Field trips and Fairy Tales: Day one

Since I am in Europe I get to see a lot of beautiful locals here, all of which have buildings that date back thousands of years. I love seeing these places that transport my imagination back in time to  a time of kings and their kingdoms. I recently went on  a trip with  a few of my friends here in france.  We went on a french country  side road trip that was one of the most beutiful  road trips that I have ever gone on in my life.

We managed to  rent a car for the trip for about eighty  Euros a day, and with  five people there with us it made the trip  insanely cheap to go on the original idea was for us to  just go to  a town called rocamadour, but it turned into so much more than that. It was an escape into the great unknown and new insight into the beauty of France.

I went with  Rodolfo, Hayley, Alex and Nora who are all friends of mine from the study  abroad program that I am currently on. Rodolfo was the one who came up with the idea, he had discovered Rocamadour some years ago and it has been one of his dreams for years now to  visit that ancient city built into the side of a mountain. 

It is something out of a fairy  tale that you would never expect to actually be built in real life.

Rocamadour is a good distance away from us about four hours by  car that making it a reasonable weekend trip for all of us. We set out friday afternoon to get where we were going. We had rented a room in the French countryside off of a website called Airbnb.com. On a side note if you have not had a chance to use this site yet and you are a traveller I would highly recommend it. The people that we ended up staying with were a fantastic with there accomedations and even gave us breakfast even though it was not part of the deal. They went above and beyond the call of duty  when we were at their place. It was a beautiful  little country home, with two dogs a cat and tow horses running around in the  yard. They had built the house on the land over the last three years and had placed it on Airbnb so to  get some income from the house itself. I even woke up early one morning so that I could go out there and take pictures of the sun rising out of the sea of mist.

Before getting to  our weekend home we stopped by  another town called Tolousse, a larger french city  not to  far out from  Montpellier. It is a is know as the red city  because most of the buildings there were all constructed with  bricks instead of the normal stones that are common place in France. We only spent a couple hours there though but the time we spent there was enough to give us a feel for what the  city was like. I have never seen anything like it, each building was read but it stood out against the others because of it's architecture that let it's personality  pop out from  the crowd of structures around it. the insides of the buildings were also amazing as well, we were fortunate enough to experience the wonders of the art that were inside of the buildings. 

We were able to  explore the open area of the town hall while were were there. As we walked through the high ceilings with art work that lined the wall all the way  to  the top. Even some of the ceilings were painted. They  were beautiful, the way that they  told stories and the the fact that there were mirrors on lining some of the rooms brings you into the artwork as well. It was really stunning.

Language

I have been in France now for over a month and it has been quite the adventure. I wish now that I brought a computer so that I could actually type a little quicker than with it just attempting to  type out some things on my phone. Although phones are a great way to maintain connectivity they are not conductive to actual long blog posts and make it difficult to  get some decent work done. Lucky for me I have a great Room mate named Ronny who was more than willing to let me type on his little tablet with a bluetooth keyboard it has worked fantastically. So I toast my glass to  you Ronny, Thank you.

Today I want to talk to  you about the beauty of language. The more I explore the world and learn of local customs and traditions, the more realizations that I have about how amazing languages are. First off I grew up speaking one language which was just English until I ended up serving a mission for my church in Argentina where I ended up learning quite a bit of the Spanish language, and now that I am studying abroad in France I have come to understand another language that I am  improving on as I learn to  speak the beautiful french language.

Language study has taught me so much and has helped me to  not only increase the people that I can talk to  but it has also helped me to understand my own in ways that I have never understood it before. I am not an English mayor in the slightest, my forte lies in Architecture and the beauty that comes with interior design, but that does not mean that I do not enjoy the English language. I enjoy being able to  communicate and I like the way that it sounds because it is familiar to me and is my  native tongue. However,  when you combine that understanding with the understanding of other languages you start to  get an appreciation for the little things that you notice about your own language.

English is a language that borrows a lot of it's words from other languages. I have heard it called a the bully because leads other languages into dark  alleys beats them up and steals whatever piece of language that happens to be in the pockets of the victim. Which as I study continually the other languages I come to realize how correct this is. English is primarily a Western Germanic language that has evolved over several thousands of years, the English we speak today is known as modern English and borrows a lot of its words from several other languages including both French and Spanish.

This fascinates me, I get to know my language better because I am learning from it's ancestry. There are little things in the English language that are so similar to  our own. Some simple ones that we now are complete knock offs that we just decided to  use in every day conversation, such as Au revior, lingerie, parfum and deja vu. That are easy to  pick out and help you to get a more comprehensive grasp of the way we speak. Then there are other that are not so obvious.

one such example was something that Ronny pointed out to  me as we were waiting for the tram. Whenever it is just a little ways off the sign that  announces the arrivals flashes proche, which in French means next. Ronny being bright and connecting two and two together points out to me that this is another word that we have taken from the french language and have mutated it to  our own liking. Now I know that Proche is not something that we ever use in the English language, but approach is a word.
In a moment of insightful brilliance that helped me to appreciate the beauty of the English language Ronny helped me see the connection that exists between these two beautiful languages.

I know it is kind of a geeky thing to  write about, but it is beautiful. I know two and a quarter languages now and that makes me happy! Those two and a quarter languages that I know help me to  communicate with people all over Europe and North and South America. They  help  me to  speak to people that I would otherwise never have been able to talk with because I now can express myself in a foreign way. And that is not even the  most awe inspiring part. I only speak two and a quarter languages; there are over seven thousand languages spoken on this world. seven thousand ways that people have developed in order to  express themselves. I know I only speak a tiny fraction of what is in the world today but I feel that by learning even just a little I am connecting more with the world around me and that is awe inspiring.