just cos french is so freakin weird i'm going to write about a few more interesting/funny/bizarre words and grammar things that i have come across.

first, these are just ones that sound cool:

• coing means quince. i just find it a fun word to say.
• coquelicot means poppy; how pretty is it?!
• the word for ace is crack
• débarbouiller is to wash (why WHY do they make it so hard???!)
• déboutonner is to unbutton. this just makes sense. and its cute!
• démangeaison means itching... again with the overcomplication
• double-cliquer means simply to click something twice. could there be a more perfect verb? if you asked me i would say NEVER.
• éclabousser is to splash
• embobiner is to get round.so so cute in pretty much every way!!!
• emmitoufler is to wrap oneself up warmly. doesnt it just sound cosy?
• époustouflant/e means mind-boggling. i find it époustouflant how 100% awesome the word époustouflant is.
• esquimau/esquimaude/esquimaux are the male/feminine/plural forms of eskimo. lol.
• dactylographier means to type (yes, what the.)

theres also weird ways they have of saying things if you translate it literally:

• to say threadbare they say used until the string/rope
• cornemuse, meaning horn and i think muzzle is their word for bagpipes. (?????)
• sunburn is blow/shock of sun
• shock of telephone is a phone call
• shock of head is a sudden impulse
• theres a verb, creuser, meaning to tunnel/to dig a hole in and to say that creuses means that gives you an appetite. also to be hungry is literally said as to have a hollow
• to trip someone up is to make a fang in the leg of someone (????ultra confusing and nonsensical but thats the word for word translation)
• ahahaha this is fantastic, their word for scalp is literally long haired leather
• thimble is dice of the finger
• to take off (eg. in a plane) is to unstick oneself
• their word for heart attack is cardiac blackout
• a roar of laughter translates to a brightness/brilliance of laughter
• to graze one's knee is to peel the knee
• to lose ones way is to mislay oneself
• to fall flat on ones face is to spread oneself out (on the ground)
• one way of saying that 'he died' is to say he turned himself off
• rolling armchair is their way of saying wheelchair
• the word for brandy is literally water of life

more weird double meanings:

• the adjective fâché/e can mean either angry or sorry. (oh god confusingness)
• i'm not quite sure how this works but to say 'i'm taking my shoes off' and 'my tooth is working itself lose' you say the same thing. don't believe i'll ever be able to master the use of that verb.
• this is also horribly confusing: theres one verb which means alternatively to smash in/down, to work like a dog, and to get high :s
• éclair means both a delicious pastry thing (like the fresh ones we had on the weekend for lunch :D YUM)  and also a flash of lightning
• as harry and i discovered to much amusement ages ago in french they use the same verb for to dredge as for to pick up (a girl/boy etc.) OH MY GOD THAT REMINDS ME OF SOMETHING harry check your emails il faut que je te dis d'un truc SUPER-MARRANT
  
• they have the same word for shell and misprint
• dément/e means either mad/crazy, or fantastic. i think i will introduce this concept to australia when i get home and just call everything demented.
• they have the same word for manure as for a variety of little round cheeses (i'm guessing this has something to do with the shape)
• they have the same word for bread crust, cheese rind and scab (YUCK, so all around france there are mothers telling their children literally to eat their scabs.)

ok and lastly, i think i said in the last entry on french that for some things french can take more time, but i've found some verbs that are just unequalled in english (which is a pity, cos it would be incredibly useful to be able to say "he is becoming middle class" with just one word. think of all the time that would be saved!!!!) SO all of these phrases require just one word in french:

• to rub shoulders with
• to mess up someones hair
• to sort things out for oneself (haha the actual word is démerder but i don't know if that roughly translates to 'getting rid of all the shit going on' cos our coordinator used it in class today)
• to hurtle down
• ahahahahaha they have a verb for to blind in one eye. seriously, you would get to use that, maybe, two times tops in your life.
• they have 2 different verbs for to shout oneself hoarse!!
• to get stuck in the mud
• to become middle class
• to open ones heart
• to get out of breath
• to use/wear for the first time

alrighty lol and a few nice violent ones that make me a little concerned about the bloodthirstyness of the french!!! but they're also funny.

• to flog oneself to death. quite quite strange
• to cut the throat of. sure this comes in real handy day to day.
• to put on a spit
• be covered with blood

ok well i've decided to do a blog entry about the french language cos i havent done much about that and its kinda the point i'm here and all. i'm going pretty well with my conversation stuff, its getting really easy to learn new words, usually if i see them written down first and then hear someone say them and recognise them... i learnt really quickly when i got here things like sorry, i'm australian, please say that again, what did he say?, i'm late, i don't understand, stuff like that lol. i reckon i've learnt alot from elisabeth in the routine (train-train lol is what they call it) of the family, cos everything is repeated every day. elisabeth has said that she's surprised at how large my vocabulary is but also theres some gaps... like i somehow remembered debarrasser which is to clear the table but then other simple words i wouldnt know. and its no use knowing lots of words if you dont know how to put them together, which is what i've been learning so now i'm remembering more and more words and learning new ones. also often you can tell that some words will be understood if u try them with a french accent hahaha. this doesnt always work though, and its very annoying when you can think of 3, 5, 10 ways of saying what you're thinking in english, but just can't work it out in french. like the other day i was trying to talk about the interest charles has in the world in general and all of his wonder... awe... amazement... curiosity... fascination and i could think of all of these but not a french equivelant. i just looked it up in my dictionary and it turns out its respect mêlé de crainte so i'm not surprised.

at school the subjects are getting easier, french and history have always been pretty good cos stuff is written down alot.. physics i am so so happy about at the moment cos we started a new subject last week and i understood EVERYTHING, better than some of the other kids in the class!! so so exciting. maths also, today was the first class where i did any work. apart from the infamous test where i got 5%. i don't know if it was really infamous but it was pretty horrifying lol. anyway all the work the class was doing before was based around proving theorems with a lot of language, and now we are onto good old surds. i have never ever been so happy to see surds on a whiteboard! there are still days when its painful being at school but the teachers just let me sit and read or doodle. 

sometimes i realise i'm thinking things in french, making comments to myself in my head or thinking about what i'm going to do next, and i automatically react to things in french now, the other night i was in bed and half asleep and rolled over and stabbed myself in the eye and immediately said AI!!! and then got so ecstatic cos thats what french people say instead of ow. they also say meuh instead of moo (for a cow), cocorico instead of cockadoodledoo, toc toc for knock knock and sirens go pinpon... i dont know how the go in aus... wee-ooh? anyway most of these things i've picked up living with a little kid. theres other stuff i didnt get at the start where things dont translate literally from english... like they say to take a decision instead of to make a decision, or to walk under the rain instead of in the rain. other cute little things that french kids do is that they say cuckoo! like we'd use peekaboo, and hoopla! of something falls over or they jump or something... both of these things sound so cute in the accent. the first weekend i was here charles jumped down a whole flight of stairs going 'oopla, 'oopla! on every step and it was so adorable i nearly died lol. 

another thing i do in class when i'm really lost is go through my french dictionary highlighting useful words and stuff, and i've also found some that really amuse me... i'll put them here but i'm not so sure anyone else'll find it as interesting as i do!

• theres a verb (one word!) for to rest one's elbows on/against. see, this is neat and time conserving (and just maybe possibly a little useless) but in other ways french takes alot of effort, for egsample they don't have to nod, they have to make a sign with the head.
• to say the beard!!! means damn it
• they call fire hydrants the mouths of fire
• brouhaha means hubbub. i love those two words lol.
• to play cache-cache is hide and seek
• they call mufflers hide-noses
• to have the cockroach is to be down in the dumps
• theres a verb for burnt to ashes
• caoutchouc means rubber. i reckon its an awesome word and i will never ever be able to pronounce it.
• theres a verb for to sing to oneself
• lol, i love this.. to say hat! means well done!
• they call apple turnover a slipper of apples.
• ATTENTION EVERYONE this made me laugh for about a week cos it is so fabuously ridiculous and weird: their word for bat is simply bald-monkey. is that not the most fantastic thing you have every learnt? it amuses me so much.
• cliqueter is to jangle/jingle (whichever floats your boat)
• theres also lots of words which mean completely different things depending on the context but still have the same spelling and gender, such as:
• circus/chaos
• ankle/peg/plug
• air (like we breath)/tune (music)
  
• chopstick/baguette (of bread)
• dumkit/pots and pans- i love that they don't differentiate
• badger/shaving brush... that could be very confusing
• bang/party

this week i saw the very maddest thing that i have ever ever seen. 

elisabeth has asked that i walk home a different way from now on as it gets darker earlier, on the rue parrallel to the one i normally take cos theres heaps of shops and more people. so i went along and was looking at all the different shops, most of which are very expensive. this week theres been massive amounts du vent and leaves just everywhere cos all the streets are tree lined. the shops and appartment buildings that have their doors or foyers open end up full of the feuilles, and yesterday when i went walking past a park there were big piles up to about chest height beside the road. anyway, some of the shops on this street are so tiny you could touch both of the walls at the same time if you stood in the middle, little coiffures and lingerie stores. but the one that i want to write about, the most awesome store dans le monde entier, its closer to the house where the shops start thinning out and it completely took me by surprise and i didnt understand what i was seeing and it just spun me right out. it's a shop that sells staircases and its just a big room with the store front entirely in glass and its full of staircases that spiral and loop around each other and morph into different colours and materials and then end up nowhere and its completely insane and froody and i stared at it for ever. the concept of it is so funny and the way it looks is just so cool. i cant imagine anyone seeing this the way i do but it is just really fantastic.

so anyway apart from that... i have a massive lumpy yellow and purple bruise on my shin from hockey on thursday which we played in the last class of the day in the schoolyard while it got darker and darker and peoples faces started disappearing and squares of light flicked on in the 8 storey appartement buildings that stand over the school. i got whacked really hard and couldnt stand for a few minutes but all was well and good after that. 

friday i was so tired the whole day i could have fallen asleep at any time and it was about 4 times harder than normal to translate what i wanted to say or what was being said to me. i got home and went to bed, woke up for dinner and then went back to bed. the next morning i woke up still tired and bummed around the house in the morning until i roused myself enough to get out and go for a run along the river. i didnt feel very good, kinda heart sick and missing being at home, just aching in my chest. i ran up until the path was blocked by construction work and then climbed up the stone wall to the road and sat on top of it for a while and looked at the river. looking back up the track there was big gusts of wind throwing millions of autumn leaves over the wall and they were hanging in the air and rolling up towards me in huge clouds and i sat in this storm of craziness and listened to The Grates. then i walked back home and felt like sleeping, i watched some TV until sophie and alexandra, the girls that i met a few weeks ago at lunch who i went bowling with, called me and told me to come meet them at the part dieu, which is a huge shopping mall about 10  minutes from the house by foot. i went and visited them and we looked around and then took the metro under the river to the belle cour, the main street of lyon with hundreds of shops and walked up and down there. we crossed the path of a womens rights protest and went to a store where we ate some goooooood ice cream. when we were waiting to get the icecream i was looking up the street, which is all paved and about 20 metres wide but packed with people. there was heaps of jeunes like us and buskers with guitar cases and dread locks and tourists with cameras and ofcourse lots of people on bikes and i could hear a brass band playing. when we got our food and continued walking up the street i saw that it was actually just three guys sitting under a tree with an speaker box that had backing music that they played over the top of. there was a trombone, trumpet and a tuba and they were so beat up and bent but they had a really good sound. further up from them is the square of the republic with a fountain that was all lit up cos it was getting darker and next to it a merry go round with lights and music. there was also ropes of lights in bizarre loopy shapes strung between the buildings and the trees have got all these pieces of silver paper tied in the branches. it was very cool. i desperatley need new adjectives. sophie and alex come from a sports made family and they took me to the store of the soccer club of lyon which has heaps of merchandise- evrything from baby booties to bikinis (i didnt mean that alliteration) to toffees to binder folders to keys you can get cut with the teams logo on them... everything! we then took the met back to part dieu, it was fairly exhilirating as there were billions of people lining up to get into the underground through gatres you have to validate a ticket in to open. soph and alex got through and before i could put my ticket in two guys roghly pushed past and through the gate without tickets, and i dont know if it was cos of them but the machine stopped working and started beeping and the gates locked. this was with me at the front of a huge crowd, bashing at the gates and being abused in french... then the other one stopped working too and in the end a girl on the other side opened one of the gates that operates in the other direction and stood in it to keep it up while a hundred people shoved themselves through. we sprinted along this huge underground passage and straight onto the train. once we got back to the part dieu we looked in more shops and walked home at about 6.30.

as we arrived we saw karen, who i went shopping with last weekend, ahead of us bringing back charles who had spent the day playing with her little son timothy. about an hour later so and alex's parentals arrived and we all had dinner together. i was horrifically tired by 8.30 when we started eating and by 10 when everyone left i felt like i couldnt stand up anymore.

i'm sure theres more that i could tell you but i'm so tired still. its 3.30 in the afternoon on sunday and i've been reading On The Road, drinking coffee and talking on msn all day. oh yeah katherine (my cousin whos spending 5 months in poland at a nunnery after finishing year 12 last year) is going to come and stay for a few days after she spend new years in paris, so that'll be very good. theres an offer to go to paris for 3 days and 2 nights before the flight home for all the kids but i'm not sure if i want to go. its very expensive and you dont do alot of stuff.... elizabeth has said that she has a really nice friend who lives in inner paris i could stay with for a while instead, but at the moment she's in madagascar so we have to wait a bit to ask her.

on the first weekend Elizabeth and I drove to my school so I could see where it was. We then we went to a big homewares store that seemed to have EVERYTHING in it. not just heaps of DIY stuff and plants and furniture but also a massive pet shop with the cutest rabbits and teeny tiny fluffy hamster things and electric coloured fish and puppys and stuff. and there was also this insane section full of Noel stuff- it was massive and it was like a  theme park or something cos inside the store they set up little houses and each one had a theme- like ice and snow which was covered in kilometres of frosty blue and white baubles and clear decorations, or one that was all gold and yellow and so bright that it hurt my eyes. they also had mountains of different foods- bags of chocolates and walls built from slabs of fruit cake- and big bins full of packets of fake snow, which i got really excited about! but it was all so pretty and unreal and i spent ages looking at it. there were also little figurines which are called santons i think, we learnt about them in french (right harry?!), that people buy and use to set up nativity scenes, but they're really really detailed and very expensive. it was very very cool and i'm really reallt looking forward to spending christmas here if thats how into it everyone gets. maybe cos it gets so dark they go to any extreme to make it still seem optimistic and bright. elizabeth also said that soon the decorative lights go up around the town which will be just amazing- its insanely lit up after dark here already, since we are so near to the city centre, so i am very excited about seeing some if the christmas things.  

the other day i saw the funniest thing- i should explain first that in lyon (probably alot of big citys) everyone rides bikes and scooters (or rollerblades, though not as often) cos the streets are so tiny and the parking availability so appalling. its very amusing- i see business men zipping around in their suits on little fold up scooters, and middle aged women in high heels weaving through the traffic on their bikes, plus little kids everywhere who are horribly, insanely fearless when it comes to crossing a four lane street during rush hour. but on the first sunday that i was here we were driving along a main road that dips down to go under a bridge, and i saw this bony little man, i reckon about 60 or more, with his bermuda shorts, long socks, rollerblades, helmet, and massive pads wrapped around his knees and elbows, zooming down the hill along with all these other cars- it was SO FUNNY but i was really scared for him. i hope he's ok :D

anyways back to the transport stuff, the day before that (my very first full day in lyon), the three of us went for a ride around the city on these bikes you can rent from bike vending machines that are on alot of street corners in lyon. the bikes lock into stands in the concrete and you use a card and a password to get them out. so we rode around lyon through the streets running very french errands like buying little cuts of meat and different cheeses and posting letters and stuff, and the whole time i was staring around me at everything and it was insanely french. like, maximum possible saturation. if you pounded up a round of cheese, a baguette,a beret and a poodle and then boiled the pulp for seven hours until it had reduced to a lump the size of a sugarcube that would still not be the level of frenchness that i saw on my first day here. there was all these shops selling fruit and vegetables displayed on tables and florists with heaps of fresh flowers and women with stockings and little dogs and men on bikes with scarves and hats and moustaches and baguettes and there were tiny streets with tiny cars and huge green trees and the beautiful river and gorgeous old buildings and yummy smells and it. was. deadly. and then we went to have lunch with elizabeths parents who live in a little apartment on the fifth floor (which in franceland means its 6th from the ground, like we live on the fourth floor but are 5th from the ground), and elizabeth explained to me that she was really old and she had over 100 years and i thought WOAH your mother is going to be like the oldest person i have ever met but then i realised she was talking about the building. so we had lunch there and i'll put that in the food part of the blog cos it was also very frenchy.  

 the morning that we arrived in paris (at 5:45) it was very cold and i think a bit foggy. the first thing that i said in french to a french person in franceland was a very excited "POUVONS-NOUS VOIR LA TOUR EIFFEL ICI???": close enough to can we see the eiffel tower from here that i got the reply 'not today'. :( we were vraiment triste but i will maybe see it when we leave. anyway we were standing around in the airport with the people from the french exchange company who got us to the train station and put us on the TGV, waiting for a bus to take to the train station. and i was looking outside at all the people and trying to judge how different the crfowd at  franceland airport looked from any other airport crowd and i noticed that everyone was smoking. chaque personne that i saw was blowing out smoke and i was a little alarmed until we went outside as well and my face nearly fell off cos it was so cold. of course we all immediately started breathing out thick white steam as well. so i have since discovered that not as many people here are 'fumers' as i thought would be- certainly more than in australia but only very few in my class at school. its certainly alot easier to be a smoker, you can buy cigarettes at 16 and people smoke EVERYWHERE. theres signs up to say that it is INTERDITES but people ignore them- in the underground,  in shopping centres, in the bowling alley i went to, in restaurant bathrooms everyone just keeps on smoking. however it is disgusting and dangerous and selfish and i myself will never take it up despite the numerous offers i have had of marijuana (not certain how reliable these are anyway).

it seems a little strange i know to devote an entire entry to converse but i am quite obsessed with them and so, i have discovered, are the français. as soon as i walked off the plane (in my all stars) i started noticing them in the airport on everyone from 2 year olds to middle aged men. anyway if you ever come to france i advise you to bring a pair cos they're a major status symbol here as for some reason they are very expensive. 70€ or more for a pair. and for some reason its not ,ore expensive to get low tops versus high tops but the paler colours like white or light blue are cheaper than red or black. people keep coming up and grabbing my feet when i'm sitting in the yard and then they smile and nod and say 'all starzzz!' when they see the logo. lots of kids wear leather ones and a few have really high top boot-like ones that they wear over their jeans. i was going to try and find a pair to buy here that was different from the ones in australia but i dont know if i can afford them!