“and so we face another table, and raise our glasses one more time”

And we face another goodbye. To acoustic guitar, and Norwegian salad, free internet, discussions about the weather and logos. To Nutella (I think ive actually eaten enough Nutella for the rest of the millennium, although it is a brilliant cure-all), fresh bread (none of this flaky French baguette crap), to getting lost, facebook wars (I’m Sorry). To songs about some girl breaking hearts (what was her name.. louise?... nah), and dislike of Bob Marley (I’m hoping its something ill grow into), washing dishes, fried couscous, and the Belgians holding up a mobile phone ("Brussels is a troublesome city"). To a canal that’s on a bridge over the road, to autumn leaves that fall and scare the crap out of me cause I didn’t see what hit me, to crepes, colds, cheese, skype burbling, to IKEA everything and bootleg programming. To feeling guilty for distracting my friend from study and imposing, to trying to interpret the words of Mr Tambourine man (far out, good luck with that), to Shakespeare’s quotes and insults (“thou smellest of mountain goat”), to train tickets, Mars bars that fall out of vending machines just cause I look at them, fire cracker chickens, ditzy backstreet boyz musak and of course the wonderful language that is Norwegian.

And that’s how it goes. Having spent a week with someone most readers of this only know of as ‘a friend’ sharing much seems somewhat wrong. Suffice to say all the above makes some semblance of sense to me at least, and I seem to have ‘caught’ saying ‘somewhat’, my gramma is also slightly AWOL, although I don’t know that that’s just from this week.

But lets see.. it was good to be social again, to taste normality, and listen to music on speakers. (ok.. im referring to staying with a Persian-Norwegian in France as normal.. that’s probably not good) It was pretty cool to get some new music, I think anything else isn’t really blog material. I did see the sixth sense though, that was quite good to actually see it.. I had heard about it a lot.. it wasn’t too bad either.

But really a blog about movies I watched isn’t really that exciting for readers. So.. I ran into Alex and Montse (not quite ran into, but it was all very well timed) that was cool to catch up on a bit of goss, not that there was that much, aside from a few rather dull domestics. We did discuss accents though, that was interesting.

So far I’m yet to find a culture that views accents quite like we do. I am assuming it has something to do with the Globalisation of English, but it could also be some old English thing as well.

To us (and I realise there will be exceptions, but defiantly from Alex, my and a few other native English speakers ive talked about this with) accents are important. Whether its just because they tell you where someone is from (and thus a bit about them), in older England accents told you someones town, and sometimes socioeconomic background also, or for some other reason. But we, and defiantly I, have always viewed accents as cool. There's sleezy ones, georgeous ones, sexy ones, etc. Often you find girls prefer a guy with a nice English accent, American ones aren’t as attractive, Deep South American and you automatically assume they are dumb (Direct quote from a Northern American), kiwi ones are just pretending to be different from Australian and so on. Light French is kinda cool.. German can be a little military, Italian=Coffee etc. But what I cant understand is that its not cool to have an accent in other languages, ie. Speaking French with an Australian accents isn’t groovy. Where as there is a certain coolness to English with a French accent (or Spanish, or Norwegian, take your pick) as long as its understandable. Trying to convince non native speakers not to go out of their way to lose their accent just doesn’t work, they don’t believe that there could be any kind of advantage to speaking English with their own accent. I don’t think they will ever actually believe us, but we are telling the truth, don’t do it! lol

Explored a bit of Paris today, saw the Champs Elessays-totally exciting (was totally overwhelmed by the shopping, especially the Disney store), saw the Effile Tower and went to the Musee de Orsay which was cool. I had some trouble taking all the art seriously, some what quite angsty and very random. But there were lots of the obligatory naked girls flopping around and statues of gods eating fruit etc. there was some Monet (which I was quite glad to recognise) which was cool to see in the flesh. There was also a replica of some Parisian (I assume) streets under the floor.. im not sure why.. but it did look cool. There was also some pretty good people watching, sooo many Americans talking knowledgeable about art. And lots of French girls sketching a statue of a young boy/goat (Goat legged person.. don’t remember the name), maybe goaty-ness works better for the French than accents, lol joke joke. And that’s all I can think of.. it’s all getting a little nonsensical, so ill leave it there.

Take care