Parlez vous Garlic?
Grandad October 1st, 2009
There are two things that confuse me about the French.
One is that they don’t seem to laugh very much, which is very surprising as they don’t have Fianna Fail to contend with all the time.
The other is that they insist on speaking a foreign language.
I like French as a language. It isn’t as guttural as German [why do Germans always sound like they are about to sneeze?] and it is one hell of a lot better than Spanish or Italian. Those two just sound like popcorn going off, and irritate the hell out of me. One of the few things I miss about living in suburbia is making life hell for Spanish students.
The French language is quite soft and is very definitely sexy. I have gotten into trouble with quite a few Fine Things over the last couple of weeks when they asked me something simple in French, and I thought they said something else entirely. But that’s another story for another time [the first court hearing is in six weeks].
For some strange reason, quite a few French people copped onto the fact that I don’t speak fluent French [translation – my French is shite], and a few of them actually started speaking English to me. When I replied in French, they got even more confused. They would then say [in French] that they were sorry, but that they thought I was English, to which I would reply [in French] that I’m not English, so much as Irish. They would then reply that they don’t speak Irish to which my reply was always that I don’t speak much of it myself these days. It was usually around this time in the conversation that we gave up altogether, and spoke Japanese [of which I haven’t a single word].
Shopping was the worst as it is very difficult asking for things that I couldn’t point to.
Has anyone got any use for fifteen cartons of sanitary towels, a patio heater and a tame giraffe?
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