heiks

I am currently moving this blog from my .mac site, so posts are from 2006, until I catch up to myself! If you've found this blog, you probably know me. If you don't know me, hello there! I mainly blog about my life in Paris (France) and what is happening in my life as an actor (or actress if you want to be British. Maybe ACTRON is less gender-specific. Shall we try that then?). So, yes, here we all are. Have fun.

Saturday, February 25, 2006

excuse my French!


“How’s your French?” my friends who don’t live in France ask me. “Fine” I reply. “Fine?” they repeat. “You’re fluent, right?” “Yes”, I say. “So, you must be quite good....?”
Well, truth is - I don’t really know. Shayne tells me I have sloppy grammar and speak like a delinquent from the suburbs, but French people, on hearing I’ve (only?!) been here for 5 years comment on my excellent French. So, who do you believe? Just this morning a Frenchman acted all astounded at how ‘excellent’ (his words) my French apparently is. How I have only the ‘faintest whiff of an accent’ and how Germanic people are obviously gifted at languages....(excuse me? have you heard what Germans do to English and French and any other language you put before their hard-edged palates? Not a pretty sound...)

I think the quality of my spoken French depends on my hormones. And how much quality sleep I’ve had. And how I feel about being in France on any given day. If I’m sad or tired, I can’t even understand a word of what I’m saying. Sometimes I can hear a piercing American accent fly out of my mouth, and sometimes I hack words with German precision.
This mix of “whiffed” accents probably accounts for the slightly mystified look some people get before they say: “Anglaise? Allemande? Ah non - Suedoise!” (English? German? Oh no, Swedish!)

I think the best judge of how good or bad my French is, would probably be Emilie, my long-suffering, infinitely-patient-with-my-hormones writing partner. Hearing me expressing myself (supposedly creatively) in French, is probably teaching her a lot about English and how its grammar is structured. And she’s taught me some cool slang (that even Shayne hadn’t heard before!)

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Friday, February 24, 2006

stopped clocks


There are a lot of stopped clocks in (former East) Berlin. It’s really noticeable - especially if, like me, your watch is either hardly on your wrist in winter (on account of the metal strap getting cold in the cold) or in summer (on account of your wrist getting sweaty under the metal strap in the heat) and when it is there, you can’t remember how many minutes fast it may or may not be, so you don’t know if you are running really late or just a bit late.
So, in general, I cannot rely on what is or is not strapped to my wrist, and thus I make use of public clocks and am forever grateful to city councils for putting them up. I have often wondered why they bother, but am glad that they do.

However, when the clock near Schönhauser Allee U-Bahn station is forever set to 13h40, it sends me into momentary confusion and an odd time warp. There is another clock near Alexander Platz that got stuck at 9h45 (or 21h45?) one fine day and on the tram ride from Rosenthaler Platz to Pankow, one passes three stopped clocks. What does it all mean? Why do the hands of time stand still on intersections in (former East) Berlin, when time and great effort have successfully erased most obvious traces of the enforced separation between East and West Berlin?

There is a public clock at the intersection of the street I live on in Paris. It runs almost five minutes fast....what do you think THAT means?

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