Improving the Tongue

There are many reasons why I chose to sign up for elementary French as my required language course in college: intuition, happy memories of Monaco, cowardice ... but I just checked on my Fall classes, and saw that the final for French is 8:30a.m. on the Saturday after the last day of instruction.

You can imagine how I feel about that. So, to see if that was common for the language courses, I started looking through some of the others I was interested in. German, for instance, is completely full (like French), but also has a Saturday final. Sanskrit's classes are all very fucking early in the morning, and unreasonably so, although no mention of the final class, I have to suspect difficulty.

Out of curiosity, I also checked Urdu (early hours), Hindi (early hours), and Mandarin (full). So what about Arabic? I thought. Sure enough, it not only is WIDE open and doesn't mention a Saturday final, but hardly anyone's signed up for it. I started thinking ... French or Arabic?

I pulled out the tarot cards, which basically told me either one would keep me on a happy path. Choose one.

So, I asked Ana, "Nice, safe French? Or the challenge of Arabic?"

Ana said," Nice safe French! ... Or Chinese!"

"Why French?"

"Because we're going to Paris!"

"We are?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"To see the Eiffel Tower and do all that sort of stuff."

"Tourist stuff? There's much more to France than Paris. Besides, there are Parisians in Paris."

"Yeah, but I want to see the Eiffel Tower and eat baguettes three times a day!"

"We can eat baguettes anywhere in France."

^_^

(There are still Parisians in Paris. That's my main argument, and I'm sticking to it.)