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Un déluge de francais

"Je le plus." It doesn't make sense, but he tries. Nick's new fascination with trying to speak bad French has been successfully incompréhensible.

"uhn, doo, trah, cat, sink..." he counts.

"Cinq, Nick, sank."

"Oh yeah, sank. Uhn, doo, trah, cat, sank, sees, set, wheat, neuve, dise! ... mone shoor... toojoors...

...je suis perdu." Well, at least he got the last one right. Yes, Nick is lost when it comes to French. But, he's learning : )

***

On Wednesday, we speed-walked to the Hatch Shell at the Boston Esplanade to try to catch the Youth Orchestra of the Americas play Bernstein, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff' at 7 p.m. Fifteen minutes late, we turned the final corner to find an empty Hatch Shell, and a menacing sign: "Performance has been moved to New England Conservatory, 290 Huntington Ave. "

"Escooze mee? Doo yu a knoe where eez zee conservatoire?" a voice behind us begged. The English was correct, but the accent was impossible to miss: French.

"No, we're trying to figure that out ourselves. Would you like to go with us?"

Forty-five minutes later, Nick, Hervie ("air-vee") and I had trekked more than halfway across the city, admiring east coast architecture and exchanging opinions on living in France. Hervie was an astronomy research assistant at Harvard. Bon.

When we finally arrived at the conservatory at 8 p.m., a herd of people had filled the lobby, looking eagerly toward the doors to the concert hall. The seats were full. Nobody else was let in. Merde.

"What the hell, let's get a drink." So we invited Hervie to take part in an old American pasttime: drinking oversized American beers in a dingy sports bar with fourteen oversized television screens playing the same Red Sox baseball game.

Of course, we couldn't get in until the bouncer had to ask Nick for a passport. "What, because I'm from the state of New Mexico?"

"Oh, right. Go on ahead, then."

Once Hervie got over the intimidation of choosing a beer (he prefers wine, duh), we settled down into a lovely evening of chatting about the weather in Nice (it's nice), rugby, and English translation of "quartier." It's neighborhood, I think.

***

"Joyeux anniversaire!" For Sophie's birthday this past weekend, Nick & I headed down to New York on the notorious Fung Wah bus at 6:30 in the morning. The only time the bus driver said anything to us what when we arrived in Chinatown, New York, to say, "Everyone get off!"

Chinatown, NY, isn't like Chinatown, San Francisco. In SF, Chinatown is a cute little street of trendy gift shops and sushi & karaoke bars; if you head one block east or west, you're back in San Francisco.

In New York's Chinatown, you feel like you're in Asia. Chinatown here is a quartier, not a street. At the fish pet store, you can buy a single fish for $1500. Next door, heavy fish smell drifts from boxes of questionable dead sea creatures sitting outside in the hot sun.

We decided to stop for lunch in Little Italy, instead.

To celebrate Sophie's birthday, we ate French takeout (I had a cheeseburger--I know, I know, but it had mushrooms on it), spoke with her French friend from Nice, and heard French everywhere from the Museum of Natural history to the Crocodile Lounge, where we got a free pizza with each beer we purchased. :D It was a tres francais weekend.

On the way home, Nick taught me how to count in Spanish. "Uno, dos, tres..."

***