reference for definitions and as a thesaurus.

Well, I’d better go study some more for next week.

Oh Canada!

I’ve visited Canada before.  I even play a Canadian sport (curling).  But I hadn’t ever visited Ottawa or visited with the knowledge that, French permitting, I would be moving there.  So with a three day weekend beckoning, and lots of available frequent flyer miles, I decided to investigate further what the Mackenzie Brothers called “The Great White North.”

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, but it’s not a huge city.  It’s not a huge city, but it seems to be a city with everything you might want in a city (well, except perhaps a subway…the train, not the sandwich shop… THAT they have).  The Embassy is right near Parliament Hill, and right near Byward market, and walking distance to quite a bit of downtown.  Things it has:

• 24 hour restaurants (two within walking distance of my hotel, one a deli)
• IKEA
• Tim Horton’s
• Just about every US fast food you can think of
• Good bookshops
• Major and Minor League Hockey
• Museums
• Bilingual everything
• One and Two Dollar coins

What it doesn’t have (that I noticed):

• Off-road mass transit
• Professional Baseball (although it does have semi-pro, and has had AAA baseball in the past)
• Cheap anything
• Stuff with “Canada” written on it

Let’s touch on a few of these.  For those of you who haven’t been…Tim Horton’s is like Dunkin Donuts only (IMHO) better.  Prices for everything seem high.  I think this is a residue of when the Canadian Dollar was only about 2/3 the value of the U.S., but now they’re more or less at par.  Ottawa has two hockey teams, and NHL one (the Senators) and an OHL one (the 67′s).  The semi-pro baseball team is called the Fat Cats.

Ottawa is an interesting place to observe bilingualism.  It’s the Federal City, so all government signs are bilingual, and at the Airport I got the “Bonjour, Hello” greeting people use to determine which language you prefer to speak, but once you’re in Ottawa, it’s an English language city.  Cross the river, and you’re in Gatineau, in Quebec, and everything changes.  It’s uni-lingual French, which was good practice , if a little disconcerting in Wal-Mart (yes, I went to Wal-Mart in Quebec, in part just to say I had gone to Wal-Mart in Quebec.)

Now – today’s vocabulary:

• Drive thru – Service en volant
• Goalie – Guardien du but
• Garage sale – Vendre garage

Road signs (at least on the Ottawa side of the river) are serially bilingual: i.e. Rue Bank Street, with the name in bold.

I was in Ottawa for Remembrance Day, which is what they call what we call Veterans’ Day (and which we both used to call Armistice Day).  The Canadians take this a lot more seriously than we Americans do.  For us, it’s more often than not just an excuse for sales.  In Canada, everything (except Tim Horton’s and Starbucks) was closed until afternoon.  I got to attend the official ceremony in Ottawa, since it was just a few blocks from the hotel.  Also just a few blocks from “Occupy”, which was an interesting juxtaposition.

Three kinds of TV – Canadian English, Canadian French, and U.S. (mostly from Detroit).  That includes two separate Weather Networks for the two languages…both in degrees C though.

The rental car dashboard speedometer is in KPH not MPH, which is fun because you can go out on the highway and drive 100, and it’s legal!

I didn’t hear anyone say aboot, but a few folks did end sentences with “eh.”

 

Veteran’s Day

I’m a veteran (Vietnam era, but never in-country).  So are lots of us in the Foreign Service.  But lots of us are not, and we’re all serving overseas to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.”  Some of us serve in places like PRTs in Iraq and Afghanistan.  FSOs were in Libya when the revolution broke out.  FSOs are in Yemen.  There’s no telling where the next “hot spot” will be, but you can be sure of one thing…FSOs will be there.

We’re not the only ones serving our country overseas.  There is USAID, and MCC, and the Peace Corps, and Agriculture and Commerce and lots of three letter agencies who don’t publicize the fact .

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month was chosen for the armistice that ended “The Great War.”  That’s why it was “Armistice Day.”

After we had another war to end all wars, it became “Veterans’ Day”.

But all who serve their country deserve honoring, and Veterans’ Day should be expanded to include them all.  “Overseas Service Day” would still honor those who served their country in military service, but also those who did so in civilian service.  Those who fought in Iraq and those who were hostages in Iran.  The people who fought the Revolution and those who negotiated the peace.  George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.  The 22 year old soldier and the 22 year old Peace Corps volunteer.

As a veteran, I can say “Welcome” and “Thank you for your service!”

Today’s episode…

…is brought to you by the number 7 and the letter H and http://hardshiphomemaking.blogspot.com/, the Hardship Homemaking blog.  The new blog is “a back to basics blog for recipes, tricks, and tips to make life overseas at hardship posts easier.”  It’s a cooperative effort, and you’ve been following me for a while here, you may recognize some of my experiments among the recipes blogged there.

My latest addition to my French studies is La coeur a ses raisons, “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” in Quebecois.

I like it better than watching French movies because each episode is only a half hour, and TV5 broadcasts it with French subtitles, so it helps with understanding both spoken and written French.  On top of that, it’s really funny, with both heavy slapstick and wordplay.  Someone should do an english language version, but it has actors and scripts, so it’s too expensive for today’s TV.

We had snow the weekend before Halloween.  Snow!  Just a dusting here, but more inland.  By the time the trick or treaters showed up a few days later, it was all gone.

I’ve posted before my recipe for easy cobbler.  I made it last weekend for the first time with fresh apples.  You can’t go wrong with fresh apples in the fall, and this was no exception.

So you don’t have to go searching:

Ingredients

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup butter (two sticks US), room temperature (or 15 seconds in microwave to soften)
• 1 cup self-rising flour or pancake mix
• 1 cup milk
• 1 (15 ounce) can or jar dark cherries in juice/syrup (not pie filling) (or peaches, or pretty much any other fruit).

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. In a one-quart baking dish or 9 inch square pan, cream together sugar and butter. Mix in flour and milk until smooth. Drain most juice from fruit. If you use fresh fruit, add some liquid (for apples I used cider). Pour fruit and its remaining juice over the top.
3. Bake about 1 hour in the preheated oven, until golden brown.