About every fifth vehicle in Port Vila is a minibus, and if it has a ‘B’ on the numberplate then it’s designated public transport. Catching a bus in Vila simply requires catching the driver’s attention. It’s the subtlest of moves: a shake of a finger, a twitch of the lips, a raised eyebrow, and the bus driver will pull over for you. There are no designated bus routes, you just stroll up to the driver’s window to request your destination. The driver makes a quick calculation of his route and gives you the nod or the shake. Jump on board.

The interior decoration of buses is a mark of pride and quality amongst drivers. Some will have bright island-print fabric thumb-tacked to the roof, others might have a flag from Australia, NZ or Vanuatu. Pictures of Bob Marley are also a favourite, as are bible quotations. The stereo will almost definitely be pumping out local radio at top volume, and there are only about five songs that are ever played. (It is not unusual to hear the same song played twice in a row. I have learned to love these songs, as it is futile to hate them. The 'no-repeat workday' is not a welcome concept in this country.) All the windows will be open, so it’s good to grab a window seat to dry off the sweat.

Often if you’re a waetfala and you’re not going far, you’ll get dropped off first. This is annoying because the best kind of bus ride is the one where you get a complimentary tour of half the island. The roads in Vila are atrocious, and often the bus will be no faster than walking pace and you will be kneaded like you’re in an electric breadmaker. Supportive underwear is recommended. As well as negotiating potholes, the driver will be avoiding chickens, small children, other wayward traffic while simultaneously shouting greetings to multitudinous family members out the window along the way. Do not be in a rush.

Bus fares are 100 vatu (about $1.20 in Australian money) no matter where you want to go. Unless you’re a tourist, in which case the driver is at liberty to make up any fare he pleases. Hence, it helps to request your destination in Bislama to avoid being overcharged. Fellow passengers are a captive audience for practicing Bislama, though you need to be ready to describe every family member in detail, and answer questions about your work, home and friends. If you have any food with you, feel free to share it around.

When you get to your destination, you need to negotiate the door, which is often broken and needs to be opened by reaching through the window and operating it from the outside handle. Give your coin to the driver, tell him 'tankyu tumas' and be on your merry way.

Yep. I live in Port Vila, Vanuatu. Since two weeks ago. I'm still finding the concept a bit surreal. Just three months ago I was settled in Paris, living in an apartment in the suburbs, studying French and teaching English and enjoying cheese and red wine in equal quantities. Now, all of a sudden, I'm living on a pacific island, speaking Bislama (pigin English) and working in a museum, and enjoying bananas and coconut milk in large supply. How life changes.

I've been learning Bislama for the last two weeks, a few hours each morning for ten days, and can report that my Bislama is now probably a bit better than my French, even after 5 years of study. Bislama is a beautiful, sing-song, story-telling language. Take English. Remove all unnecessary vocabulary and liberally add 'long' and 'blong' to each sentence. It's a language made for 'storian', for yarning, and I love it.

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.