Red Beets, Leeks, Feta, Walnuts on Spinach, Fractured French

The cookies are gone

There is no more foie gras.

All of the wonderful, creamy, stinky cheeses have been consumed.

As much as I want to continue eating at the same level, enjoying hearty pastas with cheese and stews with gravy, I decided a little restraint might be in order.

I’ve been seeing lots of ads and posts and blurbs on ‘detoxing’ to start the new year.

Well, I’m not about to go that far…. I said a little restraint.

But I did think the occasional winter salad would be good.

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The holidays are well and truly over.

School started yesterday.

I was back to discussing how the subjunctive is always used to express emotion and the future conditional is used to express a present doubt and when you use the passive voice you need to conjugate the second verb in the sentence using the…. the….. the….

I felt like a blithering idiot.

But we had cookies.

Our conversation group started again last night, too. We had a Galette des Rois. (King’s Cake)

See why I need the salad?

I digress.

After my stellar performance at school I discovered that I can’t even speak decent English.

Well, my English grammar may be spot on, but apparently my pronunciation leaves something to be desired.

The French participants in my conversation class apparently can understand my fractured French but not my native English.

The problem appears to be that I don’t pronounce my English with a French accent.

For example: We were discussing Christmas and internet shopping. I mentioned that I used several different ‘Amazon’s’ – .com. (U.S.) .co.uk  (U.K.) .fr (France) .de (Germany) and so on….

I received blank looks.

I was dumbfounded…. Surely these people had heard of Amazon.

A conversation ensued – me explaining what Amazon is, in my fractured French; they talking rapidly among themselves in non-fractured French.

Finally, one of them said: ‘Oh – you mean ‘aahh-may-sone’ (with a soft ‘s’ – like in serious).

Well, yes….

Then, as long as we were discussing the internet, Facebook came up.

Without detailing the conversation, it wound it’s way around to Google+.

Same blank looks.

Same light bulb eventually went off.

‘Oh – you mean ‘goo-gleh plooze’ (rhymes with choose).

It’s bad enough that I’m not proficient in French, but to find out I’m not proficient in English is really disheartening.

My dogs understand me.

Usually.

Sometimes…..