There's definitely a million other things I should be doing right now, and I will in a minute, but isn't it strange how in the biggest chaos you still find the time to do something completely unmeditated and strange?
I stumbled across a corny, old and almost forgotten French chanson on youtube and the memories came flooding back in giant rolling waves - the school exchange with a French school 15, 16 years ago, all those big emotions, the drama, the heartbreak... Ah, we had a fabulous time...
Somehow I got the idea into my head that by now - all postal addresses long out-of-date - the general networking hype should have made it quite possible that some of these French people are hanging around the internet as well. A friend supplied some of their second names and I spent some happy hours sieving through facebook and even one French facebooky-type site - and I actually managed to unearth two guys. ...And the most amazing part for me was that they actually wrote back!
You see, back then, my French was, ah well, let's say rudimentary (now it's not even that), as was their German, so looking back I've always wondered how we managed to communicate at all. (The answer being, of course, we didn't. ...Well, the non-verbal parts of communication seemed to do the job...) So it was something of a revelation to be able to write and chat fluently now, in English, thank God for that! For the first time we actually understood completely what the other one was saying - why, isn't that something!
Apart from that, the strangeness knows no boundaries. I am well aware that in a sense I might just as well have written to some total stranger and gone "Hey, I like your picture. Tell me what you did those last 15 years!" But in another sense it felt so very natural to hear them talk about their lives, quite familiar, in a way.
In any case it cheered me up big time and I could really use that!
I stumbled across a corny, old and almost forgotten French chanson on youtube and the memories came flooding back in giant rolling waves - the school exchange with a French school 15, 16 years ago, all those big emotions, the drama, the heartbreak... Ah, we had a fabulous time...
Somehow I got the idea into my head that by now - all postal addresses long out-of-date - the general networking hype should have made it quite possible that some of these French people are hanging around the internet as well. A friend supplied some of their second names and I spent some happy hours sieving through facebook and even one French facebooky-type site - and I actually managed to unearth two guys. ...And the most amazing part for me was that they actually wrote back!
You see, back then, my French was, ah well, let's say rudimentary (now it's not even that), as was their German, so looking back I've always wondered how we managed to communicate at all. (The answer being, of course, we didn't. ...Well, the non-verbal parts of communication seemed to do the job...) So it was something of a revelation to be able to write and chat fluently now, in English, thank God for that! For the first time we actually understood completely what the other one was saying - why, isn't that something!
Apart from that, the strangeness knows no boundaries. I am well aware that in a sense I might just as well have written to some total stranger and gone "Hey, I like your picture. Tell me what you did those last 15 years!" But in another sense it felt so very natural to hear them talk about their lives, quite familiar, in a way.
In any case it cheered me up big time and I could really use that!
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