Sometimes I love my homework.

In our book we had a letter that, when translated, went something like this:

"Dominique,

The letter you wrote and slid under my door last night was very nice, but I remain firm in my decision to end our relationship. I am sad that our relationship has ended. I am not happy, and I have had enough of unhappiness. The moments we spent together are unforgettable, moments of joy, happiness, and sorrow also. I will never forget them, and I think that you won't either. But we are too different. Our cultures, our fashions of life separate us. And I am not ready for life as a couple.
I prefer to live alone and keep my independence for the moment. Congratulations on your Masters in Fine Arts! I am happy for you, and I wish you good luck with your studies in Rome.
Dominique, please, stop writing to me. It is better for both of us. We are not sweethearts. Turn the page.

Nathalie"

To this delightful note we were told to write a reply from Dominique (despite Nathalie's request). Thanks to our previous lessons, we know that Nathalie is a French lass and Dominique is a Canadian. Hence the difference in cultures. As soon as I was assigned this project, I started snickering. My teacher asked me what was so funny. I told her there is no way she could understand what was going on in my head. And so came into being the following letter. I have taken some liberties in translating my own French. It's obviously much funnier in English because in English I can use nuance.

Je suis vraiment désolé que tu préfères vivre seule, surtout parce que tu étais si enthousiaste pour l'amour avant que je te rencontré. I'm sorry that you are wanting to live single now, especially considering how excited you were about dating before we met. Je comprends qu' après tout ce que j'ai fait pour toi, c'est difficile de supporter les autres hommes. I realize that after all I have done for you and meant to you, it is hard for you to tolerate the company of ordinary men. Ne t'inquiète pas, avec le temps peut-être tu vas m'oublier et ton coeur va glisse dans l'amour. Don't allow yourself to worry too much, with time perhaps your heart will forget me and be able to slide into love with someone.

Tu as laissé entendre que tu as senti une petite douleur. You hinted at some slight discomfort. Je présume que tu penses encore à l'incident avec le "ketchup-fried-mooseburger." I presume that you are still thinking about the incident with the Ketchup-Fried-Mooseburger. Ça aurait été mieux si tu avais bu un peu plus de cidre. As I've said, it would have gone better if you had drunk a bit more cider. Cette cidre n'est pas merveilleuse seulement à cause de son goût (brasser chez mon beau-frère, eh?) mais aussi car elle tue toutes les petites bactéries méchantes. That cider isn't marvelous just because of its flavor (distilled in my brother-in-law's basement, eh?) but also because it kills all those nasty little bacteria on the spot! Alors, je comprends que tu n'as pas envie de boire quelque-chose chaude l'accident avec la crosse de hockey. Well, I guess I can understand that you didn't want to drink anything hot right after the accident with the hockey stick. Ha! Je crois que tu peut devenir une joueuse de hockey formidable, tu as repris connaissance si vite que tu as stupefié les médecins! Ha! I think you could become a fantastic hockey player, you regained consciousness so quickly that you shocked the doctors! And now you've got the teeth for a hockey player too. You're good and tough, my stick may never be the same!
Mais j'ai parlé trop de toi, et tu as dit que je dois t'oublier. But I am talking too much about you, and you told me to forget about you. Alors, je suis très heuruex de partir à Rome bientôt. So anyway, I am really happy to be leaving soon for Rome. Ça me plaît bien. It makes me really happy. Oui, c'est genial. Yup, it's really nice. Alors, um... So... um... Tu es sûre de ne pas m'aimer? You're sure you don't love me?

Dominique.


p.s. I don't intend this as a slam on Canadians. If you view it as such and it makes you feel better, make him a Minnesotan and name him John.

Resto World

Today at Resto du Coeur I was in charge of tea and coffee. I was rather frightened at first. I had never in my life made a cup of coffee. I had only the most foggy of vague ideas how coffee makers worked. Fortunately there was another girl there with me for the first hour and a half or so. She talked fast but I managed to figure out how to make the coffee and also learn a little bit about her. She is fairly young (early 30s?) but has already done a ton of things, including several years in the military. Now she works with adults who have special needs (like psychological special needs, not just mental and physical).

The coffee and cake is in the room where people hang out before going in to get their food for the week. Each person has a specific time that they are supposed to show up, or at least a half-hour window. It is written on the little card that they get when they sign up, but some of them don't know French and apparently can't read "10:30" either. Either that, or they have no clocks and/or concept of time at all. There was one woman who came in at about 8:15. After 15 minutes she wanted to know why she hadn't been called yet. One of the workers looked at her card and said, "Dix heure et demi. deux heures" (10:30. 2 hours) and held up two fingers. I don't think that meant much of anything to her. She had two small kids who were relatively well behaved for the first 20 minutes. After that, the younger one started getting restless.

After his fifth or sixth piece of cake I stopped letting him take it. I mean, maybe he was hungry, but we had to save some for the others... But it was quickly obvious that he was eating cake for something to do, not because he was hungry. About five minutes later he came over while I was doing something else, grabbed a bunch of coffee stir sticks, and then ran off and started playing with them. Once he was tired of those he went for the cups in the garbage... Oh my. I'm pretty sure his mom is used to just letting him run wild. His older brother (who was probably 5) always had an eye on him and would drag him away if he got into too much trouble at any one moment.

There was another guy wandering around too who couldn't understand why he had been there for an hour and others were only there for 10 minutes. He didn't speak English, so I tried to mime for him but he wandered away somewhere between "Look at the clock" and "Do you have a card I could look at?" Ah yes, the language barrier... Even though I now operate in two languages, I am amazingly limited on the global scale.

And finally, I had forgotten to post that last week at Resto was the first time I picked up a French word play in normal conversation. Thanks to the way the French leave out parts of most of their words, they have a lot of homonyms (words that sound alike) and homonym phrases. They love to make jokes out of these. Last week one of the guys asked my coworker, "Qu'est-ce que tu pense de ça?" (what do you think of that?) in reference to some topic I have now forgotten. My coworker replied, "Je vais prendre une mirroir et reflechis." (I'll get a mirror and reflect on it). I laughed. The other guy groaned. Haha! I love corny jokes.

My room

Here is a little tour of my new room. Well, I guess it's not new anymore. I changed rooms back in December. I needed to cut costs, so I went to our administrator and asked if there was any way to do that. A girl was about to move out of this room, which is a special room that isn't normally rented out to students. She said I could move in. And that is how I saved about a thousand dollars this semester. Praise God!