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)

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.