Cosmic Prose

Natasha Regehr

Tag: language (page 1 of 2)

Sometimes Things Go Away Like That

May 13, 2019 / / 1 Comment

For those of you who may be dreaming of an exotic life of travel and adventure, here’s a little reality check. Written a few weeks before my recent trip to Slovenia, it chronicles some of the more maddening aspects of international living.

So they’ve imaged a black hole.  It’s a staggering accomplishment, according to those who know.

I will now attempt to image for you the black hole that was my Saturday morning.

It started last week when I tried to pay for a few things in dirhams instead of dollars.  Big things, like a course at the French Institute and a plane ticket to Venice.

You see, ex-pats in Morocco are limited in the amount of money they can send out of the country in any given year, and as I don’t want to exceed this limit before it’s time to send my last paycheque home, I am trying to make big purchases using the local currency instead of my Canadian credit card whenever possible.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. 

I tried to pay for two things online using my Moroccan bank card.  It took multiple restarts, emails, and pleas for help, and in the end I did not succeed.  All went well until the very last of many agonizing steps: I was supposed to receive a security code from the bank by SMS to complete my transaction, but the magic numbers never arrived.  (Side note: This is not unusual.  SMS confirmations from Uber, Airbnb, and various other enterprises have also been sucked into the black hole before they ever reach my Moroccan phone.  This is why I keep using other people’s numbers to do things that should be easy).

In this way, several hours were lost to the void before the day even started.  The only thing I could do, I was told, was go to the bank.  Any branch.  Just go.  They would know what to do.

So that was the first thing on my list of things to do this Saturday morning.  Then, I could come home, make my two online purchases, and my life would be complete.

BAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Common sense reeled me in.  Exactly how likely is it that the bank would be able to instantly remedy this situation? If you’ve dealt with Moroccan banks, you already know the answer: highly unlikely.  Therefore, it is always wise to have a back-up plan.

In a normal world, I would return from the bank, try to make the transactions, and then consider alternate courses of action if necessary.  But in Morocco, one must be wily.  One must think ahead.  Way ahead.  Kind of like this:

I can pay for the course and the plane ticket in dirhams if I go into the city and pay in person.  If I drive to the French Institute at 9am, the traffic will still be bearable.  I can then pay for my course, walk the 15 minutes to the Air Arabia office, buy my plane ticket, walk back to the French Institute, and drive home.  It should only take a couple hours.

Upon minimal reflection, I decided to make Plan B my Plan A, and make the trip to the bank a side errand.  In this way, I would be certain to make my purchases in one day, and getting the annoying SMS issue fixed would just be the icing on the cake.

Step 1: Drive to the French Institute.  Check.  It wasn’t even awful.  Waze actually found me a tolerable route.  There was parking.  There was no line-up at the cashier.  All went eerily well.

Step 2: Walk to the Air Arabia office.  Check.

Step 3: Pay for plane ticket.

And here is where the day began to fall apart.

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Remote (out of) Control

October 28, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Do you like the idea of going to remote places? If not, you will find this piece quite funny.  You will roll your eyes a lot, and wonder why I’m like this.  You will also spend the next few minutes thanking the merciful heavens that you did not join me on this vacation.

If, however, you do like the idea of going to remote places, this post might be just what you have been waiting for.  I, on your behalf, will visit a remote place, and tell you all about it.  And then you will laugh, roll your eyes, and think twice about your own vacation preferences. Continue reading

Do Not Enter

September 13, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Three years ago I had a disastrous encounter with a maestro who shall not be named.  It would not be a stretch to say that there were elements of trauma to that evening.  Before you go any further, you should probably read the amusing, but heart-wrenching account of my first audition experience in Casablanca.

Now, three years later, I did the unthinkable thing, and repeated the experience.  Same never-ending round-about.  Same obscure church entrance.  Same ghastly maestro.  Same everything.  But not the same me. Continue reading

DELF Unpacked: Don’t Ever Lose Faith

September 2, 2018 / / 5 Comments

Natasha here, reporting in on the aftermath of the infamous DELF B2.

I was worried.  Let’s find some better descriptors, now that I’m functioning in my mother tongue.  Words like chagrined, nausea-ridden, paralyzed.  I dreaded that exam.  My entire body was stiff with tension for eight solid weeks, from the moment I walked into my first class to the day after the inquisition.  My long-awaited summer in France turned out to be, in many ways, a summer of travail and trepidation.

And then, just like that, I passed.  Not just by the skin of my teeth.  Not just with a satisfactory margin of breathing room. Not quite with the flying colours I secretly dreamed of.  But almost.  Almost.

At one point, I re-coined the DELF acronym (“Diplome d’Etudes en Langue Française”) as “Dumb, Enigmatic Lists of Faults.”  I still kind of think that.  The test-makers are simply méchants, in my well-studied opinion.  They rub their hands in delight as they formulate one trick question after another, in a sinister attempt to separate the dumb from the dumber.  I know.  I met one of them.  And she was mean.

But do you know what it was that bumped my score down two points from the 80% I’d hoped for?  Continue reading

Venez!

August 28, 2018 / / 4 Comments

A few weeks ago, I posted my very first French blog.  I am re-posting it today, with two critical changes:

  1. For those of you who asked for an English version of the original story, scroll down to the end to find a rather crude translation.
  2. For those of you who are curious to hear my weird Canadian-Moroccan-American-French accent, I have added an audio recording of the story as well.  It will make you laugh, even if it’s not supposed to.  Which it is.

Audio Version:

(with many thanks to my good friend in Vichy, for teaching me how to say “hockey” in French, and for letting me teach her a few Canadianisms as well)  

For those of you who didn’t read the original story and have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s where it all began…

Original Story:

This summer I got to do a little creative writing in my French class! We were asked to write a funny story that exaggerates the stereotypes that foreigners have of our home countries.  My Spanish, Mexican, Brazilian, Korean, American, and Basque classmates shared their stories, and then I offered up this little piece of Canadiana, inspired in part by our beloved Bob and Doug McKenzie.

Warning: This is my very first blog-worthy French composition.  There might be errors.  You might be offended.  Be gentle with me.

Venez! Venez! Venez au Canada! On vous accueille, comme on accueille tout le monde, tout le temps! Venez!

Dès que vous arriverez, on vous mènera à votre igloo, où vous dormirez en tout confort, en portant votre anorak et votre toque!

Le lendemain matin, vous prendrez votre déjeuner (au Canada, nos repas sont tous mélangées): un bonne portion de poutine avec une bonne portion de bière (Molson Canadian, bien sûr).  On vous donnera vos patins pour votre premier match de hockey.

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La magie des mots

August 10, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Something has happened to my French, and it’s because I’ve made a friend.

She is a retired doctor.  She’s travelled the world.  She has a tiny little dog called Charmeur.  And she loves words.  Words thrill her, as they do me.  I read her paragraphs from books that stir me, and she recites poetry with all the animation of a master story-teller, and we delight together in this magical, magical space called language.

It’s a space that we inhabit together while seated at the Grand Casino Cafe, so named for its proximity to what used to be a casino, but is now something else.  It’s a space that we inhabit together over tea, coffee, kir, water, chocolate.  It’s a space we inhabit through the careful completion of grammar exercises, the meticulous correction of essays, and the endless parroting of phonetics.  It’s a space we inhabit from 12:15 – 1:45 every day, and it is changing me. Continue reading

Faux French, Riviera Style

July 11, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Have you been wondering how I’ve been faring since I bade farewell to les vaches?

I am slowly adjusting to life on the French Riviera.

Slowly.

My drive here was uneventful, except for that time my GPS became my enemy and led me in circles for two hours in downtown Nice during the height of tourist season.  Navigation systems don’t do well with pedestrian-only streets.  That’s all I’ll say about that.

And now I am perched on a hill overlooking the uppity town of Villefranche-sur-mer, with its uppity yachts, BMWs, and fake hedges. Why anyone would need a fake hedge in this lotus land is beyond me, but there it is.  Why water a real hedge when you can buy a fake one?

No, to be honest, I’m missing the friendly, down-to-earth charm of my village in the Alps.  Well, okay, the cows were not so friendly.  But there was an endearing honesty to that place, a sense that life had substance, and that everything else was somehow false.

Not so with the French Riviera.  Everything here feels half-empty, like the soul of the place just drained out into the Mediterranean when the people all arrived. I’m sure at one time it was quaint and delightful and historically significant; but right now, it feels to me like a toy neighbourhood, constructed out of blocks and toothpicks and dotted with plastic accessories.  Doll houses, all, papered in Euros…

But I, too, am a falsehood, here on the French Riviera.

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Holy Cows, Batman

July 3, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I dearly wish that I had had the wherewithal to prendre un photo of the cows that ran me down, but alas, stampedes do not lend themselves to portraiture.

Fortunately, I have words.

Do you remember the days before the touchless car-wash? Do you remember its predecessor? The one with the big, sudsy brushes that advance on you and engulf you, while you sit helplessly in the car and wait for it all to be over?

Wait, let’s back up a bit.  And by “back up,” I mean, reculer, in case you didn’t know.  But of course you did.

My day started with to-die-for jam (peaches and spice) and conversation around the breakfast table at a farm in the Southern French Alps.  I learned that the French drink tea out of rather big bowls, and that parapente is the French word for paragliding.  More on that later.

Scene Two: I am in my rental car, fiddling with the GPS, and then setting off ever-so-slowly down the winding mountain road to my first activity for the day.  I am leaving early, so I have plenty of time to get lost or have some other disaster befall me, both of which, of course, happened.

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Maybe!

June 18, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I have been stressing out about French. Have you noticed? Likely not, because you think I’m still obsessing about the Royal Wedding.  Forget that.  I’m over it.

No, French is my ongoing obsession, more than ever now, as the stakes creep higher in equal proportion to my rising self-doubt.

What if I can’t do it? What if, no matter how much I study and how long I persist, I never pass beyond the blundering idiot phase of language learning? Oh, sure, I’m less of a blundering idiot than I was three years ago, when I couldn’t say, “I want to walk up the hill.” But the subjunctive has its own mode of blunder induction (did you catch that, French-speakers? Its own mode?).  The more I learn, the more I blunder.

Now, these rising stakes of which I speak so melodramatically.  What are they? Well, you know.  Employment. That about sums it up.  You see, I miss Canada. Continue reading

La Grande Vie

May 13, 2018 / / 2 Comments

I want to talk to you about The Big Life (or La Grande Vie, as I called it in my first work of French pseudo-fiction, which I may or may not share with you at a later date, if you promise not to judge me by my grammar).

The Big Life: what is it? What makes a life small, restricted, or ingrown, and what makes it expansive, possibility-ridden, unencumbered? Is it where you live? Is it the people with whom you surround yourself? Is it finances, or family, or a sense of independence?

I remember doing a family history project with a bunch of six-year-olds a few years ago for social studies.  One of the things I asked the students to do was to talk to their parents about their origins.  Paper after paper came back to me, saying, “I was born in Lindsay.  My parents were born in Lindsay.  My grandparents were born in Lindsay.”

Now, Lindsay is not Toronto, or Montreal, or New York, or Paris.  Lindsay is a small, rural community in the middle of (pretty much) nowhere.  It has its charms, to be sure, but there is nothing particularly distinguishing about it.  Even Bobcaygeon, a small rural community even deeper in the middle of nowhere, has a massive shoe store to commend itself to the wider world.  But Lindsay? It’s just a little Canadian town, surrounded by lakes, trees, and farmland.

“What small lives these people lead,” I thought to myself, as I imagined generation after generation living, marrying, and dying on one little speck of this great earth.  “I don’t want a small life.  I want The Big Life.  I want to Go.”

Going is a form of enlargement, I’m sure of it.  In the last three years, I’ve visited a dozen countries scattered across four continents.  I’ve lost track of the cities and airports I’ve passed through, the mountains I’ve climbed, the seas I’ve sailed, the terrain I’ve trekked.  And I live now in a foreign land that is about as far removed from little Lindsay, both geographically and culturally, as it could possibly be.

Is this The Big Life? It sure feels like it, when I’m scuba diving in the Mediterranean or camping out in the Sahara.  One does not ride camels in Lindsay.  One does not barter for one’s daily necessities.  One does not wonder how to say “thank-you” in Polish or “please” in Hungarian.  One certainly does not climb the Great Wall of China.  These are Big Life things.  They are things that cannot be done in any alternative form of “elsewhere.”  They are unique, defining, unreplicable experiences.  That’s what The Big Life is all about, right? It’s about Doing Big Things and posting them on Facebook for all the world to see.  Look at me and my gigantic, interesting life!

The Great Wall of China
The Bavarian Alps
The Eiffel Tower
Surfing in Dar Bouazza
Tiananmen Square, under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao
The Greek Acropolis
Berber bridal wear
The Sahara Desert
Camel trekking
Venice, Italy
The Atlas Mountains
Nice, France
Scuba diving in Greece
Buying oranges at the medina

You should know, though, that taking selfies with Chairman Mao is not representative of the real, everyday, Standard-Sized Life that I live in Casablanca.  If anything, my Moroccan life has been one of shrinkage and thinning (not in body-size, unfortunately, but that’s another story).

Let me tell you what I mean.

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