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I speak a little French. My reading comprehension is fairly decent. I had three years of French in high school. When I first got into France, I had enormous difficulty parsing out the words of spoken French. I was on a train from Dijon to Beziers, and someone had taken our seats, and they wouldn’t change seats – they were nice, but they said, oh, just sit there (I think that’s what they said, at any rate). So we took someone else’s seats. So then more people boarded at different stops, and we had to play musical chairs. Not the most fun thing to deal with in a different language.
But yes, I’ve found a lot of really nice people. I find most warm. Only ran across some friction with a woman at the bank. I also find that most people here don’t speak English, which is different from my experience in other countries. It’s nice, because I get a chance to try to practice. In other countries, they tend to get frustrated with me and just start talking in English.
I had a real nice conversation with the fruit vendor in town. And several days ago we found a winery on our way to the garbage dump. We were looking for junk in the dump with which to make art, but found this winery at 9:30 in the morning. Came up to it, and understood everyone, and they gave me a tasting in the morning! The wine was different, light liquid on my tongue and then a burst of flavor. I bought a bottle of everything I’d tasted, and then they gave me an additional one as a gift.
We’ll be here for six more weeks. This first week shot by so quickly. It’s warm half the days here. I sit on the ledge of our kitchen window and read in the sun, which seems to reach 70F. I want to try to stay longer. We met the owners of this house from Craigslist.org, in our initial house hunt for London. We stayed in their London house 3 weeks, and they offered to let us stay here. We pay rent, but it’s really a token amount for this area – 120 Euros a week. They do TV documentaries mostly for the BBC. They’re doing a documentary on the royal princes for the French.
We’re trying to find poetry readings here, but I can’t even find readings in French. I wonder if there’s a different idiom in French for “poetry reading.” The variations I’ve googled don’t come up with anything. We also contacted English-language bookstores but so far no one seems to be open to a reading. Really weird. I bet we’d have more luck during tourist season.
Now for an announcement:
My friend in Milwaulkee, Denise Dee, organized an Irish festival (in Milwaulkee) from March 11 to March 17. Cleveland Poetry Icon Katie Daley will be performing the 11th and 12th. Here’s a link to more information: http://www.pbase.com/seanzo/touched_in_the_head.
Denise Dee