February 12, 1999

Hello all,

For those of you who are not up to speed on the weather in Wales we have had some snow, about 6 inches worth. This is a once a decade type snow storm here. They usually only get a few inches every other year. (True to form the forecasters missed it again.) The Student Village, where I live, was a madhouse. Of course many of the British students have never seen this much snow but many of the Greeks seem to have never seen snow at all. Imagine groups of 50 – 100 students engaged in snowball fights. These groups would then start fighting each other until someone realized that it was a lot easier to hit their roommate ten-feet away than someone they don’t know fifty-feet away. A pitched snowball fight would quickly turn into a mêlée. For about two hours in the evening Hendrefoilan Student Village resembled Kossovo. While there were a few students using the snow to build most used it in a playful, yet inherently violent manner. As Arnold said in ‘Terminator 2′, “It’s in [our] nature to destroy each other.” Major bummer isn’t it?

The next day I went with my housemate Franca, and two of her friends who are visiting this week, on a hike. About halfway there the bus got stuck so we had to walk about four miles to the coast – under tree covered paths as the snow melted off. We then walked about three miles along the coast, where I had the experience of walking on a snow-covered beach, and then a couple miles back to the road where we caught a bus back to the village.

idano

polyGeek 1999, franca, letters, snow, swansea

November 20, 1998

Let me tell you about the people that live here in my house. First, let me tell you about the house. (Note: the flash on my camera is broken so pictures will NOT be forthcoming until I get a new camera.) I live in house 69. There are eight rooms, four upstairs and four down (the ladies have the upstairs), a bath upstairs and a shower down, and a kitchen and a dinning area, both downstairs. In room 1 is me. My room, like all the others, is about 8×12″. Plenty big for one person. Room 2 is Nick, a good bloke from Britain who is studying marine-bio and spends most of his free time surfing. Room 3 is Sean who is originally from Tanzania but looks more like a British aristocrat; he is studying philosophy and psychology. Room 4 is Tasch; he is from Germany and is studying literature. Upstairs in room 5 is Rashme; she is an East Indian from Canada; she already has a degree in polysci. and is now getting a degree in law; she studies, all the time. Next

is Stephanie, she is British and is studying biology. There is Peggy, from France, also studying biology and is another studyholic. Finally we have Franca, from Italy. (Pronunciation note: to pronounce ‘Franka’ correctly you say ‘fr + cat purring sound + anka’.) she is studying literature and her English is not so goodly, but it is improving.

Aside from the eight official residents there are two other people who are here all the time – Paola and Jenny. Paula is Franca’s friend from Italy and Jenny lives two houses down and is pretty much everyone’s friend.

As you can gather there is quite the international scene going on here. It isn’t rare to be in the dinning room and have conversations going on in two different languages. On one occasion there were four conversations going on and all in different languages. English is the only language that everyone knows but the Italian girls speak French better than they do English and of course Peggy is a native speaker and then Reshme speaks French fluently and some Italian. When we are all in the room together I have to constantly remind them not to lapse into French or Italian. I hate it that I don’t speak any other languages. Jenny, who is from Sweden but looks and speaks like an American-new-age-hippie-chick, speaks six languages, fluently.

I’m hopeful that after getting Latin down pretty well I’ll be able to learn a little French and Italian from the girls.

Many of you on this mailing list are ‘computer literate.’ Some of you know more than others and some of you make a living being ‘in the know’ with computers. Anyone who knows anything about computers has probably run across someone who knows less than they have and needed help. All the sudden you’re an expert, comparatively. For those of you who have lent computer assistance before might find this rather humorous. My polyglot friend Jenny knows next to nothing about computers, but she does have a 386 laptop running Windows 3.1. It just so happens that she got a job translating a document from English to Swedish and they want the translation done on a computer. Good thing she has the laptop to work on; bad thing that she knows nothing about it. So she comes to me to help her get things sorted out. Now it has been many years since I have worked on a Win3.1 system so I’m a bit rusty, but all she needs to do is make a document. As bad as Win3.1 is MS-Works is worse. So I have to help her use an outdated operating system and the worst word processor conceivable. But it couldn’t be that hard, right. Oh, did I mention that the language is set to German on the operating system? Well not everything is in German some of it is in Swedish. So, here I am trying to help someone who knows next to nothing about computers and they have to translate everything for me. The upshot of this is that I now know that “Ja” in German means “yes.”

So I was wondering, can computer literacy count as a language? I think it should. Perhaps I’m not the mono-linguist I thought I was. Now if I could only get NAU to wave my language requirement.

This past Friday I went on a tour, run by the history dept., to three Medieval castles. Of course I took many pictures. I will put them up as soon as I can but I don’t think it will happen this week. Funny thing about school is that sometimes, rarely, I have work to do. Like, ah, college – bubble gum popping sound – would be, like, so much more fun if it weren’t for the classes. Or as Mark Twain said, “Don’t let college get in the way of your education.”

Chow, idano

polyGeek 1998, franca, letters, swansea