First of all, class demographics. All female.  Half  are half young-ish people in their 20s who are daughters/girlfriends/wives of physicists (and one female physicists). The other half are women in their 40s-50s with children. Kat and I are the only Americans. The rest hail from Italy, England, Japan, Korea, Poland, Russia, Romania and Slovakia. This makes for a lot of interesting french dialects.

It’s a two hour class which is long. When I think back to college, I’d try to avoid those 1.5 hour classes even if I only had to go twice a week instead of three. With intense listening and language talking, two hours is draining. As a result, sometimes I lose my patience and start getting silly.

Take last week. About 1.5 hours into class, we’re going through some verbal exercises that Madame has asked us to model just like the cassette tape. (Yes, I said cassette tape.)

Exemple:

A: Il est comment mon blouson?

B: Ton blouson? Trop grand!

This roughly translates to “What do you think of my blouse?” “Your blouse? Too big!”

Got it? Ok, here’s the next one.

A. Il est comment mon pantalon?

B. Ton pantalon? Trop grand!

Last one!

A. Il est comment mon caleçon?

“What’s a caleçon?”

Madame wrinkles her nose. “That’s hard to explain…” she begins.

Kat grabs her dictionary and starts flipping through as Madame explains, in french, that it’s something that women wear on their legs, sometimes under dresses, and can be long.

Kat finds the word. “Boxer shorts.”

Madame and the rest of the class give us funny looks. But there, in her dictionary, it says boxers. Or, alternatively, long johns.

We’re puzzled as the rest of the class comes to the conclusion that “leggings” is the best translation. I finally ask whether the word can mean some other clothing for a man.

“Yes,” Madame says, apparently remembering this. “It can also mean underpants.” Aha.

At this point, I’ve either had too much french class or realized the ridiculousness of the conversation that we are about to have. “Then, isn’t this conversation a little strange if a guy is speaking?”

Kat and another younger classmate start giggling, realizing what I’ve asked. Madame doesn’t seem to get it, or she doesn’t understand my french so I have to repeat the question. At this point, the older women start to laugh, realizing what I’m asking.

Finally, Madame, with a straight face and in English responds. “Wouldn’t your husband or your boyfriend ask you something like this?”

I suppose the occasion hasn’t come up in our relationship. But, if it does, I’ll be ready.

John and Sarah’s wedding from Sarah Croft on Vimeo.

Apparently, living in the country of potatoes, cheese and bacon has had an opposite effect on him. He has actually lost quite a bit of weight and now all his pants are too big.

Since we had a bit of a shopping bust in London and he was too busy to get pants in the states, we had to suck it up and buy some pants here. Unfortunately, H&M is just as cheap quality as it is in the States and twice the price. But, we found a really nice pair of pants at Globus, the most expensive store in Geneva. They are a great pair of pants though, and they fit him great.

So I was surprised to find them in the wash this morning. Of course, he’s worn them all week and they should be washed. But, these are PRICEY POSTDOC PANTS that I need to be super careful with. I should read the washing instructions.

Despite these pants being an English brand, the instructions are in German.

Ok, Google Translate. Please tell me what this says:

Binnenste buiten en apart wassen. Ware von links waschen. Flecken nicht lokal entfernen. Farbabgabe beim tragen. Ausfaerben bel der wasche. Farbschattlerungen und Waschkniffe sind typisch Fur diese modische hose. Das ausfarben und die Optik berechtingen deshalb Nicht zur reklamation.

Washing and tricks are typical for these fashionable pants, eh?

hiking! jura!!!

Enjoy these pictures I shot!

Don’t you step on my blue grey suede shoes

I guess there’s a time when you buy crazy beautiful expensive shoes and never look back. They were 33% off the original price, satisfying my internal bargain huntress.

Oh, Switzerland. How you are skewing my perspective on how expensive clothes/shoes/everything should be!

I’m at an advantage here in SwitzerFrance because in middle and high school, I took French classes until my senior year. This all would be more helpful if I didn’t decide to learn Japanese in college, thereby pretty much undoing all my natural French hesitations and accent. I’ve found that for me, language is largely binary. That is, I know my home language (English) and something else. That something else for the past several years has been Japanese. Comprehension isn’t really the issues, it’s speaking. Let me tell you that French people look at you very strange when you say “Arigatou” instead of “Merci.” Having to discipline myself to respond in French has been a challenge, so I here I was, signing up for French Intermediate class.

On our first day, we did introductions in French and then had to take a placement test. Everything, even the instructions, was in French. Still, I was cautiously optimistic as I read the reading comprehension questions. A train announcement. An airport report. A phone conversation.

Sweet, I’ve done all this. I’ve traveled on trains, I’ve been in airports. I eavesdrop on people on the tram all the time. I was ready!

The instructor started the CD. Train annoucement: Le train vadcamzedix huinfe a voie day ennsin man twaznimu.

Omg. WHAT?

This is basically how the rest of the listening comprehension went for me. I got bits here an there like “train” and “track D,” but I had no idea what the train number was or what time it was coming.

The airport announcement was worse; I didn’t get a single word. Desperate, I read the answer choices for the questions, hoping to use my deductive reasoning skills.

What happened to the airplane?

1. The airplane is delayed
2. The airplane is broken and needs to be fixed
   
3. The airplane has been changed

What should the people do?

1. They need to retrieve  their luggage
2. They should go to the new gate
3. They need to wait until the flight is ready to board

Test aside, talk about a stressful situation at an airport. All you get is that there is something wrong with the plane. I could imagine myself doing the completely wrong thing. Well, actually, you’d probably be in an airport and watch others around you who did understand what happened and follow their lead, but here, in my french test, no such luck. I mean, I had no idea what had happened to the plane.

The rest of the pre-test was similarly frustrating. I mean, yes, I get my French isn’t the best ever, but I understood the entire passage on a princess crowned in 2003, but could not answer the question “How does the author feel about the princess? How do you know?” I read the passage twice more and realized that the three or four vocabulary words I didn’t know held the key to answering the question. So, I wrote, “If I knew what xxx meant, I probably could tell you.”

I still don’t know how I did on the test, but it couldn’t have been good.

If you have heard of it, chances are you’ve read it atop some sort of list or ranking, about how great the school is or some article about how strange our mascot is. (It’s a purple cow.) However, recently, it seems that we’ve gotten some new press and a new #1 ranking: Best College to Find a Husband.

Ok, first, 50% of alumni marrying another Eph is really high. Back when I worked as a tour guide on campus, I got in trouble once for saying a number verging on 40%. (On the weekends, I noticed that there was always some wedding preparations going on at the chapel, so this didn’t seem to be incorrect.) Now that I’m a much older and wiser alumni, I’ve realized that using my friends as a non-exact sampling, the number is closer to probably 10 or 20%. Don’t you think that the Alumni council would have more exact information on this? And what about Alumni divorces? Do those count?

At any rate, the article is strange. Most of the colleges on the list are crazy difficult to get in to, so it doesn’t seem to make sense that a potential college student would find it useful in any way. If it’s just to say, yeah, lots of us marry each other, it’s true. But, I don’t know how different Williams is from any other college or university.

But, I did find my terrific husband. Hard to believe how our one-year anniversary is only six weeks away.

I’ve been a big fan of yours when I lived in Chicago. I got to go skydiving through one of your offers, and I discovered great restaurants that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.  Since moving to Geneva, I thought I’d have to find another discount group to get daily mails from, the Europeans being less a bargain-hunting sort.

So imagine my surprise when I saw this on my facebook pageNo, it’s not surprise that groupon has made it’s way to Switzerland, no.

It’s that we have searched high and low for bubble tea in Geneva and have not been able to find this delicious drink anywhere. And here, Groupon suggests that no only does it exist, but that I could potentially get 70% off of it.

OMG. GROUPON WHERE IS THE BUBBLE TEA IN GENEVA???