And the Winner Is…Comté

Forty days is a lot, but still kind of short.  Exactly half of those days I woke up and scurried off to class, to train a sluggish brain to re-conceive the world.  The goal is not to translate, but to forge new paths of comprehension.  One at-first-mind-boggling conflation for me was that of sensory perception—sentir (“sense”) is used to describe feeling (physical as well as emotional), smelling, and tasting.  And parfum typifies scent as well as flavor.  But think of how evocative it is to, for instance, sense garlic: do you really taste alone without smelling?  Is the taste not accompanied by various sensations such as a peppery bite, a lingering pungency?

Will, does this have to do with Pokemon?

Speaking of complex flavors, after much sampling and reflection, I have concluded that my favorite French cheese is Comté.  It’s pretty much just fancy swiss cheese, but it’s perfect in every way.  Aside from traveling well, you can sink your teeth into it, it’s tangy and rich and bright, and it is fantastic alone and goes with everything.  Apparently lots of other people feel this way, as it is the most-produced AOC* French cheese.

*government quality regulation

Thank you for following along on this trip to France—and huge thanks to Marta for hosting me and sharing her life well lived.  What’s next is a surprise.  Tune in to find out if I:

- return to the regularly scheduled program “Antarctica Part IV: Ice-Shattering Adventures in Cargo Loading and Unloading”

- enroll in more gratuitous educational courses and “Teach English in Mystery Country”

- manhandle questionable meat while awaiting auroras at “Alaskan Winter Truck Stop”

The Future Simple

After a mere eighteen language lessons, we were asked to project what our lives will entail in 2040.  In class we took turns impersonating palm readers, and later I waxed poetic in my written homework.  Inspired by my fantastically-romantic writer-hero Patrick Leigh Fermor, I will swim the Hellespont at an advanced age (I’ll be 57)—and do him one better, reciting Byron’s verses in between breaststrokes (another Europe-to-Asia swim club member).  The future conditional (to say nothing of the subjunctive) is a beautifully nuanced construction.  In English it’s so concrete to say “If I see him, I will talk to him”; I rather like the French finessing of the verb to express the potentiality of the action, with conjugative elements of the infinitive, future, and imperfect all wrapped up in one word (“Si je lui vu, je lui parlerai”): I totalkperchancewill to him.

Crossing the bridge to the medieval quarter of Lyon, where verisimilitude = bed bugs.

All last week the city slowed.  One by one the bakeries put up notices of August closure and the dive-bomb buzz of motorbike engines lessened.  It was doubly surprising to find that Lyon, France’s second largest city, was simultaneously near-abandoned and stuffed with tourists.  Lyon, I cannot fathom why in the still of summer holidays you hosted some WNBA showcase with commentary amplified to fifty miles around until after midnight in addition to posting willfully atonal brass bands on every third corner.  And in case I didn’t get the hint that Lyon doesn’t like me…bedbugs.  Universe, you were supposed to check off the box for failed/traumatic youth hostel stay when I was, like, 20: why did you wait until now?

Luckily, the near future (at the moment of bedbug horror) was good.  In French, any plans further down the road than the next hour or so qualify for the future simple:  

-What are you going to do today?  

-I will meet up with a friend, we’ll catch up, go eat a delicious lunch, drink a glass of wine, and then walk around town for a while.  

No finessing layers of meaning into as few words as possible; just, simply, the future.