Skype

Skyper - to Skype, conjugate like a normal '-er' verb. Like the English, the French have also made Skype a verb.


So today I spent almost eleven hours on Skype talking to various people. I won't go into too much detail, but if I were to go and visit all of those people, the journey to them would clock up roughly 8111 miles...and that wouldn't count the return journeys! Skype is truly a wonderful invention. So where would I have travelled to:-

- England (Leamington)
- England (Southport)
- China (Jiujiang)
- England (Banbury)
- Germany (Würzburg)

Not bad for a day's work! Found out some expected news and then was able to spend the rest of my time catching up with everyone. My parents had had friends over for the weekend, so they had loads to tell me...with all the snow that has been happening recently in England, I think my mum was just glad they managed to arrive so her and Dad wouldn't have to eat all the dips! They told me about a museum I really need to visit when I'm home...from the sound of it I would really enjoy it, so perhaps sometime over summer or something. After I had just got off the phone with my parents, imagine my excitement to find Sam was online...now although we've kept in touch via messaging and email, we've not actually Skyped until today. Of course I did spend about five minutes exclaiming how amazing it was that I was in France and he was in China and we were talking. I know, little things. He has a lot more students than me to teach...if I said a big class for him was around seventy (mine, around thirty), and a small one was around forty (mine, three) - well you get the idea! It was awesome to find out how he's getting on, and actually speaking face to face...it never seems the same via writing somehow. So since this was the first opportunity to speak speak, of course we started straight away on the pronounciation of words and how often we get them wrong! I will take this opportunity to quote another part of 'Talk to the Snail' to illustrate my point:-

'Spelling is an integral part of French grammar because the verbs are so difficult to conjugate, and because lots of grammatically different words sound alike. Four verb endings -ai,-ais, -ait and -aient all sound exactly the same. And the practically indistinguishable verre (glass), vers (verse or towards), ver (worm), and vert (green) give French kids nightmares. Or their teachers, anyway. The same goes for the identically pronounced vin (wine), vain (vain), vingt (twenty) and vint (came), and saut (jump), seau (bucket), sot (idiot) and sceau (wax seal) to give just two common examples.'

French is fun. Turns out that Chinese is pretty much the same, but with more chance of accidently saying a euphemism instead of a real word!

This conversation was followed by a jump back to England to speak to Harriet...who I haven't spoken to since before Christmas, which is more than a real shame! Anyways, we had a lot to catch up on so did talk for rather a long time...and Harriet's parents (who she had gone home to see, I can only apologise and thank you!) Brilliant to actually manage to find a time to catch up...I really need to try and attempt to find more time to speak to these beautiful people! Last but by no means least we have Chandru, out in Würzburg...and very nice it was to speak to him it was too! Somehow I've managed to keep more in contact with Chan than others, probably because we're in the same time zone and actually speak quite a lot in general anyway...was nice to have a chat about our contrasting weeks and seeing what the other was up to.

So this photograph was a bit of a panic one...why is there always one light out in double street lights?

Unfortunately did not get to bed that early (you'd've thought I could have stopped at 8 hours or something!)...but you know what, I'm not going to regret it one bit...the time I got with my friends was more than worth it!