Christmas Season – Christmas Markets in Oxford

Today I had a wander around the Christmas Markets in Oxford.  I counted three, but there are probably more.  They are dotted around the town centre, each is quite small, just ten or twenty stalls.  In the main they sell crafts and foreign foods – especially Glühwein (german spiced and heated red wine) which is becoming increasingly popular.

I started my excursion at the castle mound market.  It was cold, but no snow.  One of the first stalls I saw was this one, selling really beautiful hand made tiles.  I like them a lot, but never buy any since I have no idea of what to do with them – re-model the whole kitchen so I can fit some tiles into the splashback for my sink?

So I moved on to the German sausage stall to buy currywurst.  There was a long queue, and since I hate standing in line I decided to come back later and have my lunch backwards – first the sweet, then the savoury!  I had spied a waffle stall, and was wondering whether to try one with chestnut purée, when a family with any number of rugrats pushed in front of me and loudly debated what orders to place.  Back I went to the sausage stall, but the queue had grown even bigger.  So I had some caramelised nuts instead.  Not terribly healthy, but neither is standing around in the cold queuing for currywurst!

The market is scattered all about the castle ground, half a dozen here, three over there.  On a wall outside the castle I found this little bird, which probably looks better illuminated when it is dark but I wasn’t going to stick around that long.

 Having had my fill of no currywurst and nada waffles, I decided to go home via the central but station, intending to check some timetables along the way.  And what do I find there?  Another Christmas market!  This one is entirely French, a dozen stalls selling saussicon, baked goods, olives, cheese, dried fruit, and, weirdly, a huge stall selling woven baskets?!?!?!?  Oh well, why not.  I buy some saussicons – I always buy sausages of some sort at these markets – and leave before I get sucked into some unnecessary purchases.

 But I had not escaped yet!  There was another Christmas market in Broad Street!  This one sells mainly crafts, and I almost bought an amazing planter in the shape of a head (see last photo).  Unfortunately the cash machine I tried to extract some cash from proved uncooperative, and by the time I had found another one I had come to my senses and decided that I did not have space for the head after all.

Anyway, I need my money for tomorrow, when I am going to the London Christmas markets!

Christmas Season – Christmas Market in Bremen, Part 2

And here is the tallest ever candle-driven pyramid!

And to finish off my little report, here one of those homely heart-warming little stalls one finds all over German Christmas Markets.

Now I am looking forward to the London and Oxford markets!

PS  Seeing as I have started another blogpost, and can upload o few more photos, I am herewith adding a few Bonus Pics!

Christmas Season – Christmas Market in Bremen

I spent a few days in Bremen last week, and stuck to my resolution to haunt as many Christmas Markets as possible this year.  There was neither snow nor frost, which diminished the Christmassy feel, but I nevertheless enjoyed it immensely.

The main difference between German Christmas Markets and all other, lesser, markets, is that the German ones sell not only food and the sort of thing one can just as easily buy in the usual shops, but also all sorts of things one can only buy once a year – at the Christmas Market.

My favourites are the ornaments by Käthe Wohlfahrt, like the one below.  It is possible to go to one of the shops that sell them all year round, but these are few and far between, and the best way to buy these ornaments remains the Christmas Market.

The trouble with most Christmas Markets is that they are totally overrun with people, and it is impossible to take a decent picture of the market overall.  I usually get at least 50% heads!  So I settled again for using photos of individual attractions, rather than those that show a larger part of the market.  Just use the photos below to imagine the rest!

This jolly snowman is in front of the Cathedral – the Bremen market nests in its shadow.  I took some photos, but they are impossible leaning so I had to forget about using them.

I especially like the street lighting in Bremen.  This one depicts the Bremer Stadtmusikanten of Fairytale fame.  Incidentally, there is also a B –League, consisting of a pig, a chicken, a fish, and a butterfly!

Here is the Bremen take on Santa’s Grotto!  Loads of little children queuing to get in, of course. 

Another feature of many German Christmas Markets is the oversized decorations, like the snowman and here, the nutcracker….

Darn it, out of photo memory again!  To be continued!

Christmas Season – Christmas Market in Paris

Since this has been in some ways a bleak & dismal year, I took a management decision and resolved to celebrate Christmas in a major way this year and enjoy myself shamelessly.  The Christmas Markets, the Cookie Baking, the Present Buying, the Advents Season’s Rituals, the Get Together with all my Favourite People, I am doing the lot!  This Blog will bear witness to my excesses, as a warning and/or example to emulate for all.

So, this year I plan to go not to one, or even two, but to four Christmas Markets in three countries.  After all, what is the point of rushing around to see people in other countries if you can’t enjoy yourself why you are there?  Paris was the first stop of my Christmas Market Crawl.

The Champs-Elysees Christmas Market is said to be the biggest one in Paris, so that’s where we went.  The entire street is lined with little chalet-style white painted huts, each occupied by a vendor of some more or less Christmassy goods.  Taking photos was almost impossible, since there were loads of people who were almost as tall as the huts and five to ten rows deep in front of them.  I did manage to take a photo of the talking Christmas tree above, who was encircled by a little train full of small delighted children eating cotton candy, called Father’s Beard in French, apparently.

I also managed a photo of the home made chocolate stall, where massive slabs of chocolate were on display – obviously I felt honour-bound to buy some afterwards!  Very good chocolate, though hideously expensive.

Then we bought pretzels from the German food stall and continued to wander along the huts that sold hot wine, donuts, bonbons, candied fruits, sausages, cheeses, various woolly items of clothing, and so on and so forth.  There were even one or two huts that sold Christmas ornaments, though not the sort I would hang onto my tree – I am extremely particular in that respect, and only suffer hand-made originals from the depth of Germany on my Christmas-tree.

In addition to the huts we spotted several carrousels and similar funfair style contraptions, including a House of Horror and a Dinosaur Dungeon.  I dismissed them all as unsuitable for Christmas, and bought more food instead.

On the way home I happened across the cutest little Christmas trees imaginable!  Less than a foot high, extremely tree-like, made from real pine tree branches stuck onto a wooden central stake.    Never seen such a thing, I just love it!!!

I also took a few quick photos of a really beautiful Christmas display in a shop window, but the reflection was such that all my photos turned out to look like surreal triple exposure artistic avant garde street scenes.  But well, maybe you like to see one of them anyway!

How not to learn French - Lesson 5 - Watching French Movies

As all the other things I tried to learn French, this seemed a great idea at first.  Spend an evening at the flicks watching one of those avant garde French films, and effortlessly learn the lingo by letting it seep into your sub-conscience, thus combining pleasure with utility.  Unfortunately there were a few problems.

Firstly, I hate avant garde movies!  I have enough problems in my real life, thank you very much, and don’t need it in my time off from reality.  I want easy laughs and cheap merriment!  Difficult to come by in the French movies available outside of France.  The reputation of the French for being sophisticated and stylish and ‘out there’ means that any French movie that caters to my kind of tastes is dismissed as a non-French aberration and not stocked.  Actually, there exist hilariously funny and entertaining French movies – like Safari – but it is almost impossible to get hold of them in Anglo-Saxonia.

Of course, one can order them on Amazon.fr, and I have done that, but again have experienced a few difficulties.  (a) How do you find out about these funny French movies, which no one talks about except in French, which you don’t yet understand?  If you ask French friends, chances are they won’t tell you, because they don’t want to ruin their sophisticated image abroad and instead recommend the usual boring irritating problem movies to you.  (b) Every time I order something from Amazon.fr my credit card gets refused with some incomprehensible – well, French – blurb, to the effect that my card doesn’t work.  A week later I receive whatever I ordered in the post.  Go figure!

The other option is to watch American or British movies using the French language track, and/or French subtitles.  Again, this is fraught with difficulties.  The main being, that the people who translate the language track and the ones who translate the subtitles don’t communicate, which results in two different versions of the film.  So if you were hoping to learn how to correlate the written and spoken word in French by watching these movies you can forget it.

OK, let us assume you have gotten your hands onto some movies in French and are ready to spend an evening at home educating yourself.  This is what happens.

First attempt.  You watch the movie in French with English subtitles – hey, you want to understand what’s going on, right?  And what about your loving partner/cat who watches it with you and has no interest in learning French?  Exactly.  The trouble is, you focus on the subtitles and stop listening to the spoken words, except as a sort of background music.  Result, No French Was Learnt. 

Second attempt.  You watch the movie in English with French subtitles.  You become caught up with the action and quickly cease to pay any attention to the subtitles.  Even when you do read the subtitles occasionally, they rarely correspond word for word with the language track.  Result, No French Was Learnt.

Third attempt.  In a desperate effort to salvage the Learn French by watching Movies option, you watch the film in French with French subtitles.  You understand nothing, get bored, and give up.  Result, No French Was Learnt.

Actually, there is a way of learning French by watching French movies, and I have done it (to an extent).  I shall discuss it when I start my series, How to Learn French in Ten Difficult Lessons, sometime in the new year.

For now, watch French movies by all means.  Just don’t expect to learn French that way.  Your experience will be exactly the same as trying to learn French by listening to native speakers or taking French lessons.  OK, that was my experience, it may be different for you.  But this is a blog series for people who have tried everything to learn French and wonder why they did not succeed.  It is not a blog for people who have tried to learn French and have succeeded.

I am sorry – well, perhaps a tiny bit – if I sound defeatists and negative.  I am tempted to blame it all those avant garde French movies, but alas I have not watched any for decades.  It is just that I have been told so often how easy it is to pick up a foreign language.  All those comments by friends & relations - You have learned French for three years now, aren’t you fluent yet?  No, I am jolly well not, my French is still abysmally awful and I resent the implication that it is my own fault for not having tried hard enough.  Sure, if all you want is say Please and Thank you and Hand over a pint & a pickle sandwich, yeah I can do all that, but that hardly counts as speaking a language.

Learning a language properly is hard work and takes a long time.  Unless you have a really good reason to do it, don’t even try.  If you want to find out more about another culture, read a few books about it.  If you actually go to another country, learn to say in the native language, ‘I am terribly sorry but I can’t speak your language.  It is a scandal and an insult to your great culture, but my tiny brain couldn’t handle it.  Please do forgive me.’  Usually they reply, ‘Hey, no problem, I speak English!’ 

Of course, if you actually want to live in another country, or spend a considerable amount of time there, you must learn the language!  It could be a matter of life and death.  Just imagine being stuck up a lonely mountain side during a walking holiday in a backwater where no one speaks English, with an injured friend rapidly bleeding to death, unable to call for an ambulance!  That’s what I mean about being motivated; it is precisely this scenario that determined me to learn French.

Tadpoles in November? I am so bummed out!!!!

This being a beautiful mild Autumn day, I decided to clear up the garden a little.  Not too much, mind – I don’t want to disturb any of the creatures that have made their home there.  This is indeed the problem in the Little Garden; it is extremely popular with any number of small creatures, who take exception to just about anything I ever do there, so I must be careful.  I just tidied up a little, raked some leaves, guided a particularly wayward pyracanthia back to more orthodox growth habits, and fished some leaves out of the pond.  That’s when I had a major shock! 

Most of what goes on in the pond is invisible, on account of the black liner and floating vegetation.  It is unsatisfactory for me, but the pond dwellers prefer it that way and so I acquiesce.  However, partly to satisfy my desire to observe the pond creatures, partly to protect the pump from excessive mud, I installed an old wash bowl in one area of the pond.  It stands on a few bricks, and the pump is inside of the bowl.  Its rim is usually a few inches below the water surface.  Since the bowl is light coloured, I can observe any creature that swims around in it.  The bowl also functions as a nursery for the tapoles; when they are quite tiny, I keep the water level at just below the rim of the bowl, thereby keeping out predators.  When the taddies grow too big to be eaten by their fairly small predators, I allow the water level to rise so that they can colonise the rest of the pond.  However, the bowl continues to be popular with them, partly I suppose because the pump oxygenates the water, partly perhaps for nostalgic reasons.  Also, whenever I feed them little titbits – usually frozen water fleas – I put them into this bowl.

This bowl had become a little overgrown of late.  When the taddies grow limbs they become more skittish, and I try to leave the pond as undisturbed as possible until the froglets have left the pond.  Then I went on my long holiday, after which I suffered from a cold so spent little time outside.  So it had been quite a while since I had attended to the pond.  It was fairly choked with leaves, and had an overabundance of oxygenating plants.  I pulled out a few handfuls, and took out the bowl for cleaning.  When I returned it to the pond, I was once again able to observe its denizens.

And would you believe it, the bowl quickly became populated with tadpoles!  In mid-November!  Any self respecting tadpole turns into a froglet and leaves the pond latest by August, at least that’s what they had done in all previous years.  One or two, it is true, lingered on and refused to grow up – the technical term for this is Peter Pan Tadpoles – but I had never had an entire generation adopt this course of action.

What oh what have I done wrong?  In the middle of last year my neighbout had finally cut down a huge tree which shaded the pond, so I had expected the taddies to develop quickly and leave home in double-quick time.  I had fed them water fleas, turned on the pump in hot weather, re-stocked with oxygenating plants, and even added a few more marginals.  I had also introduced a few sticklebacks into the pond, to keep down the mosquito larvae after the tadpoles had left the pond, and long agonised over this decision, worrying that they would eat all the smaller taddies.

Stupid idiot me!  Far from having been eaten by the sticklebacks and whatever other predators haunted the pond, the taddies had become so comfortable they decided to stay for good.  Not for them the exhausting business of changing from tadpole into froglet, and of braving blackbirds and thrushes waiting to devour them when they emerged from the pond on a moist Summer evening for the first time.  No, they had collectively decided to put up a finger to evolution and remain as tadpoles in their nice safe pond, living happily ever after.  I suppose I can’t exactly blame them, but all the same I am appalled.  Who is going to eat all the slugs and snails and flies and mosquitoes in the garden if there are no more frogs?

I feel like a mother whose children refuse to move out of the parental home, preferring its convenience and full service environment to living on their own.  How on earth does one evict reluctant tadpoles from a garden pond?  And what is going to happen in spring, when the next generation of tadpoles emerge from their eggs?  Will the older tadpoles eat their smaller newborn siblings?  Will they suddenly hurry up and leave the pond before their siblings grow up and taunt them with their ‘mutton-dressed-as-lamb’ status?  Personally I blame the mother!

The culprit lurking near the scene of her crime ...

How not to learn French - Lesson 4 - Buying Hermes scarves

I love scarves and wear one every day.  Sometimes wool, usually silk, sometimes small or large, usually medium.  They are marvelously useful, in my opinion.  If I feel warm, I pull the scarf away from my neck.  If I feel cold, I drape it around myself in generous folds.  Much better than continually taking one’s pullover on and off.  I started out in my twenties, hunting for scarves in thrift shops, and occasionally receiving one as a gift from my Mother, completely unaware that even my best Liberty scarf was as nothing compared to the beauty of an Hermes one.

I might have remained in this blissful state of ignorance indefinitely, had I not taken to visiting France.  It was only a matter of time until I came across an Hermes shop during my wanderings around Paris.  I saw, I succumbed, I read the price-tag, I shrank back in horror, I looked again at the glorious designs and colours, I cautiously inched my way back to the scarf counter, I retreated again scandalised by such ludicrous cost for a piece of silk, I was reeled in again by the sheer beauty of the scarves, etc etc ad infinitum.  I knew it would be madness to buy such a scarf, an indefensible extravagance, a luxury not meant for us non-millionaires.  Besides, did I not have up to a hundred scarves already?  I had no excuse, and I knew it.  Sighing deeply, I smothered my scarf-lust and turned to leave the shop. 

Then I saw a remarkable thing:  each Hermes scarf had a title; a French title!  Might I not utilise this little shred of French for learning the language?  Hitherto the language had completely eluded me, so surely I would be justified to spend a small fortune to learn French?  Why of course I was!  The spiel was made, money changed hands, and I left with my first Hermes scarf.

Back home I laid out my new treasure, sat before it in a reverend attitude, and immersed myself in contemplation.  People tell me they queue for hours to see an exhibition of paintings by the Impressionists, or brave the crowds for a glimpse of the Athene of Phidias.  Me, I just look at my scarves.  Because, as you have guessed, I did not stop at the first one.

A friend calculated that I paid an average of £25 for each word, and predicted that I would either go bankrupt and learn French or survive financially intact and remain Frenchless.  But this did not deter me - I decided that I would rather know French than be rich.

A good example of learning French by scarf is one that depicts all manner of fantastic early planes and balloons, and is called Les Folies du Ciel.  I learned the words for folly and heaven, and had an illustration of how to form the plural of le and la and de.

La ronde des heures is another favourite.  It has a little rhyme on it:  Parmi les fleurs je compte les heures (among the flowers I count the hours).

Then there is l’Instruction du Roy – En l’exercice de monter a cheval.  Instruction for the king – an exercise (manual) for riding a horse.

One of my favourite language learning scarves is L’ombrelle magique – the magic sunshade (interestingly enough, the French l’ombrelle does not mean umbrella).  This scarf tells a story.  Each scene is depicted, and has some French words describing it.  So here it goes:

L’Ombrelle Magique (the magic sunshade)

Il etais une fois (once upon a time)

Un prince solitaire (a prince who was a loner)

Amoureux des oiseaux (who loved birds – or maybe he was beloved by birds)

Un beau jour (one beautiful day)

Le brouillard le surprend (he was surprised by fog)

Perdue dans la foret (lost in the woods)

Il demand son chemin (he asked the way)

Un vieil ermite lui repond (an old hermit answered)

Prends cette ombrelle (take this sunshade)

Quel que soit ton chemin (wherever you are?)

L’ombrelle te conduira chez toi (the sunshade will guide you home)

En route pour un voyage (while travelling)

Aux quatre coins du monde (to the four corners of the world)

Magie!  L’ombrelle soudain se change (Magic!  Suddenly the sunshade changed)

En princesse menehould (into a beautiful(?) princess)

De retour au palais (they returned to the palace)

On celebre l’amour! (to celebrate their love – see photo above)

As mentioned before, my French is pretty lousy so my translations must be taken with a pinch – or even a pound! – of salt!  By the way, I have not been able to find 'menehould' in any dictionary, but surmise it means something like many hold (hold being a German word for beautiful/attractive).

And finally, Dame de Coeur a Vous l’honneur!  A wonderful scarf featuring some rather unusual playing cards.

So, is buying Hermes scarves a good way to learn French?  Well, I learned all the words depicted on my scarves, but I hesitate to recommend this method on account of its expense.  Also not everyone is interested in scarves.  But personally, I cannot find it in my heart to regret my purchases – they are just too beautiful, and whatever sorrows might trouble my heart vanish when I contemplate my ‘wearable works of art’.  And that’s more than can be said for any book of grammar I ever encountered.