It’s just another weekday here but I’m planning to take it easy anyway. My day got off to a delightful start when I emailed a photo to myself and opened my boîte de réception to find a note from “moi.”
Happy Independence Day to all my American brethren! Please watch enough fireworks for the both of us.
It just occurred to me that it would be good for vocabulary building and reading comprehension to change my email and Facebook interfaces to French. Look how adorable they are! The Mets are “affronting” the Cubs right now. You bet they are. My gmail inbox is my reception box. Drafts are called “brouillons,” which in verb form means “to mix up, scramble, confuse, or blur.” Fascinating!
This is the stuff I do on Saturday nights here…
I have loved every second of being back in Dakar… excepts for the seconds minutes hours days I’ve spent uploading videos to send out for review. I wish I could say the photo above was stolen from the Internet ether, but it is actually the current sad state of affairs chez Ruth.When all is said and done, it will have taken five hours (if I’m lucky) for a file that is less than 1GB to upload.
But tragic network speeds and all the other things that had at one time or another annoyed me about Dakar are rolling right off me now that I’m back from my trip. Being here feels positively glorious, and such a privilege. The sun is out, rainy season has not yet begun, I have spent no more than three hours in an office in 2016, and my French has miraculously improved rather than suffered in the absence of speaking it for a month. (More evidence for my “marination theory” of language, which posits that time away allows everything to seep into the long-term, intuitive part of the brain, even while it abandons the short-term, readily accessible part.)
As Lloyd Dobler put it, I’ve been “walking around feeling satisfied. Can you imagine that?” I keep having these manic bursts of happiness while on the street or reading a book or listening to music. Even in the middle of twelve-hour edit sessions I have found myself overcome with the shock of contentment.
While I was away on my shoot and missing Dakar much more terribly than I would have thought possible after only three months living here, a similarly “homesick” study abroad student at the language center, who had just gotten back to the States, posted this video to Facebook. It’s been stuck in my head since, and it’s now one of my go-to happy songs. I think it very nicely captures how I am feeling at the moment.
After ten days straight of nothing but eat-sleep-edit, by this past Thursday I was feeling out of the woods enough on my video deadline to take a little break. During this little break, which has inadvertently extended to today, I have inexplicably decided to continue staring at my computer screen, to set down a few links that will go completely stale if I don’t share them soon. Also to post some pictures from the Dak’art Biennale, which I managed to get to just under the wire, on its last day this week.
First, the links:
Pick a country, pick a decade, and listen to the popular music of the era. My friend Jennie posted this link to Facebook a few weeks ago and I have been meaning to tell her since then that it has made me so so so so so so happy. Right now I’m listening to music from 1960’s Congo and it is amazing. I could spend the rest of my life blissfully down this rabbit hole…
Anthony Bourdain has lovely things to say about Senegal, and I agree with all of them.
There will be a refugee team at the Olympics. This is amazing, and there needs to be a documentary about it (and I need to work on it).
In Morocco I kept telling shop owners I was just looking but might come back to buy later, and without fail they would respond, “Inshallah,” which I found hilarious because I had just finished reading this article.
Hyperintelligent commentary on the usage and interpretation of “woke.”
The ostensible reason I am posting this article about getting chills while listening to music is because I like that the word for that sensation is French, but the real reason is that I love beyond measure that Air Supply was part of the study.
A reminder to stay positive while learning another language.
The end of sleeper train service in France. 😦
When West Africans dress, the fabric is the message.
Instead of renting one apartment, sign a (pretty expensive) lease that lets you live around the world.
On the pleasures of traveling alone.
The seven joys of traveling, from a joyful traveler.
In English, double negatives make a positive, but that’s not true for all languages.
15 slang French words every French learner should know.
Along the same lines, 20 funny French expressions. (Can someone French please confirm that number 19 is still in common usage? Because I would like this phrase to come out of my mouth as often as possible.)
Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants? I refer to a foreigner intending to stay someplace temporarily as an expat and one hoping to stay permanently as an immigrant but I guess that is also fraught.
And now, some Dak’Art favorites:
The piece above, which at first glance appeared to be a sculpture wrapping around the gallery wall, turned out to be a photo-mural featuring real people. I loved it. The artist explains. 
The above were all at the IFAN Museum of African Arts, which I intend to revisit soon to check out the permanent collection. I mistakenly thought that one of the other Dak’Art exhibition sites was at the old railway station that I passed by and went gaga over on one of my first walks in Dakar. It was actually only for performances, and there were none the afternoon I visited. But what there was… was the most spectacular train station in disrepair I’ve ever seen. This may be my favorite place in the city. Also, I am in love with the French phrase for railroad: chemins de fer, literally “routes of iron.”
And now I’m off to grab something to eat before getting back to editing. Enjoy the rest of your weekends!
I can’t even begin to guess what they meant to communicate…
But now I can’t stop picturing bigger-round-the-middle mama matches giving birth to tiny baby matches.
Speaking of lost in translation… I’m off to Portugal tonight, to meet my friend for a much-needed vacation from my vacation that has turned out to be anything but a vacation. Two days after I get back it looks likely that I will start another video job. So I may be a little MIA for awhile…
Today marks two years since I wrote this blog’s first entry. I also wrote the “about” page that day. I just revisited both and was awestruck / deeply shocked at having done exactly what I set out to do up to this point, exactly on schedule.
Until I went to grad school, which I did not quit despite many moments of thinking I might, and where I learned and made things I once felt incapable of, I never really followed through on any of my dreams, big or small. The first one I remember extinguishing way before its time was becoming a ballerina. I took ballet lessons for three years in grade school but quit when I got impatient for toe shoes. I would have toppled right over, having barely learned a thing, but I wasn’t in it for the dancing – I was in it to wear tutus and feel pretty. Black leather ballet flats did not cut it.
I similarly harbored yet too quickly abandoned grand dreams related to ice skating, clarinet, drums, guitar, baseball, about six diaries, marine biology, anthropology, being a humanitarian aid worker, and, until two years ago – living abroad and learning another language fluently.
It took 25 years on this earth to figure out that any dream worth having doesn’t magically come true without a ton of effort (and in the case of grad school, a ton of money – that’s a pretty effective carrot on a stick).
It’s been more than 10 years since I turned myself around, but it still feels momentous any time I take responsibility for making something that I want to happen actually happen. The second anniversary of this blog feels momentous in two ways. First of all, personal writing is one of the things that I started and quit and started and quit all the time as a kid but have now managed to do consistently for nine years. That makes me pretty happy.
Much more importantly, the blog represents the commitment I made to my grandest plan: spending two years saving money and practicing French and Spanish so that by February 2016 I could move to Dakar and then somewhere in Argentina to become fluent. The idea itself had come to me not long before, during the very, very depressed week after I returned from the best vacation of my life in Argentina, to gray skies and snow-covered ground in New York. I remember getting back from the airport, dropping my bag on the floor, bursting into unexpected sobs, and wondering how I had not noticed that I was muddling through life in New York while neglecting a lifetime’s worth of (admittedly crazy) lists of all the places I wanted to live and languages I wanted to speak and jobs I wanted to do.
Other countries and languages came and went (Kenya, South Africa, Spain; Swahili, Czech, Arabic), but Senegal and French were always at the top of those lists. And now I’m in Senegal, (quasi-)speaking French, and my blog has transformed from a repository for my unhatched dreams to a witness to their unfolding.
So here’s to two years of Talk Foreign to Me and many more years of actually talking foreign.
Bookends:
Argentina, day one: February 10, 2014 (first selfie ever, in a bathroom, because I’m classy; and the endlessly fascinating Recoleta Cemetery)
Senegal, day 60-something: April 21, 2016
(I’m at a fancy hotel on the Corniche after having given a presentation to a bunch of intergovernmental agency comms people on storytelling through video, in English, with conversation in French – including French accents from all over West Africa and Europe. It was nail-biting, the fear that I would not understand what was being said during a discussion that I was charged with leading. But I made it through, understanding 90% of it and faking my way through the rest, and then I got to eat lunch at an ocean-side table.)
The first time I encountered it in my host family’s house I assumed it was simply an incense burner… because the smell of incense was coming from it. Then I freaked out when I saw my host sister rest her feet on top of it. I assumed the iron grill was incredibly hot (there was a ton of charcoal ash below) and that she either had superhuman feet or was about to get burned to a crisp.
In fact, the iron grill is intended expressly for resting feet upon, to warm them up. Like a British hot water bottle, but with bonus features. I suppose the incense is to counteract the scent of warm smelly feet wafting through the air.
It’s fascinating to me how so many of the same things are actually quite different country by country.
In related news, as my 7-week homestay was drawing to an end last month, I checked out several apartments to move into, all north of here in more happening parts of town. But I ended up staying on with my host family after they offered to keep putting me up (putting up with me?) as long as I’m in town. I get along with them well and get tons of (and some days my only) French practice with them, so it seemed like the best option, even though it feels a little like being 17 again.
That has been awkward at times. But it’s also been oddly reassuring to finally be doing the French study abroad semester I regret not having done in my youth. A four-month homestay – just like this one is turning out to be – would have been my setup had I gone to Dakar back in my junior year of college. Better 15 years late than never.
People. Today I had a meeting… in French.
The first thing the man I was meeting with asked was, “Français? Anglais?” I chose the latter because though I’m seizing every opportunity to speak French, a business meeting is no place to practice. I then proceeded to lose all professional decorum when he offered me espresso from his Lavazza machine.* It was like Beatlemania applied to a coffeemaker.
So to be fair, there wasn’t much farther to fall. But I was alarmed when the man called over one of his staff, seemingly to introduce us, but actually to join us for the rest of the meeting – in French, because I had said that was fine when I thought we’d be doing five seconds’ worth of, “Je m’appelle Ruth. Enchantée. À bientôt.”
For the next twenty minutes I had three parallel streams of thought running through my mind. One was, “Holy shit, I’m having a meeting in French and I can understand!!!!” One was, “Holy shit, I’m having a meeting in French, what if I can’t understand????” And then of course, one was the conversation itself.
Perhaps it’s due to this overcrowding that my brain seems to skip over some fundamental processing component when working in French. I’ve noticed that I’ll follow along with a conversation, respond accordingly, and conclude with some mutually agreed upon forward-facing plan, but afterwards I’ll find myself unable to recap what was said in anything more than vague general terms. The specifics don’t seem to get banked, even in my short-term memory.
Anticipating that I might have this problem today, I scribbled down notes in English immediately following the meeting. It felt a little like I was cheating the (language acquisition) system, but in this case I couldn’t afford to get anything wrong by writing in French. As it is, I’m terrified that when I email them to follow up they’re going to be like, “Why is she going on and on about X when we asked her to talk about Y?”
That’s not the point. The point is: today I reached a new personal level of awesomeness because I had a business meeting in French. I just gave myself a literal pat on the back, because such things are important.
*It takes capsules just like Nespresso but it is as delicious and potent as the real thing.
So I got back from my trip Saturday night and it felt a bit like a homecoming, which was nice. But then again it also felt like exactly the opposite, which is part of what prompted the waterworks.
I am getting ahead of myself. The trip: I was hired by a non-profit that funds development work in Senegal (and other countries) to make videos about some of their projects. Since I traveled as part of a donor visit whose itinerary contained not only site visits but also lots of tourist stops, I got to enjoy plenty of off-the-clock sightseeing during the week we spent on the road. I also got to enjoy the company of the donors, who were a really fun and interesting group.
Pictures…
A handful of hands is what the French call a handshake. It’s both poetic and ridiculous. I like it.
[Photo: Julia Taylor]
talk foreign to me 