French classes, English horns, and Chinese tourists

1. I am going to have French classes, starting not this next week, but the week after. It will be six weeks of intensive classes, 20 hours a week. This was a bit more than I was thinking about, but I guess it's the right thing to do. I will, however, have to rethink my writing plans for the time being! I talked to the teacher on the phone, after which she told C (head of the lab, remember?) that I was at a rather advanced level speaking, to which C said (smiling), "Mais elle comprend quedalle..." ('But she doesn't understand hardly anything') ... to which I told C, "Oui, quand tu parles..." ('Yes, when you talk...')

2. I finally got an chair at work that has arms. This is excellent! I hadn't even known that it had actually gotten ordered, it was months ago that I asked for one, and now it's here.

3. JD and I went to a concert in the 16th that a friend of his organized. She does publicity for a woodwind quintet, and they played tonight for free as part of a church's concert series. They were great! They played a number of pieces by French composers I didn't recognize (Rameau, Delibes, Marais, Lully) and some by French composers I did recognize (Debussy, Berlioz, Satie). They had their piccolo, their bass clarinet, their English horn (cor anglais, which, we learned, is English only because of a misanalysis of anglé, 'angled'). Woodwinds are really fussy instruments, and there was much blowing and cleaning and shaking out of condensation; but they were very good at turning all that into music. The arrangements were quite good too, some by some of the people in the group. The Berlioz was the waltz movement from Symphonie Fantastique, which I happen to know, so it was fun to listen to the orchestration and compare it with the original. The Marais piece was originally for viola da gambas and a continuo; much of it was done with just a flûte de bois ('wooden flute') and bassoon, which was neat because the flute had to sound like a string instrument, with for example several unmistakeable three-string arpeggios. The bassoon just had to hang in there, and hang in there she did.

The only part of the concert that wasn't up to snuff was a contemporary piece which was like any number of contemporary pieces I've heard before: giving percussion instruments to the woodwind players, blowing air through the flute, dramatic pauses with sudden sounds, group improvisation... but I don't want to end this review on a negative note, because really, that was only a minor blemish on what was a masterful, and colorful, evening.

4. On the RER on the way back from the concert, we saw a guy with a shirt that said "HAWAI [sic] BEACH" in big picture postcard letters, and also "ALL MOST THAN HOT." A pretend year's supply of viennoiserie to whoever can explain to me what that was even intended to mean.

5. On my way back from the Gare de Lyon I came across two tourists, with two other tourists who were trying to help them find their hotel. I couldn't find the street on their map either, so I called the hotel, since they had the number on their reservation printout. It was close by but on a small street. Then I and the other tourists tried to explain to the first two tourists that the hotel was nearby, but the first tourists were Chinese and there was something of a language barrier, so I finally said, I'll just walk you there; anyway, it was almost on my way home. They were from Guangzhou, it turns out. I told them I had been there a long time ago!

When we got to the street, there were several signs for hotels there. They seemed worried that they didn't know which one it was, but I showed them the name of the hotel on their reservation and pointed them in the right direction. After my experiences in Japan, I'm sympathetic to people dealing with unfamiliar alphabets, but really it was like shooting fish in a barrel -- it was a dead-end street a block long -- so I felt okay leaving them at that point.

They didn't ask me any questions, and I realized as I doubled back home that they probably assumed I was French. :)