Little Neige, Big Neige!

Bonjour mes amis! Or Bonsoir I guess I should say, because while it's almost 1:30pm in St. Louis right now, it's almost 8:30pm here...bonkers.

Anyway, mom and I decided to stick close to home today. We've both been pretty worn out by all the hoofing around we've been doing the past few days, and we needed to recharge the batteries a bit. So I was looking on our map and found that the Mosquee de Paris is just a short walk from our apartment, so we decided to head over there. We got there, and I wasn't really sure about what the boundaries were about us going inside or whatnot, but when we looked in the door we saw that there was this huge cafe right inside the mosque!! Strange...but I was a little freaked out and didn't really want to stay just because I was really unsure about how to behave in such a place. So mom allowed us to walk around the block of the mosque and look at all the cool architecture before making me go back and have tea :) Fortunately, THIS time she was right. The tea was DELICIOUS and the little cafe was pretty cool. Definitely a highlight. Then we came back and just walked around our neighborhood for a while, bought some chocolate (never a bad idea), grabbed dinner and more mousse chocolat (again, never bad my friends) and came home. Oh there's also this really cool catholic church/cathedral right in the middle of our neighborhood that we were able to go into and walk around. It was no Notre Dame but it was still really pretty.

So now I will go into the hilarity that is my mother's attempts at speaking french. Or frenglish as we like to call it. Today we were at this cafe/bistro for lunch and our waitress' english wasn't very good so we were both trying to work with each other to figure out what was on the menu and then what we wanted to order. So we got our food, which was pretty good, and after we were done the waitress came over to clear our plates and asked how it was. So my mom says "Very good! Tres Bien! Perfectiment! oh and we're ready for our ticket" Oy vey. So then I started laughing at her, duh. To which she responded as she normally does, "shut up!!"

We will now break down the pronunciation of her frenglish. For those of you who don't speak french, "perfectiment" isn't a word. At least not to my knowledge. And apparently it is pronounced perfect-i-mon, with a little nasal action there at the end. So apparently you can just add "i-mon" to any english word and it's automatically french. Well I wish I had known that before I took 7 years of french!! Also, "ticket" was pronounced ti-ket, ket like the beginning of "kettle". Now, to her credit, ticket is a word I believe, but not the right one for your bill after a meal. So at least she hit A target whilst shooting in the dark. Either way, I had a good laugh about it, which meant she had a good laugh about it too. :)

Also, I realized today that I never wrote on here about our hilarious encounter with one of our waiters a few nights ago. This was the night that it snowed and wreaked havoc all over the place, meaning there were sirens galore. Now, I had noticed that there were a plethora of sirens anyway regardless of the snow, but I had attributed this to a hospital that I thought was nearby after looking at the map. So we were chatting with our waiter (who also didn't speak very good english, but enough to get by) and we were commenting on all the sirens. Then we asked if it was because of the hospital nearby, to which he said that there was no hospital nearby. Thoroughly confused, I decided to just drop it and not worry about it, since it really didn't matter. But then he decided it was really important for us to understand why there were so many sirens, so he said it was because of all the neige. (Neige means snow, but only I knew that. Mom was totally clueless, which made it even more hysterical later.) Then he goes, "when there is a little neige, lots of sirens (this was complete with hand gestures to communicate small and then large) When there is big neige, no sirens, no police or ambulance, they don't want to go out!" Now I, who had actually understood what he was trying to say, verbally agreed with him and kind of laughed/smiled my acceptance. Mom just kind of smiled and nodded and I totally forgot that she would have had no idea what neige was. So right after he left, she goes "What the hell is neige??" For some reason this just hit my funny bone and I started cracking up, then I told her it was snow and she seriously went BONKERS she was laughing SO HARD!! We created a major scene in that poor cafe. I really hope the waiter didn't think we were laughing at him. My mom then explained, after composing herself after her fit of hysterics, that for some reason she had thought he meant Santa Claus because there was a little Santa doll behind me that he had been pointing at, when really he had been pointing out the window at the snow. Also she thought maybe neige was somehow related to "St. Nick"....who knows. Either way we were both crying and I felt really bad about disturbing the entire restaurant, but it was too hilarious to pass up.

So now, whenever one of us screws up our french, the other one says "little neige, big neige!" and we die all over again...great times.