Il est Américain

Recently I've thought a lot about how to explain the difficulties of learning French. I can't say it's that special. It's difficult in the way training for a marathon is difficult. It's difficult the way calculus is difficult. How difficult is that? It's difficult enough to make you reconsider the value of your time.

French isn't Spanish, this is true. However, I've found that Spanish often lets me read French. Also, thanks to William the Conqueror, English has more than a little to do with French. Recently I sat around the dinner table eating fromage and talking with my buddy and his folks. When faced with a specific word absent from my French vocabulary I'd ask him to translate only to have him repeat the word back to me with a French accent.

Language learning has become a much smaller part of my trip than I anticipated. After one month I'm neither disappointed nor discouraged. I've spend July appreciating France. From here, the language I learn will reflect a deepening affection for the culture and people. This is the way language learning should be.

No Leaning

Danger: Images not suitable for my father. If you are my father, do not read any further. Failure to yield to this warning could result in extreme bouts of acrophobia.

Last Wednesday was a special day. After several days in Lyon I decided to explore the Alps. Here is a running diary of one of the scariest days of my life. (Times are color coded by location.)

8:30am - Up to get the petit déjeuner offered at the Vagabond Hostel in Chamonix. My roommates, who were Finnish and much better hikers than I, were up at 5:30 to get on the train. The more extreme the route, the earlier you get up. The good climbers don't sleep.
 

10:00am - I arrive at the train station. Train station? Okay, I need to explain. I'm hiking along the mountain, not up the mountain. (Registers a 0 on the Dad Scale)

Ode to a Russian Seminary

Can I interest you in the first article of the trip?

"Catholicism in Russia"

Between La Tour and Le Tour

Just inside the entrance to The National Museum of the American Indian in DC there's a large room with a circular space in the middle. The whole arena is earth-tone: wood, sand, and lots of light. The circular space at the center acts as a stage where the museum displays American Indian culture, crafts, and events.

A few years back I observed something really brilliant on that stage. A craftsman from Bolivia was making a boat of reeds. The reeds were long and green and flexible. He would gather them into a bunch and tie them really tightly. Then he'd carefully gather another bunch, and he would tie those too. When he had a bunch of bunches, he would bunch them together until he had a gorgeous green canoe with reeds bound up all along the hull. The craft was simple, elegant, and quite sturdy.

The other day I began thinking about how I learned Spanish. Looking back there seemed to be formative moments where a conversation synthesized all the little pieces of Spanish I'd been gathering. These milestone moments seemed to gel the reeds of a growing vocabulary, tying them together, making them fit.

My favorite reed boat moment came after my American classmates went home for winter break. I stayed behind to travel with my father. While in Bilbao, we stayed for about a week with a lovely Spanish/Basque family in Getxo. Every morning Rosa, la madre, would wake me up and demand that I tell her how I slept, what I wanted for breakfast, and what I wanted to do that day. She didn't give me a chance to think in English, just speak Spanish.

I'm writing about all this today because I just had my first French reed boat moment. After two weeks of staring at my French computer program and feeling embarrassed as I listened to my French friends tell each other what I can only assume are the most entertaining stories ever told, some of the small French pieces began to gel.

It happened as I managed to get a ride from Lyon to Chamonix with a French gent baring a delightful resemblance to Harrison Ford. Whereas I've found it difficult to get new people to speak slow, well-enunciated French to me the last few weeks, he obliged. Every new sentence seemed to unlock some hidden word I'd learned somewhere, waiting for confirmation in a real-world setting.

As I'll discuss in a later post, French presents challenges that don't exist in Spanish. But for now, at least, I've begun tying together the reeds of a simple, but sturdy French vocabulary.

Toulouse à Vélo

Gérard Manset - Il Voyage En Solitaire

Keys to Photographing Le Canal du Midi

On Sunday my host Raoul took me on a bike ride along the Canal du Midi. It's like the C&O canal in DC except businessman don't cut down trees along the canal that block the view from their mansion.

Riding back I noticed a gorgeous field of sunflowers just on the other side of the canal, protected by a barbed wire fence. The flowers obviously needed to be photographed. Monday, I obliged the sunflowers. I learned a lot along the way. Enough to present to you:

The Keys to Photographing Sunflowers along the Canal du Midi in Southern France

1) Do not, under any circumstances, bring a map. French roads are generally laid out in a circular pattern, as opposed to English streets which use a grid pattern. Also, all the houses in suburban France conveniently look the same. This is perfect when searching for a field of sunflowers. Not only won't you find the sunflowers, but your frustration will be compounded when you realize you're incapable of finding a HUGE FIELD OF SUNFLOWERS.

2) Make sure you bring a heavy metal camera-stand that's large and black and doesn't fit in your backpack. That way, when you ride down the streets of Toulouse, all the French people will think you're carrying a semi-automatic rifle.

3) If you do nothing else, go in the middle of the day. The light from the sun will be incredibly ordinary AND it'll be as hot as possible when you get lost.

4) Oh, and when that cute French girl approaches you on the way back, make sure not to speak any French. You'll be too tired, frustrated, and sunburned to care about missing the chance to meet the future French mother of your children.

Okay, you're all set. Follow all the keys and here are some pictures you'll take:

Toulouse, Je t'aime

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

What comes first: being happy or smiling?

Socially, I dominated middle school. There are a number of reasons why. I had a clique. I had a girlfriend. I still believed I was destined to play professional soccer (Brazil 2014!). Adults, teachers, fellow students older and younger; there were few people I felt uncomfortable talking to.

My high school social life didn't exactly live up. Some new realities had set in. There's a list, but most of it revolved around puberty. I was surrounded by the same people as middle school, but something had changed. I wasn't having the same social success. Sports became more difficult and I found myself struggling to keep girls' attention.

For a long time I externalized the blame. Fate, my parents, my school, my community: everything was fair game. Even into my twenties I blamed everyone and everything except myself.

Not long ago I came across an old photo album from that time in my life. Flipping through, I was unaffected seeing myself Boy Scouting, wrestling, playing soccer, or standing on stage. Towards the end of the album there was a pouch with all my old school pictures.

I never loved school photos, but I never feared them either. For some reason I'd always liked my photo from 6th grade. I wore a white, long-sleeve shirt with Michael Jordan silhouetted over wacky 1990's colors. I looked young but not infantile. For once, my unruly hair was tame. But what struck me more than anything was my smile.

I looked...happy. My smile was genuine, honest, welcoming. I recalled seeing the photo sometime during high school and trying to remember what it felt like to be in that moment and feel what that smile felt like. I remember failing. Pictures of that smile don't exist from high school.

I've never forgotten that photo. Thinking back, it's the way I wanted people to remember me, and I'd never understood why. Much later I realized it was my smile.

Please don't think that my smile is anything special. Everyone's smile has this power. A smile does a number of things well. First of all, it projects confidence. Two, it makes other people feel good. This combination creates a powerful attraction. In "Blink", Malcolm Gladwell talks about a famous study that found the act of smiling has a reverse effect. In other words, we smile when we are happy, but we also become happy when we smile.

On Tuesday I arrived in Toulouse, France. It's a big sprawling city with a gorgeous downtown and a extremely pleasant night-time atmosphere.

When meeting French people here, I have limited resources at my disposal. I don't speak French. I don't know anything about the city. And my host and I are still relative strangers.

And yet, I'm having a great time.

It could be French culture. Or maybe I'm blessed to stumble upon a group of people that make me feel so welcome. It could be I'm a curiosity because I'm foreign. But if I had to guess, I'd say smiling shares some of the responsible. Feels like middle school again.

Rule #4: Smile

Devendra Banhart - Can't Help But Smiling