Parlez- vous francie?

I love language.  I love to listen to people talk, I love to hear foreign languages, I love trying to figure out why people use which language when...(did I say that right?).

I have forgotten much of the French I have learned over the years- just like my mother warned I would!  But starting this trip with time in Quebec has certainly brought much back, and reminded me of how much is buried in the gray matter.  Yesterday in a restaurant I passed on ordering a particular salad because one of it's ingredients was "arachide".  I would have SWORN that "arachide" meant spider  (Latin (or is it Greek?) lovers will recognize the root...).    Guess I could have eaten it after all...it is another word for peanut.

At the wonderful B&B where we are staying, B&B La Bedondaine, we had a nice conversation over breakfast.  Jeff doesn't speak French, Mr. and Mrs. Tessler speak English and French.  At first we are speaking only in French.  Mr. T looks at Jeff and speaks to him in French.  Jeff looked at me for a translation.  I translated as best I could.  Mr. T corrected me...in English!  Remember the game of Telephone when you were a kid?  We thought it was hysterically funny when the message was mixed up.  Were we really mimicing grown ups?

There is a word, which I can never remember, which means a word that is the same or very similar in two languages.  We know it is a VERY dangerous to assume we know the meaning of a word in our own language because it is spelled the same in another.  The other night when we were trying to find a hotel in the dark, we pulled into a place that had a lot of cars in the parking lot, a store on the first floor, curtained windows on the second and third, and a sign that said Accommodations.  It was a liquor store...without accommodations.

Someone has had fun choosing which words will be the same in another language and which ones wont.  Do you suppose they sit outside of the Accommodations stores and watch the Americans drive up?  Good craic on a Saturday night in a rural town.

This only reinforces my need to brush up on my French while we are here, and before we get to France. 

Je vous souhaite les ciels bleus!