Hey, it's Wednesday! Wordless Wednesday!

oh, English...

Idioms have got be the most difficult part of a language to teach a non-speaker, and that's what today's tutoring consisted of. The theme was "Food Sayings", and it went something like this, given the choice of 5 food phrases or words:
"I know someone who is really crazy. They're _beans__pie__nuts_."

There really is no easy way to even make an educated guess, once you think about it! I mean, whoever decided a piece of cake was "easy", or even pie for that matter? The particular student I was working with, quite the character, decided that English itself was "full of beans" and "nuts".
I assured him there were idioms just as puzzling in his own language...

Norwegian: å gå som katta rundt den varme grauten
to pace around hot porridge like a cat = beat about the bush

Russian: Вешать лапшу на уши (Vešat' lapšu na ušy)
To hang noodles on one's ears = to tell lies / talk nonsense

Tibetan: chang.sa.rgyag
to put up a beer tent = to get married

French: pédaler dans la choucroute
to pedal in the sauerkraut = to spin your wheels - to go nowhere

And the best of all!
Dutch: Ik zweet peentjes
I sweat carrots = I'm sweating like a pig 

(from a fantastic language resource website, omniglot.com) 

understanding Ewoks

I know I'm making progress in my learning Tibetan when I can understand what the Ewoks are saying.

From Wikipedia: Ben Burtt, the sound designer of Star Wars says: "For the Ewoks, I was inspired by a recording on a BBC documentary of an elderly woman speaking Tibetan. It was very high-pitched and sounded like a good basis for Ewokese to me. Eventually then, what evolved was a pidgin, or double talk version of words from Tibetan, Nepali and other Mongolian languages [sic, neither Tibetan nor Nepali are Mongolian languages]."

"Tibetan diaspora was puzzled as many of the phrases they could make out did not correlate to events on screen."                                      

                                                     http://www.tk1336.com/ewok.html

where do you come from?

Once upon a time (in the 19th century) there was a small band of people living on a small island named Tristan da Cunha that lies in the south Atlantic, roughly between Africa and South America. This group had been a garrison of the British Marines while Napoleon was held in exile on a northerly island, St Helena, just in case he tried to escape. He did indeed escape, but there's not a lot you can do when the ship traveling to communicate this news is a few thousand miles away. Napoleon was long gone by the time the garrison got the message, and so they were no longer needed.

Some of these people decided they really liked this island, and stayed. This consisted of one man, his wife and their daughters, and some other non-relatives. They remained on this island, built families, and their population grew without a whole lot of outside contribution. Here is that island:

It looks quite lovely, but what do you think about the shape of this island? Yes, in 1961, that very volcano blew its top and all the 240 settlers had to be ordered off and rescued by the British Navy, thus, the end of inhabited Tristan da Cunha, for a little while at least. Eventually, some people returned.

Anthropologists have studied populations like this because of what we call the "founder effect". The biology of populations that grew from an isolated group tends to show some very unique genetic features. For this group, one of the few founders had carried a gene for retinitis pigmentosa, causing blindness, which was found 10 times more often compared to that of Britain, from which the original founders had come.

Another location much closer and more familiar to Americans is with Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. Here, hereditary deafness was the common condition, and so much so, that the people developed their own sign language, somewhat different from ASL and officially called MVSL. There have been stories about people in the bars, drinking and chatting as most bar-goers do, but as soon as an out-of-town person would come in, they would become silent and switch to their own code of sign language.

Surprisingly, even though these close-knit groups share many common genetic traits, there were often very low rates of inbreeding. Still, what we learn from this is that it's better to mix things up!

fennel harvest

Remember how I talked about going out to a canyon in San Diego and filling bags of weeds, including fennel?

 

 Before I came home to Kansas, I went out to the lake near my house and harvested some of my own. Here, you can see it filling out the sides of the trail, usually about 6 to 10 feet high!

 I collected a lovely amount of seeds, and set them out to dry in the sun once I got back to Kansas.

 But, silly me, after an entire dry summer in California, I forgot it actually rains in Kansas. My seeds were soaked and then turned moldy. Very disappointed, I tossed them in with the soil in one of my pots while re-potting another plant, and took a trip to the store for some instead. Several weeks later, look!

I guess I'll have to think about thinning them out eventually.

First Fridays

I always get "Final Fridays" and "First Fridays" mixed up, since one is KC and one is Lawrence, so I just generally think of end of the month and beginning of another. Tonight was FIRST Fridays in Kansas City, and my FIRST time to go. I've been wanting to go for about a year, and I figured today was the day, before it gets too cold and before I have too much work to even enjoy some free time.

Thanks to Kansas construction which resulted in one lane on the Interstate during holiday weekend, rush hour traffic, it took me twice as long as usual to get downtown. I wasn't even sure exactly where I was going. I really should have checked beforehand because I never got to where I was supposed to be, with all the art galleries. I did find two, plus a Friday Night Farmer's Market, and lots of hot dog stands.

The first building I went to had an empty first floor, some abstract paintings, and this really cool old... elevator? It was just pushed into a corner with a bunch of construction stuff, but it was more interesting than the actual art on display, in my opinion.

Also in the first building was part of the Drepung Gomang Tour which is currently in Kansas City. The visiting monks played music (I love those long horns) and taught kids how to make sand mandalas, mold flowers, and paint rocks. It was very entertaining to watch.

Sure it was "for kids", but I wish I could have tried...

At the farmer's market, I found some Thai basil. When my mom and I ate Vietnamese in San Diego, we had some on a plate, but couldn't tell what it was. But now I know, and now I'm going to make some Vietnamese food. I bet it will go quite well with my cari chay. It's probably not so different from regular basil, but I do think it's prettier.

Several people I walked by commented on how nicely it smelled too!

Finally, I made a stop on my way home to check out the new Trader Joe's. It's huge! And like always, they had the goat brie and chile mango popsicles I love so much.