Language

I came home today from class, made pancakes (crepes) with syrup and a chai milkshake for lunch.

Not that I'm counting calories or anything, but I'm thinking my diet needs a bit of an upgrade. No, cider does not meet my Vitamin C requirements, and those red onion/black olive/garlic potato crisps are not veggies. So while I think I may be on the way to getting leg muscles (this would be a first) and I'm doing water aerobics with the old ladies on Maandags und Vrydags, the food sector of my life is not looking so hot. Something to work on.

When I was in high school, I decided to take Latin because I believed it would help me in the medical profession. Yes, before I discovered I'm absolutely terrible at anything scientific I was hoping to enter the world of plastic surgery, treating burn victims and repairing lives and Roman noses. While it might have helped for some SAT word roots, reading the collected works of Catullus was pretty useless, in retrospect. Who cares about kissing a thousand times, a million times, to ward away death? Please.

When I entered college, I'd had it up to here with dead languages (despite the whole "a good Latin student never declines Sex" puns, it wasn't that fun) and wanted something I could speak. Spanish was a little too commonplace -- though, also in retrospect, it would've been a good choice because I'm such a clueless gringa -- and I wanted something beautiful, something that flowed off my tongue and enabled me to speak with hot foreign boys while sipping red wine and wearing nice clothes and being literate and witty. So I took French, of course. While trying to figure out the "r" pronunciation after my first class, I pictured myself as a new Audrey Hepburn, speaking flawless French to the masses, impressing them with my deep statements about society ("ma soeur a un crayon rouge", etc.), wearing Givenchy, being adored.

Rutledges are really good at making fried chicken (my aunt's recipe is to die for) and having Southern accents. What we're not so good at is goodbye. Saying goodbye is a process that often takes hours, a fact my mother points out each time we make the trek to Dallas and spend half the time officially "leaving". Rutledges are also not the greatest at social/religious/racial tolerance.

But perhaps the thing Rutledges are the worst at is language acquisition. Within a month, my dreams of being a fluid French speaker were crushed. I had the worst accent, and what's more, my writing didn't show any real promise, either. Without complaining too much about how random some of the gender assignments are (why is "uterus" masculine, exactly?), I couldn't get my adjectives and nouns to agree in number, I always confused "ont" with "sont" ("to have" and "to be" are two different things, apparently), and my teacher perpetually had this amused-yet-slightly-exasperated expression on her face when I tried to tell her what my mother did for a living.

"Her mom work on the computers," I attempted.
"Her mom?" Mme. Blomquist prompted me. She was a particularly bitchy grad student who seemed to think we should praise God because she deigned to teach us, making no secret of laughing at our mistakes.
"Yes. Her mom work at Fort Worth for the computer city?" I guessed.
"Her mom?" And then, snapping out of the French, she raised her eyebrows and muttered, "You need to work on your possessives. 'Ma mere,' not 'sa mere.'"

It didn't get any better as the months wore on, and so, after four semesters of more or less the same, I dropped French my junior year.

And then, three weeks ago, I came to South Africa. Everyone here speaks Afrikaans at home and learns English when they go to school, but I guess their mother tongue is always their fallback; also, almost every course at the university (save for the English classes) are taught in Afrikaans. I'm a fish out of water, I guess. So I signed up for the Introductory Afrikaans class. So far, we've only learned a few words, but despite the fact that the language seems completely made up (one of the words for "male" is "manpersoon" -- is that a joke?) and tough to listen to (switching from beautiful French to this harsh Dutch derivative is some transition) with their guttural g's, I'm excited. Now, instead of someone randomly asking me for directions, me looking downcast and asking if they could please repeat, this time in English, I'll hopefully be able to tell them the gym is 15 minutes down Bosman St. and over the bridge. Maybe I'll even say their farewell ("okaybyyyyye") without laughing at how ridiculously made up/leet/Valleygirl it sounds.

On the plus side, I have three English classes, and those are taught in a language I know, a language that sounds significantly less harsh and flows fluidly off my tongue. Because even when I don't know what I'm saying, I can always just b.s. (Some might argue a B.A. in English is just that.) Unfortunately, I can't yet b.s. Afrikaans, because I literally don't know what to say, let alone make some sort of Freudian statement about the narrator's relationship with her father. But check back with me in a few months...

P.S. The pictures are from Cape Point -- one is a view of the Cape of Good Hope, the other is just a view of the mountains (I know, all my pictures kind of look the same, but the mountains are just sooo pretty) and the other is a group of penguins on Cape Point (it was a little underwhelming because they stand around and do basically nothing, but cute). Oh, and those are baboons we saw at Cape Point -- they start screaming when they're scared and they are absolutely terrifying. But also, adorable.