I remember being in Year 11, and going to the Sixth Form subject fair at my school. Walking into the Frideswide's Gym, I made a beeline for the Modern Languages stall, skirting to the left of the table to talk to Mr Harvey about French A Level. The course, Mr Harvey assured me, would take me to a level of being bilingual. It later transpired that this was a lie. By the end of Year 13, as I picked up my B grade in French, I could only barely scrape together the mildly racist phrases peddled out in my oral on why ghettoisation should be encouraged.
Bilingualism makes you a god in Ottawa. Especially at UOttawa, the oldest bilingual university in Canada. At the welcome lunch for exchange arts students on Wednesday, jealousy and awe consumed me as the staff and all non-British students flipped seamlessly between mother tongue and English. The only time I can switch so easily between languages is if I need to say 'kinky slug' in Spanish. (Barbosa morbosa, if you're wondering.) At the lunch, I met Yvet and Lisanne, who are both Dutch; Lydia who is Chinese and Mark who is American. All of them, bar the latter, are masters of two or more languages. Meanwhile, I have only a basic grasp of this language called English and a predelection for using the Oxford comma.
Melancholy over my mono-lingualism over!
Today I went back in time. Ish. Y'know, to one of those olde village set up things. I went to one in British Columbia a couple of years ago, and today's really wasn't as good!
Upper Canada Village is a heritage park in Ontario and is 19th Century Canadian life living and breathing in this 21st Century. All the houses and commodities you'd expect are there: bakery, mill, shoe maker, flour mill, school house, dress maker, farms complete with sheep and pigs and cows etc. The theologian and Anglican within me had a moment of pure delight at seeing a Church of England church in this village! Furthermore, there was no red, white and maple leaf Canadian flag at this point, so there was a chorus of 'God Save the Queen' to the backdrop of many Union Flags. You can take the girl out of Britian, but we were an empire once and don't you forget it!
Lydia and I took afternoon tea; good old English cream tea. Several problems:
1) Cheese?
2) Whipped cream, not clotted cream.
3) Current jam, super sour.
4) I don't enjoy tea at the best of times, so I certainly wasn't going to inflict the dishwater than North Americans pass off as tea on my tastebuds, so I went for ice tea.
5) It's just not cream tea if it's not in England. Period.
Now I have a confession to make: I would love to travel back in time! For one, I'd get to wear period costume like corsets - and I wore a corset in Les Mis, and it made my boobs look like they'd been pumped with silicone implants! I'd also get to participate in old-fashioned, romantic courting, and work as a kindly school teacher with chalk and blackboards, in cute one-roomed wooden school houses. So there was a temptation in Upper Canada Village to stay and sneak into costume! Alas, I'm back here in Sandy Hill in 2012 with boobs that are just beginning to show signs of becoming aquainted with gravity.
Today has also made me think about this living abroad lark and the ex-pat life; could I ever do a perminent move away from Blighty?
The problem is, my likes and dislikes form a mass of contradictions.
I like space, but I don't like isolation.
I like an unspoiled view, but I also like buildings.
I like the outdoor attitude of Canada, but I like the home-centric attitude of the UK.
I like Shaniah Twain, but I don't like Justin Bieber.
I'll come back to this question at the end of the year abroad!
No comments:
Post a Comment