This one time, in Dutch class...

Well. Let me just post the quotes from class.

"You know in France, they kiss three times, EVERY TIME THEY MEET? What is that? And then they meet three times a day, and each time, kiss-kiss-kiss. ten times in one day, they are doing this! Come ooooooon! That's not good for the economy."

"A cow is kind of a prison... one word, and with that one word, you have to express your happiness and your sadness... it's not a good life, a cow's. Maybe there is a happy boe and a sad boe. What does a happy boe sound like? Boe-oe-oe-oOE...?"

The first quote is my teacher's response to the Dutch birthday traditions of keeping birthday calendars in the bathroom and kissing and congratulating everyone on a person's birthday (on Franny's birthday in November, people said, "Oh, it's your sister's birthday? Congratulations!"). The second was only part of the conversation that followed a poem about a cow:

De Koe
Een koe
is een merkwaardig beest
wat er ook in haar geest
moge zijn
haar laatste woord is altijd
boe ... boe ... boe ...

K. Schippers (1936)

Sociolinguistics was (also) very interesting today. We discussed dialects and accents and dialect vs. language and dialect boundaries and dialect continua. Ernestine (teacher) was surprised to hear that my grandfather pronounces "which" and "witch" differently. Next class will be even better (not counting the quiz!) as we will discuss creole languages. And creole fascinates me. One day, I would like to learn Haitian Creole. If only it were safer to live there.

After classes, Eva and I went to the HEMA cafe for coffee. We talked about languages; she's also doing the linguistic track but opted out of sociolinguistics this semester in favor of theater. So I tell her about everything that goes on. She's from Hong Kong, and speaks Cantonese, Hungarian, and English, to my English, French, and Spanish.

The problem with studying in the Netherlands is that, even if you're trilingual, your abilities are put "into rather harsh perspective" (to borrow from Emma Thompson in "Love Actually")!