foreign tongues

the short trip to France last week left me feeling like a completely stereotypical brit-abroad, leaving the confines of England completely unprepared to speak anything other than English.

OK, slight exaggeration, but knowing the French for hello, goodbye, please and thank you hardly counts as learning another language.

two holidays in Spain in the last few years haven't fared an awful lot better but the fact that we can get by on a handful of words while other nationalities accommodate us in their own countries is rather shameful.

The staff in Disneyland must have been versed in multiple languages to deal with holiday makers and i even overheard a young German girl taking pleasure in reciting the English she had learnt, introducing herself and saying that she likes swimming, fluent and to a degree I was only capable of managing when my secondary school began teaching us German at the age of 11, obviously it must have been a well thought out decision to teach half the new year 7's German, and a very worthwhile effort when you take into account that I'm yet to consider holidaying in Germany.

so now to try and reverse some of the damage done I'm loading my generic mp3 player with language courses with the hope of broadening my horizons, today i was learning how to ask where the gift shop is, not the most necessary question when you are surrounded by them in Disneyland.

and the relevance of Girls Aloud? Girls Aloud are always relevant, and who really needs much of an excuse to watch one of their videos?

more than one night in Paris

Last week was an interesting week, filled with landmarks, bones, skulls, cartoon characters, a graveyard, rollercoasters, and thankfully, no rioting.

I have no intention of using my blog to reveal every detail of my life but I do think that it is of note that I’ve recently returned from being very touristy in Paris.

Me and my girlfriend fulfilled the old standards of going to the top of the Eiffel Tower, visiting the Louvre and not knowing an awful lot of French. We also took the time to see the lesser heralded sights of the Parisian catacombs and Père Lachaise Cemetery. We took in afew more of Paris’ better known attractions and our stay was rounded off with running around Disneyland’s park and studio theme parks, cuddling and posing for photos with cartoon characters and proving that we aren’t really that grown up at all.

The weather was freezing all week and combination of the current exchange rate and Disney’s (and to a certain extant also Paris’ own) exorbitantly inflated culture put a huge dent in our travel money but the bad is weighed up against the fact that at this time of year most queues for rides were no more than ten of fifteen minutes if that and the hindsight that we managed to avoid days when the top of the Eiffel tower was closed due to fog limiting visibility and when most of Paris was brought to a standstill by protests.

All of which should provide enough inspiration for a handful of forthcoming posts.