Kew and a play
Today I had coffee (and later dinner) with Brian Ridgers, one of my London professors. We chatted about a little bit of everything. He and his wife just bought a house in Devon, which he insisted I come and visit. (That’s going to have to wait until next summer though. Great excuse to come back!) And I’m going to help him get a deal on some Apple hardware.
After our coffee, I took the Underground out to Kew Gardens in West London. I took a bunch of pictures of crazy plants, from staghorn ferns to orchids. And I saw a real, live piranha!
“Is it true that there are going to be piranhas in the aquarium?”
“Where did you hear that!?”
shrugs “My source indicated it was a possibilitiy.”
“Well, yes, but piranhas are a very tricky species.”
On the train from Kew Gardens to Earl’s Court, I sat next to some 10 year olds. They were talking in English, and then suddenly they were talking in German. I was impressed with myself at how much of it I understood. The stories they were relating and the things they were talking about weren’t complicated, so that certainly helped. But it made me want to brush up on my German again. Bust out some noun cards and conjugate some verbs.
Then we met for dinner at Wagamama, a UK “pan-Asian cuisine” restaurant. It was good, though I wasn’t too stoked about the dish I ended up getting. Afterward, we parted ways and I went to see The History Boys, which I enjoyed. I didn’t get some of the references, which were coming fast and thick in more than a few places. And there was an entire scene in the first act that was done exclusively in French. So I certainly missed some of the jokes there. But I liked it nevertheless, and for £10, it’s not a bad way to spend an evening.
The play, of course, also made me realize that my education has thus far been deficient in the area of French, which is actually something I’ve been thinking about for some time. Ever since I read “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” I realized that I knew next to nothing about French history. Everything I’ve read and/or studied glossed over the French stuff and focused on the English. I’ve recently come to admire the French for a whole host of things, from the metric system to their reliance on clean nuclear power to their relentless internationalism (ISO, etc.). And then there’s the whole Napoleon phenomenon, which I still know next to nothing about. I keep bumping up against the Napoleonic wars (Count of Monte Cristo,
Being in Paris knowing no French made me feel dumb. So maybe I’ll learn some French too. It sure would help knowing how to pronounce/translate/use some of the many phrases we’ve stolen, such as “N’est-ce pas?”.
But before any of that can happen, I get to sleep.