Andrew & Esther - Through Our Eyes Archive
Our Thoughts

March 15, 2007
It Really Has Been Too Long This Time
I’m used to complaints that I’m not updating my blog enough. It usually ends up being about twice a month that I find enough inspiration (or guilt?) to post something. So having heard a few more complaining-type emails, I took a quick peak and saw that indeed, it was nearly a full month ago since I dipped my trusty pen into the ink and sounded off what’s running around my head. So here goes…

Part of the problem with my infrequent blogging habits is that so much happens in the time between posts, they end up being informational reports. I’d prefer to expound deep philosophical revelations that I spend most of my days pondering, but perhaps that’ll be my next post (maybe I'll even post something sooner than the world expects!). For now, here’s what’s been happening…

GermanyTaking full advantage of our location in the center of Western Europe, we headed off for a weekend to Southern Germany, spending time in the Black Forest near the border. It was great to be back in Germany where schnitzel, pommes frites and fresh German beer were waiting to greet me, but hearing German did effectively undo all my French learning of the past couple months. Still recovering from that…

We spent the next day in Basel, Switzerland before rounding out our three-country tour by returning back home to France.

Hike in SwitzerlandThe following weekend was focused on Switzerland, with a hike on one of the surrounding mountain ranges and a day trip to nearby Montreux, right on Lake Geneva.

Now you’ll have to forgive me as this blog seems to quickly becoming a travel blog, and I’m not quite sure that’s where I’d like this to go. Life certainly consists of more than stunning views, though they certainly are present. The adventure of learning French has been in full force lately, complete with plenty of ups and downs as I suppose any language learning would go.

We recently visited a bi-lingual church, partly to help me practice my French! I was reminded again of the joys of this language, where spelling officially means nothing when it comes to pronunciation.

Example: la foi (faith) is pronounced identically to le foie (liver), other than the article. And oh yeah, une fois (one time) also is pronounced the same. If you say deux fois, maybe you mean two times or maybe two livers…no one really ever knows! This country is in a constant state of confusion, as conversations talking about doing things two times a week are typically misunderstood as a person having two livers. It gets pretty messy, and its amazing how many people claim to know friends who have two livers. I guess no one ever connected the dots. It’s a language problem people...how do you expect a language to survive using only vowels. CONSONANTS ARE IMPORTANT!

…and so is blogging. So we’ll see if I can post sooner than the world expects this next time around. (although who would know, since I’m sure most of you don’t check back that often anyway? Hmm…)