During my stay in Switzerland, I discovered a number of things.

The region I was staying in (Nendaz) speaks French. Now, my knowledge of 
French is minimal. I recall that what we refer to as a "gold fish", the 
French call "le passion rougue" ("the red fish"), and that's about it.

I recall sitting down in the cafe at Siviez. Waitress wanders over and 
mutters something in French. I look at her for a moment. "Well I hope 
your English is way better than my French." She looks worried.

Well anyway, I eventually managed to figure out that if you mumble 
"shokolah", they bring you a mug of hot chocolate. Which tastes ****ing 
fantastic BTW.

Benny likes to drink some kind of coffee. I'm not sure exactly what it 
is. The waitress comes over and he says "reversay". And she looks at him 
like "dude, WTF?" Anyway, it turns out the correct way to pronounce this 
word is actually a cross between saying "reversay" and trying to cough 
up a gold watch: hhhhhhhhrrreversay. Otherwise they literally have no 
idea what you're saying.

I still have no idea what this word actually means... Any guesses?

Also somewhat interesting: If you ask an English person how to say 
"hello" in French, they'll tell you it's "bon-jor". Well, *I* didn't 
hear anybody say that! What I heard was much more like "bor-shor". 
Because, you know what? To speak French, you have to actually speak in a 
French accent, or nobody knows what you're saying. Which actually makes 
sense, really...

Similarly, it's not "mer-see". It appears to involve a completely 
different set of vowles, more closely approximating "meial-si". Danm, I 
can't even *type* it, much less say it out loud.

For me, the most baffling thing was hearing little kids uttering 
complex-sounding French sentences. Now, logically, this isn't 
surprising. They're probably from France! What else would they be 
speaking? And yet, it still amazed and astonished me every time... 
French words seem to have such a complicated structure. And yet these 
kids toss it around as if it's *easy*. Which, when you're a French 
person, it probably is.

Like I said, logically there's nothing unusual here. Rationally, you 
know that. But even so, when you see small children casually doing 
something that you yourself find impossibly difficult... it's always 
surprising.

(But then, come to that, there were children there who could ski better 
than they can *walk*! Really showed me up...)

You know, it's probably a *good* thing that I don't know how to say "you 
have a really nice arse" in French. Because that waitress would have 
probably slapped me for it. Mind you, she says her boyfriend is always 
teaching her new English words and phrases. (And damn, her English isn't 
half bad...) Ho hum!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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