So here’s something I’ve learned about living in a foreign language, context is king. Lots of understanding comes from gestures and facial expressions. I didn’t realize how much I’ve been getting by with full scale theatrical productions of English phrases. Of course all this goes away when you’re on the phone.
My lovely husband Neil, who speaks Spanish, French and a bit of Italian (what a show-off), has always told me that he has great difficulty speaking foreign languages on the phone which I never understood. Either you parlez-vous or you don’t. I put it down to my better two-third’s fundamental weirdness when it comes to phone finesse.
Here’s a perfect example: He answers the phone. I wildly gesticulate to him how unavailable I am at the moment which involves me mouthing “I’m in the shower” or a rapid sweeping of my hand back and forth across my throat which, as everyone knows, means ‘I’m not here’. Neil says “sorry hold on a minute, Bobbi’s trying to tell me something.” I politely say hello as my shoe goes sailing toward his head and he looks confused. Every single time.
Well it looks like a feed of crow is on my menu tonight as I just got off the phone with a receptionist at a dentist’s office here in France and it was a narrow escape to be sure. The good news is I’ve reached my target heart rate for the day and lost a couple of pounds in sweat. The bad news is I have a whole new language challenge.
What a drama. Recent claims about my French progress were clearly exaggerated. I’d rehearsed everything I needed to say but forgot that someone would be responding to me. Every time she spoke it was a stream of gobbledygook. But it takes more than that to keep a good Newfie down. See, being made fun of by snotty mainlanders your whole life eventually pays off. I just kept right on going through all her sighs and audible eye rolls with no concern at all for her disdain much like any Newfie would behave at an Air Canada check-in counter.
Anyway at the end of the day I’m the big winner and she can kiss my lily white arse. I have developed an empathic understanding of my husband’s phone difficulties plus I have a dental appointment at the end of May or a date with a dental hygienist named Celeste for Saturday night, either way not too shabby.
What’s your latest triumph over the world?
Bobbi French is a regular contributor at Gypsy Girls Guide
I have always been a girl attached to recording. It started with unimaginative to-do lists. On the wall of my childhood bedroom, right over a poster of a Greek pop star whose day has come and gone, you will still find a Post-it note that reads:
World Literature Assignment on The Stranger
Write debate case
Orthodontist – 5 PM, Tuesday
As life progressed and other experiences let the glory of orthodontist appointments fade into oblivion, I started jotting down memories instead of to-do’s. Some people use journals as the receptacles of their memories; others scrapbook. Yet others make digital photo albums. My chosen vehicles of nostalgia are notebooks.
This is how I know that on a November Thursday in 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I had my first Snapple. In the beginning, I rarely used my notebooks to write full stories, or even full sentences. I recorded life in a waterfall of lists: lists of songs that reminded me of a particular period of time, lists of ideas I had in the shower – even a list of “Things I Could Do With My Life.”
In the spring of 2009, I was getting ready to embark on my first field projects as a gender-related development specialist in conflict zones. The notebooks did not know it, but their ivory, unlined pages were about to be read by inquisitive border protection officers in the Middle East – one of whom earnestly inquired “Who is Elijah and why did he get you locked out again?” I would lose some pages to a mugging in South America, likely resulting in a Colombian reading about my attachment to the Tony Dize song emanating from taxis that February. I would almost drown a different notebook during a hurricane in Guatemala.
Both the unlined pages and I have survived. Their story is my story.
Written in a car between Gulu and Entebbe, Uganda
My imagination was entirely wrapped up in food: the ants in it, my craving for pancakes, the granola at Cafe Larem in the North of a country that was just recovering from a 20-year civil war. I was always moved by kindness, but at the same time was displeased by the fact that I, a white foreigner, was invited to skip the line at the doctor when women with more serious conditions and young children had been waiting there ahead of me. And I was missing my loved one, who was still living on the other side of the Nile. The longing and heartache of the geographical separation was at the top of the memory list.
Written at Pottery Cafe, Cairo, Egypt
I flag my favorite passages in what I read and copy them down in the unlined pages of my notebooks, word for word. Here: Kundera, Herman Hesse, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist share space on my pages.
Written in Ciudad Bolivar, Colombia [blow-dried in Antigua, Guatemala]
Lined pages. I initially resented them because I used to be neurotic enough to be pickier about notebooks than I was about mattress firmness. This was the notebook that nearly drowned in Hurricane Agatha in Guatemala. I blow-dried this transcription of a female war survivor’s story. The memory of it is less fuzzy than the writing.
Written on my bed in Bogota, Colombia
Serving suggestion: It is not a good idea to conduct a training on ex-combatants’ memory reconciliation if you have little command of the past tense of the language in question. It is an even worse idea when the language has more than two past tenses.
Written in Beersheba, Israel
And once you have mastered the past tenses in Spanish, why not try to learn the vowels in Hebrew? One of these endeavors was more successful than the other and this page serves to remind me of the languages that might have been.
Written in Jerusalem
The notebooks have not just been a snakes-and-ladders game of nostalgia and anticipation, though they have captured and reflected both. In this page I brainstormed questions for an interview with an American girl who participated in the Egypts protests in January 2011.
Written (started?) in Agra, India
This “I want to photograph…” list has spilled into more than one page and more than one notebook over more than two years.
Written in a car on the way to Haifa, Israel
Another of my favorite ways to measure time, reflect on memories and remember travels: The songs that accompanied me through the wandering.
How do you record your journey, memories and wanderings? Revisit a page from an old notebook, or a song from an old playlist, or a photo album you have not browsed in a while. What memories does it stir?
We need those things in our lives that are not for anyone else, those things that make no sense whatsoever in terms of practicality, but that please us.
We need them to balance out the endless pursuit of “purpose” and “balance.” We need them because we need something in life that connects us to a sense of wonder and something to be explored.
I don’t often have a lot of time to travel–when it does happen, it happens in short bursts, such as a day trip, or in one big burst such as a summer or a month spent in Italy. I read travel blogs with some longing, because the vagabond lifestyle has always appealed to me.
In reality, however? I’m a homebody at heart. I like to travel while having a home base, some place where I can relax my body into a familiar mattress.
Please note: I have resisted this truth for a really, really long time. The image of the wayward traveler who’s always wandering from place to place, having new experiences and living life fully (more fully than me, my inner critic will say when I’m feeling triggered and prone to comparisons) tugs at me. I have phases each year where I want to sell everything and live out of a backpack.
Then I travel, and I’m reminded of what it really means to live out of a backpack: smelly clothing, cigarette smoke you cannot avoid until your sinuses clog and you get a headache, hours spent waiting in train stations, battered feet, mosquitoes coming into the room but no ability to ask for mosquito repellent in the local language.
All worth it? For some people, every single moment is one of joy, and they would look at me in arrogant distaste for not having a thicker skin for travel. For me? I can handle all of these discomforts in measure, and then some moment comes to me in which I realize that I want the comforts of home.
Finally, I am allowing this to be okay. I’m allowing myself to let go of the internal criticism that this boring, or that life is passing me by and meanwhile I’m not seeing half the world that I want to see. I see it as a practice of the middle way, of not going to extremes (with those extremes being “you are a vagabond” and “your life is utterly boring and without meaning”).
To make up for the the time between my trips and travels, I practice something that I call “staying present to wonder.” It looks something like this: When things have become far too stultifying within the routines of my daily life, I pack an “adventure bag” (Check out this Flickr tutorial on creating your own ) and then head out for the open road: no agenda. 9 times out of 10, my partner in crime, Andy Rado, is with me. The agenda? To have no agenda whatsoever. It is without an agenda that a true “Adventure day” can take shape in its own perfect way.
Last Saturday, our day looked like this: Take public transit into the city of San Francisco. Have a cappuccino and almond biscotti, outdoors, enjoying the early summer weather (75 degrees! sunshine!). Walking around the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, visiting the familiar pieces as if they are old friends, ending as always with “my painting,” Femme Au Chapeau by Matisse, marveling as I always do that he created such a masterpiece. Then–impromptu cable car ride from downtown to Fisherman’s Wharf! A family from Australia was traveling through. Their twin girls kept switching who was standing on the edge of the cable car, keeping things egalitarian. “Don’t lean far off of the cable car into the other lane of traffic,” the operator yelled, “or you’ll get a headache, if you know what I mean.” And then–impromptu hot chocolate at Ghirardelli Square. The whipped cream was heavy, as were the tourists loaded down with bags and chocolate sundaes. We walked down to the wharf and watched the waves come in while we drank hot chocolate and watched people swimming in the Bay. Later, we took another bus back to downtown and eavesdropped on the conversations of those around us as the bus jerked its way up and down hills (the driver was a heavy breaker).
We’ve done all of this before, of course–visited these sights and seen these places. Yet because the day had no agenda, all of it felt ripe, and new.
I know that so many people are just now coming out of the most difficult winter they’ve had in years–the snow has been heavy, the temperatures have been cold. Maybe you don’t live in San Francisco so you believe there’s less to do, and maybe you don’t have a lot of money.
Nonetheless, I invite you to take it on as your duty to cultivate a sense of wonder at the world around you. I invite you to photograph that snow from fifteen different angles as it melts. Download yoga classes online and create a studio in your own living room. Go online and learn a new language for free, and then practice with others. Look up news channels in other languages and just listen to the sounds of a foreign tongue (for instance, you can go to http://www.rai.it to see Italian news programs). Take a dance class for cheap at your local community college. If you always drive, find some way to take public transit. If you always take public transit, borrow someone’s car. Record your experiences.
Stay present to your wonder, experiencing the world as it was meant to be experienced: each moment fresh, new, alive.
Kate Swoboda is a Life Coach, teacher and writer who works with women from around the world who are interested in living lives of courage, integrity, passion, and power. She’s the author of the Courageous Living Guides and creator of the Courageous Play and Create Stillness retreats. She’s excited about learning languages, reading as many books as she can, getting bendy-stretchy on the yoga mat, the quest for the next amazing chai latte, and running.
@jeaninecaron 's post at GGG today is pretty much the story of my life!It is also about changes, love & courage. http://t.co/pqKzXLST about 137 days ago
