Thursday, September 11, 2008

Drole Histoire

I love language barriers. Seriously. Here is why:

I met this boy name Samuel at the post office on Saturday (random, I know). We talked for a while, later exchanged phone numbers and the like. Anyway that's not the important part of the story. My friend Samuel left for Scotland today, so last night he had a going-away barbeque at his house. I went with my roommate, Alex. There, we met 20ish French people. That was kind of exhausting, because everyone does "la bise" (la bise is the greeting where you make kissing noises on either side of a person's face to say hello and goodbye). It went pretty well...our French was good enough that we could have conversations, so we made a couple of friends.

It wasn't until I'd been there for a couple hours that I first encountered a translation problem...and it wasn't on my part! (hooray!) I was talking to a boy named Quentin, who was passing around a camera so that everyone could take pictures of everyone else. I guess it was my turn, because he holds the camera out to me and asks, with complete seriousness, "Do you want to shoot people?" He had been speaking English to me to practice (I responded in French). So I look at him sort of sideways and say "excuse me?" He says, "Do you want to euhh...shoot people...you know...with the camera...?" I couldn't stop laughing. I guess he was translating literally from French, where it's possible to take a picture of someone by shooting them. (I know we have photo shoots and shoot pictures, but when was the last time you shot someone to take their picture?)

It was interesting. Oh! I think today is internet day at my house! Maybe I'll put up pictures tonight :)

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