Archive for May, 2008
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
More linguistic shenanigans …
My three year old recently came home from playgroup with a new word. Which no doubt has got the poor boy very confused. The word in question is ‘Nein’ (the German for ‘no’); which he likes to follow with the word ‘ten’.
Strasbourg’s location and history means that the German language is used a great [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Life in Strasbourg by Bart
Monday, May 26th, 2008
The best show on TV
I am in the fortunate position of occasionally being able to benchmark French Television programming against contemporary British fayre. And I am afraid to say that they are both as bad as each other. Indeed the same could be said of popular music in both countries, but I would never dare to say [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Life in Strasbourg, entertainment by Bart
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
Exquisite corpse : the show
There is a family game, which I knew fondly as a child as ‘Consequences’, the equivalent title of which this side of the channel is rather macabre: Exquisite corpse.
Essentially ‘exquisite corpse’ (or cadavre exquis in French) refers to a method art-form by which collaborators add to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule [...]
No Comments » - Posted in entertainment by Bart
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Thalassa
There seems to be no such thing as ‘Prime Time’ TV programming in France, at least not on the national channels (France 2, 3, 4, 5, O).
Nothing demonstrates this better than the Friday-night post-news slot on France 3, which has been occupied by the same show since mid September. At first, it had to do [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Life in Strasbourg by Bart
Monday, May 12th, 2008
Ass-purge season
Here’s some trivia for you: ‘ass-drainage’ is the perfect anagram of ‘Andre Agassi’; but I digress, that’s not what this post’s about, but I thought you might want to try dropping that in to an awkward silence sometime?
Ass-purge on the other hand isn’t the anagram of anything; it’s the phonetic pronunciation of ‘Asperge‘ which is [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Life in Strasbourg, food by Bart
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Bilingual babies and toddlers don’t talk
One thing we never really considered when we moved to France was how our children would cope with growing up in a bilingual environment. With hardly a sentence of French between us, let alone any first hand experience of bilingualism, we just assumed that their language skills would develop as normal - but in two [...]
11 Comments » - Posted in Life in Strasbourg by Bart
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
Spot the Scotsman
Don’t be surprised if you hear the sound of bagpipes in Strasbourg this weekend; as Saturday’s parade of nine Celtic pipe and drum bands from across Europe will mark the culmination of the 2008 EuroCelt festival in Strasbourg, during which much squealing, honking and drumming will have taken place (and that’s just at the bar [...]
