I have been tagged!

It is always nice to find out that people read your musings – especially when the main reason for your blog is to stay in touch with all those people you love but are far away from, as it is the case for yours truly. Consequently, I was thrilled to find myself tagged by Tasha – I didn’t know she was reading, and now I do, and that makes me happy.

So first my 7 random facts:

1) I love random facts. Like that the Earth is 0.02 degrees hotter during full moon. Like that in France technically it is illegal for a woman to wear trousers (except when riding a horse or a bike) because of a law dated 1892 that was never abolished. Like that apparently coffee drinkers have sex more often than people who don’t drink coffee.

2) I share my birthday with, among others, John Coltrane, Ray Charles and Eurypides (although I sincerely do not know how did Wikipedia people manage to figure it out for that last one).

3) My very favourite place in the entire world are Tatra mountains in Poland (Zakopane). Any mountains make me happy, but there is just something about these particular peaks that makes it a true soul asylum for me. No demons can go there.

4) I sing most of the time. I try to keep it in my head when in public, but I quite often fail.

5) I love garlic sandwiches. One of the best things about being sick when I was little was my dad making them for me (cause garlic boosts up your defences and you’re sick in bed, so no one cares if you sweat it out and stink). Take a slice of bread, butter it, put chopped up raw garlic on it and finish off with some salt. Yum. (I have just made some for Manpreet, as she’s poorly and off work, she was sceptical at first but then loved them).

6) I can’t sleep without my stuffed dog. What can I say – a 25 years long habit is not easily lost. Not that I’ve tried though.

7) My favourite season is winter. Even if it is not snowing, although of course it is much better with snow. There is something about the crispness of the winter air that makes you feel more alive and makes everything sharper and more there. And then there are the evenings, dark and cold, which make your home and bed even cosier than usual.

And now for the tagging –
Tasha has already tagged some of the blogs I would have tagged, but there’s still one by an old friend of mine Ewelina and Carina’s culinary pages, and then some by people I don’t know but whose writing I enjoy: Annie Rhiannon, Morning Coffee, German Joys. I know it's not 7 but that's all I've got.

Words and meanings

Yesterday afternoon at the university we had an event where Year 9 kids from different backgrounds were teaching us their languages. There was a girl teaching Norwegian, but to my great disappointment all she could provide were names of animals – I wanted ‘I love you. Marry me’. That was beyond her knowledge of the language. Oh well.
There were also three kids teaching Polish – all people who had stopped at their tables would come back to me and show off what they had learned. I particularly appreciated Lyndsey telling me that she had a cat – which in Polish could mean ‘I’m nuts’ and Paul declaring he had a horse – which could have been interpreted as him admitting to having a penis. Ah, you’d better be careful, you never know what you’re actually saying!
So I’ve learned some Norwegian, some Portuguese, some Lingala, some Cantonese and some sign language. The latter being the only one that I’ve not forgotten.But most of all, I learned some Satswana. It’s a language spoken in Botswana. And it’s amazing. Their currency is ‘Pula’. That word also means ‘rain’. In an African country. Wow. ‘Madi’ means both ‘money’ and ‘blood’. Wow again. But it gets better. ‘Monday’ is ‘mosupologo’, which means ‘get out of your shell and get going’. Hating Mondays must be something they don’t quite get. Or maybe they get it even better. The word for ‘Sunday’ means ‘bells are ringing’. But my very favourite is ‘maitsiboa’, which translates as ‘evening’, but means ‘you know it’s time to come back’. Isn’t that all that evenings should be about?