LEARNING AND LAYING LOW

One of the by-products of starting a blog is that you feel a certain responsibility to keep it up. …Clearly, I have not let that sense of responsibility weigh me down too much!! I don’t even pretend to believe that any of you are waiting for my next installment with baited breath – but I did make a commitment of sorts, and it’s important to me to keep my commitments. I apologize for my irresponsibility and I promise to be more attentive.

So – with that – I’ll share that we haven’t had a whole lot of excitement around here in the past two weeks! We thought that we’d have more time to ourselves now that the house hunting had concluded – but we ended up staying pretty close to home. I developed a lingering cold that didn’t sideline me, per se, but did keep me up at all hours with a hacking cough. And – thanks to the joys of hotel living – my coughing kept Hubbz awake through the night and weakened his immune system enough to invite a cold in as well. So, we spent last weekend TALKING about getting out and going someplace, but never actually achieving it. Hubbalicious spent two afternoons gleefully watching live coverage of the Tour de France, and I finished another book, napped and caught up on some work tasks. Let the good times roll!!

This week I did celebrate a birthday. Thanks to the wonders of this digital age, I spent the better part of the day responding to well wishes as each time zone awoke and noticed on Facebook that it was my birthday. It was really fun and touching to have so much of “home” in front of me. We had dinner with friends that night and overall I had a lovely birthday.

I also had a lovely birthday epiphany. I am now old enough to start lying about my age! The shape my age-lie is going to take may surprise you, though. I’ve decided that when next I am asked, I’m going to ADD numbers to my years. Seriously! My logic is this…. I may not be holding up all that well for the thirty-something years that I have actually lived…but I figure I probably look darn good for someone in their forty-somethings!!

Two nights a week now, we take a German Language class! The teacher is a very kind German woman who has been teaching ex-pats the language for more than 20 years. We like her a lot. We like her even more for the fact that she brings local delicacies of chocolate and gummi bears to class every night. She’s good people! She calls on all of us equally and is very kind in her corrections of our errors. She also fills us in on some cultural happenings and roots of words. The 2 ½ hour class is a long commitment ant the end of a work day – but overall we enjoy the time and appreciate the lessons.

Learning a new language is hard (at least it is for us). We leave class feeling like we’ve absorbed something, and wake up the next morning feeling like we have lost it all! But, I realize that I have picked up a little vocabulary here and there in little places. I can kind of get the gist of a billboard sometimes or recognize a number stated in a radio commercial. We are trying to keep at it and be disciplined about studying outside of class, but we are both working full time right now and the hours seem to fly right out of the day!

I remember feeling that I wasn’t “getting it” when I started taking French in Jr. High school. Somehow something must have stuck, because today I find my brain full of French vocabulary and verb conjugations when I reach for a German word. I imagine the process in my brain happening like this: My mind recognizes that English won’t do and it reaches for the only other language I’ve ever somewhat understood. I wonder if learning German is going to actually resurrect my French memory! It’s a bit of an impediment because I also have to fight the urge to apply what French grammar rules I know to the German I am trying to learn. A clean mental slate would probably have been an advantage but I'm determined to overcome the challenge...or  maybe we need to plan lots of vacations in France :)