Jholapplä?

Swedish and French are not at all far away from eachother when it comes to words. They laugh a lot here when I say the very Swedish word "långkalsong", and it shows out to be old, old French. Weird. So is also Swedish "byrå, fåtölj, betong, trottoar", etc... I always claim it's Swedish words that the French has adopted, nobody seems to belive me. And my grandparents always said "jordäpplen" for potatoes, guess that this comes as an direct translation from French pommes de terre. Well, in Värmland they said "jholapplä", but thats a language of its own. :)

French Canadians complain about the frenchmen in France, there is apparently an old and still strong discussion about what is the real French language. In France they seem to have mixed up a lot of French with English words now, and in Quebec they laugh about this. In France they even subtitle the French Canadian movies with French. Now, that's something! But French in Canada is quite heavy on its dialect, suits me fine, coming from deep forests of Värmland!

French moving forward

My French course is funfunfun! We have now learned how to ask questions in many different ways, very confusing and fun, hopeless to remember when to use what, but who cares. I'm happy as long as I can ask for my coffee. Have become a helplessly coffee-holic lately. But it's sooooo gooood! :)

Tonight I'm having a second rendez-vous of my own with a friend since I got here. Yeeeaaaa! Happy inside! Maybe I'll even impress on him with my French.

Sweden are finally thinking!

Wow, this was interesting! Now Sweden knows what to use their military defense for, finally! Star ship troopers?

Read this article from today at SR's homepage. (sorry, only in Swedish)

Klimatet oroar mer än militära angrepp.

snowy day of fun

Hmm.. It's still snowing - and forecast tells us of 3 days of more heavily snowing... It's gonna be tough in the city. I just waked up and looked out of my window to see all the cars they so carefully and with so much pain digged out yesterday, is now all covered and jammed in with 1,5 meters of packed snow (along both sides and cars close parked in front and behind) again from the clearing of the road and heavy snowing. Poor car-owners I say. Well, maybe this is their punishment for polluting the air, neh?! "The one who digs a whole..."
Off to French course, then library down town for some hours of reading, a visit to the Centre d'histoire de Montréal and then to Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibition of Canadian electronic arts, later on Swedish course for M´s friend and home late tonight. Full day in Montreal! :)

Right now...

...I miss yoooooouuuuuuuu!!!!!

translation please!

You who know me knows how hard it is for me to be quiet, most of the time that is. But I'll tell you, here I have learned how to be quiet, not because I actually want to, but I just don't know what people around me are talking about, so I don't know what to say. "Pluuu, pluplu pluuuplupluuuu uuu pluuu plu!" Poor M almost has his musical ears falling off when he gets home and I might have been quiet for 10 hours in a row alone at home! "Blablablablaaaaa! :)
Sometimes when I sit there listening to other peoples happy talks with jokes and laughters and funny stories - so it seems, I don't understand a thing - I just want to do something surprising for them. Maybe I should just go for the very famous and effective Swedish-French expression;
"Eta gelé me treskée i vedbóa!" That should keep them occupied for a while.

our home & co.

We live in a old house that probably has seen it's days of glory go by many years ago. It's not so charming from the outside, but has a nice ambiance inside in our little one room and a kitchen hut. It's charming I think, and it has got a very nice little outdoors space, like a Swedish wood veranda with glass windows facing a small garden. I like it a lot, and it's close to the huge fruit and vegetable market and other stores and coffee shops and things. Nice! It's also very, very close to a small indoors swimming pool and library, and 4 evenings per week they have a free hour of swimming, so I go there as often as I can now. Very nice! I'm gonna be swimming myself to success! (and slim down from my three months of laziness and good food and M's homemade amazing wine and all nice locally brewed beer)
The only real downside with or apartment is our neighbor. Actually, it's not him who is the problem, he's really nice, it's just that in between our apartments the walls seems to be made out of rise paper or something, it used to be a big house and they seem to have just split the first floor into 2 apartments, without much thought behind it. And the neighbor love playing the radio with bad music, and watch football games loud on TV with hectic commentators screaming in French. I hear him cooking food, putting down the glass on the table, walking around, talking over the phone, snore during night, and sometimes I can even hear him fart...
Besides him we have a funny but friendly housewife next door, who seems to have her goal in life set on keeping track on what her neighbors does - or doesn't do. She invited me over to view her apartment, showing EVERY room, including the bathroom, asking me over and over if I didn't think it was Oh! so beautiful?! Well, I must say - it was different. Very kitschy Italian style with gold and pink and plastic and porcelain figurines everywhere, even in the bathroom. We also has got a very nice neighbor to the right who has a small white dog called Sushi - we were thinking of getting a cat named Soya.

snowstorm

Snowstorm, it almost sounds romantic, doesn't it? Well, I spent the weekend with M on his tour while in Quebec City, we had funfun! But this morning we woke up to a snow storm, learned that they had closed all the schools in whole Quebec region (not the city, the hole HUGE region across Canada). It was cold and snowy and above all windy! Brrrrr... My car ride back to Montreal never came, so I took the bus and came back to a completely white, covered in snow Montreal. Amazing sight! It was like 30-40 cm fresh, powdery snow and all the cars parked along the streets were all covered in snow and jammed from when they had cleared the streets of the snow. People digging down everywhere trying to get their cars out. (Wished I had a digital camera so I could show you how it looked like, but I posted this free pictures from the web to give some snowy ambiance of Montreal to you, not as much snow as it is here to day, but anyway.) But no one here seems surprised at all by all this snow and storm, they are more or less used to it. This is gonna be a very hard winter for me I think.