So in French, homeless people (in politically correct parlance) are called SDF: sans domicile fixe, or 'no fixed address'. I know this because I am currently SDF. My housemate out in the burbs got a bit creepy and so I made a hasty departure, and am now aimlessly meandering about France.

Admittedly, i am an SDF de luxe, since I just spent 4 with my cousins on their yacht cruising along the normandy coast, and am about to catch the TGV (with first class upgrade) down to Dax, a spa town in the Pyrennees, in the south of France, before gently wandering across the mountains that divide France and Spain until I get to the Mediterranean. After that, a few days admiring wines in the Claret region, a visit to the country mansion of a rather eccentric artist I once met in Melbourne and then back to Paris in time for my birthday.

And then, on the 31st May, I'm boarding an aeroplane for Australia to start a new chapter, working in Vanuatu for a year. Sweet.

This video is quite simply awesome. [via hippocampe, who is also full of good things.]

Readers will know of my devotion to Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency. I tried using one of McSweeney's lists in one of my English classes the other day, but the exercise sank like a pair of concrete slippers.
I used one called 'other things there will be, in addition to blood', in a class where I was teaching 'will' as a construction for explaining the future.* I was kinda hoping that it would add some laffs to an otherwise fairly dry grammatical exercise, and that I could introduce a bunch of language-lovers to the pleasures of McSweeney's. Sadly, no. I conclude that the humour is just too subtle.
That said, here's a link to a particularly lovely list in the McSweeney's style.

* Note to English speakers. Did it ever occur to you that we don't have a future tense?

I hung out with my housemate and my neighbour on Saturday night, properly, for the first time. Up till now, I’ve been a bit too unco in French to be able to properly communicate, preferring to make encouraging noises while my talkative housemate monologues for an hour or so. But on Saturday, for a full evening, we chatted, joked, debated and mucked around. At about 2am we thought it’d be fun to go for a drive, so we packed a little picnic (lemonade, plastic cups, figs, dried apricots) and went to Trocadero to look at the Eiffel Tower. We stood there in the chilly night air watching the city workers prepare the streets for the Paris marathon the following day, munching dried fruit and arguing over the ideal viewing position for the great Parisian icon. It was a particularly Gallic moment.

After, we took a drive along the Champs Elysees (I was shocked to realise that I’d never been there before, in four visits to Paris), and then jumped onto the ring road to do a loop of the city before heading back home. Much of the evening’s conversation was spent trying to find an equivalent phrase for URST* in French, and couldn’t find one. Conclusion: either one does not exist, my housemates don’t read enough pop culture theory, or I really didn’t explain the concept properly. All options are equally likely.

* URST = Unrequited Sexual Tension. The greatest example of this that I have seen is between Holmes and Watson in the glorious “Hound of the Baskervilles” with Richard Roxburgh and Ian Hart. Gnaar.

It's really freakin hard to follow the footy from Paris. The AFL website is pants, Bigpond refuse to answer my repeated requests about getting access to their secret men's club of bigpond-members only footy replays, and copyright laws mean that I can't stream the live commentary from the ABC radio website. Instead, I am stuck with reading the weekend round-up online and dreaming of chilly winter weekends at the ABC with my binoculars and trannie.

That explains why I am so unreasonably excited by the arrival of the DVD of the NAB cup Grand Final, that I mail-ordered like the desperate footy geek that I am.* Pathetic but true. (Also, I intend to use it as a learning tool for all those heathen unconverted European sould who are yet to see the light of AFL. heh.)

* can one be a sports geek? or does being into sports preclude being a geek? In which case, perhaps, 'footy tragic' is a better description.

spring snow
Originally uploaded by helen walpole

Snow! OK, granted, it's not much, but's enought to get this Aussie excited.

Moment of linguistic breakthrough: I no longer feel like I'm in a foreign country.

When I arrived, everything looked so damn French, you know? I was surrounded by signs and posters and ads and text that was in a foreign language. Whenever I put on the TV or the radio it was immediately apparent that I was out of my element, that I had to work hard to make any headway into understanding what was being said. If I wanted to go into a shop, I needed to rehearse my lines.

Now, I'm starting to feel at ease. I can respond if someone talks to me unexpectedly, without needing a dress rehearsal beforehand. I can follow the news. I can handle myself in a restaurant or cafe. I can stand on the metro platform and read the ads, understand the announcements and eavesdrop on the odd conversation. That's not to say that the penny has dropped. Goodness no. I'm not fluent in French yet, not by a long shot, but I’m starting to feel a bit more comfortable in my new French skin.

We were discussing fashions in baby names in class recently. I thought the Anglophone trend of inventing names with bad spelling and a surfeit of the letter y was shameful enough, but my French teacher totally trumped me when she told us that she had recently come across children named the following:

1. Peripherique. To clarify: the 'peripherique' is the Paris ring road.

2. Lampadaire. Direct translation: lamp post.

3. Photocopieuse. No translation required.

Right, yairs, it's rather been a while, hasn't it? I've been a bit busy, what with all the French-learning and the apartment-hunting and the eating of unpasturised cheese.

I'm now settled in an apartment in the Paris suburbs, in a place called Alfortville which feels a bit like its own town and not a all like Paris. My kitchen window looks onto the town square, where earlier today a marching band was playing the national anthem. Quaint. There is also a market in the street twice a week and no shortage of patisseries and chocolatiers in the near vicinity.

I've got two jobs, both of which are as a teacher of English as a foreign language. It's quite a challenge. I thought I had a pretty good grip on the English language but got a rude shock when I realised I had never hear of the present continuous, of frequency adverbs or any of the rules that govern their usage. I always wondered why my parents groaned about learning grammar at school - I never did it - but now I see that it's pretty complex and very very detailled. However, since I don't want to look like the idiot native-speaker who doesn't know her own language, it's back to the books for me.

cambridge
Originally uploaded by helen walpole