Seagull

The full title of this post is ‘Seagull, Silver-Screen and the Seine-Maritime’ but lots has happened in a very short space of time so I’ll split this blog in to three handy sections (the other two will be separateposts below this one) and you can pick and choose which you read.

Before we begin, I’ve decided that England is one of the worst places to learn English for non-native speakers. When I was at school, I knew a French native who’d worked in Scotland and here I’ve worked with someone that worked in Northern Ireland and another person who has spent time in the USA. All of them have far better intonation and more authentic sounding accents than any French person I’ve ever met who lived/studied in England. It seems to be better to go somewhere with a strong accent that you can really pick up. (I imagine this also works for other languages.)

A Seagull (Or ‘You couldn’t make it up’)

They come here. They all come here. How do they find me? – Max Bialystock, The Producers

My friend Donné particularly enjoys asking me the question “How do you get yourself in to these situations?”. This is mainly because I have proven repeatedly that if there is anything bizarre, crazy or irritating within a 10-mile radius then it will likely go out of its way to try to hunt me down.

The last week has been no exception to this rule. It started with small things like a man asking me what day it was and finding the answer quite traumatic. After this came a student tirade about the evils of jelly. Another fairly amusing thing happened at Tuesday night’s language café (my commitment to attend is going strong). Sam and I were on an English table with some quite... interesting people. One French man was finding it difficult to hear which caused him to misunderstand quite a few things that were said. This eventually resulted in him writing down that a Korean girl’s name came from her parents wanting her to grow up to be ‘beautiful and white’ rather than ‘beautiful and wise’.

Two events, however, really surpassed themselves in trying to be my weirdest thing of the week. The first was a man running after a seagull shouting and swearing at it. The seagull had managed to steal his takeaway, get the tray out of the bag, open the tray AND start eating before he managed to catch up with it. Here is my sneaky photo of the seagull and his spoils:

This is what winning looks like.

 The second strange event of my week was less pleasant than watching a man getting mugged by a hungry seagull. I got on the bus to goto school and sadly so did an incredibly drunk man. He was aggressive, shouting and swearing at all of the other passengers. The rest of the bus ganged up on him (one quite elderly lady said ‘We’re just trying to get towork. What are you doing for society?’) and the situation was escalating pretty quickly. Eventually the bus driver stopped and said she wouldn’t go any further until the contrôle (ticket inspectors/bus bouncers) arrived. Eventually three of them arrived and carried the guy off of the bus. He didn’t take this very well and as we drove off with everyone on the bus cheering he was still shouting and lashing out at the control officers and a policeman.

Please send in your own entries to my ‘You couldn’t makeit up’ competition. If I get any good ones, I’ll pass them on.

Silver Screen

As other assistants have commented, it can sometimes (not always!) seem like there is surprisingly little to do in Le Havre for a town of its size. Consequently, we spend a heck of a lot of time at the cinema (at the moment, I’m going around 3 times a week). This isn’t a bad thing – it’s a good way to improve my French without having to try too hard and it’s pretty good fun.

In the last week, our cinema has been having a previews festival. As a result, I’ve got to see some really great films before their French release date and, excitingly, they’ve all been in English! As much as I enjoy learning French, you really can have too much of a good thing and, while dubbing works fantastically with animations, it is severely irritating when it’s applied to live action films. On one of these cinema visits, the lady checking tickets warned me that the film would be in VO (original version) rather than VF (French dubbed). I told her that I didn’t think it would cause me too much of a problem.

 

The Seine-Maritime

This weekend I was lucky enough to have the chance to stay in Dieppe and Rouen, the Seine-Maritime department’s other two large cities, with one of the teachers from school and her boyfriend. Sadly she’s not a colleague I generally get to work with as she teaches English in the other section of the school to the one I work in so it was really nice to get to know her a bit better.

We stayed in the small town of Quiberville-sur-mer near to Dieppe. It’s a beautiful town in the countryside and the house overlooked the sea and cliffs.

Language, Language, Language!

To speak another language is to possess another soul – Charlemagne

So hang me, I cheated with the title. This post is, however, very much about language and therefore I do not feel at all guilty in having done so.

Firstly, Sam (one of the other assistants here in Le Havre) has written two absolutely brilliant blog posts, one on how to sound French and the other on how to sound French Havrais-style. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind I had an idea for a similar post but it couldn’t possibly be as accurate or as amusing as these posts are. If you want to have a go at sounding French, give them a read – they’re very entertaining and very true to life.