April Fish!

Poisson d'avril, or 'april fish' is, quite right, the Belgian way of saying April Fools. There's a long story about how it dates back to ancient times but long story short, for those who play jokes they say "april fish" and the typical little kids play joke is to stick a fish on people's back. However I did notice that there weren't many fishes swimming around april 1st. April fools, as with Hallowwen (and Thanksgiving, shockingly), seems to be much more popular in the US than over here.

An 'Oh, French' moment

One of my friends was handing out our geography tests. With a look of understanding pity, he hands another of my friends her test with a F scribbled on top. "Pas terrible," he says, which I translated as "not terrible". Wait, huh? No detectable sarcasm about a test that was fairly terrible...
Flash forward to my host mom telling me about a walk and discussion she'd had earlier that day. "It was terrible," she tells me, with a huge grin.
"Hang on.. what does terrible mean?"
"It's like... good."
Yes, in french, the word terrible means good.

I need to stop getting thrown off by little things like that in French. But all I can do is sigh, think to myself in a tone of amused (and somewhat bemused) wonder, "Oh, French." And roll my eyes.

Living in history

We were discussing Belgian history in my geography class (which interesting in and unto itself, as I have a separate history class) a couple days ago and we came across the topic of World War II and how that influenced and changed Belgium. It was an interesting but relatively unremarkable conversation until the teacher dropped the phrase 'after the occupation.' Of course I knew that Europe was a major battle ground in WWII. Of course I knew Belgium had been occupied during World War II. But I hadn't ever consciously thought about it. And it threw me off. To imagine that this land, here, was such an integral part of the war took my breath away for a second.

Language has really come to define my life in these past nine months. I feel a lot more aware of the language itself that someone speaks. I'm not talking about the meaning that their words convey, I mean the physical way they speak, their accents, as well as an overall consciousness of what language is coming out of their mouth. It's a hard state to explain, but it's led me to remark different things: for one, how almost everyone has a different quality of voice when they change languages (some go lower pitched, some speak less gravelly, etc.). Or how I speak less than I used to in the US.. and how I speak less with my hands in French than in English.

The big two-five-zero

Today, February 19, 2011, makes 250 days that Belgium has not had a government. Because the French speaking region and the Dutch speaking region have different political views, they've always disagreed at least partly over the running of the government. And this year - well, 2010 - their differences have left them 250 days without a new government. It's actually a really fascinating situation, but to cut a long story short, the parliament needs to chose a prime minister because one doesn't vote directly for the prime minister in Belgium, and so far they haven't been able to so. Yesterday we claimed the world record, finally beating Iraq to 249 days without a government...