Yes, it’s one of those blogging trends, but I like this exercise. It takes some thinking.
1. Read more than 150 pages of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and really, really enjoyed it.
2. Sent the majority of my phone-text messages during the last year in my third language.
3. Gotten lost in a slum in Agra at night.
4. Lost the ability to speak my second language, which at one point I could at least use passably in the workplace, through disuse.
5. Gone without any sleep for 72 hours (and only about 6 hours during 6 days) while copying a musical score (for a composition of my own) for an upcoming concert, and making only one major mistake in the copying of the full score and individual parts.
6. Performed on soprano and tenor saxophone, flute, and sung backup vocals all in one night… in a rock band, in a foreign country.
7. Eaten Lebanese moujadhara, Korean dumplings, and salad all in one meal in the last week. (The dumplings didn’t go well with the Lebanese.)
8. Lost all my money and travelers’ cheques in a foreign country when I was not the only person dependent on the money I’d brought there, two days before a flight out of the country, and on New Year’s Eve.
9. Bought a tanpura on my last day in Delhi and carried it home on an airplane.
10. Paused in the middle of an argument about Bush’s foreign policy to take a moment to shake hands with the Dalai Lama.
via Kat, who like me, is a kind of sheep… as well as a brilliant critique-writer for novel manuscripts.
I’m with you on 2 and 4 – my 2nd language is French, but now when I try to say hi to my grandparents, I end up confusing them and myself completely with a mix of Korean and English, with a few French words mixed in. :(
D’you really shake hands with the Dalai Lama?
Lacking Francophone grandparents, my losing French worries me ever so slightly less. I figure I can pick it up again at some point, and plan on using French for linguistic cross-training… gonna try test that theory I link to from Let’s Learn Korean. I did have a hilarious experience asking some French people where the good hotel they were discussing (in French) was… “Ce bon yeogwan que vous avez malhesseo, ou iyaeyo?” They switched to English for me.
Yes, I briefly shook hands with the Dalai Lama during a short audience when I was living in a house outside McLeod Ganj, near his home in Himachal Pradesh, in India. I was deeply involved in an argument with an American Peace Corps guy living in Uzbekistan, about Bush’s Administration and especially its foreign policy. Suddenly a monk turned me and faced me at the Lama, who was grinning at me. We shook hands, and I said hi, he kept smiling and inclined his head, and then another monk put something around my neck and shuffled me on down the line.
I’m quite sure hundreds of people, if not a couple of thousand, shook his hand on the same day. No speech, no chat, just a handshake and a little red string around my neck and then I was on my way. Kept arguing with the American guy, and eventually had lunch with him. Must admit, though the Dalai Lama story sounds interesting, it was arguing (and later chatting in a more friendly fashion) that made that particular day interesting.