(Is "goings-on" a real term that real people use? Or is it just another word I've learned in a dream? [like mumphin. and turble.] [also I'm pretty sure kaleidoscope didn't become a word until after I dreamed it.] [given, my definition was a *teeeny* bit different])
(Does Portugal have opium dens?)
(Isn't Portugal in Europe?)
(SHUSH)
Incidentally, I have discovered why English is such a difficult nonsensical language that is so challenging for people to learn. (while we delight so much in tormenting them and refusing to listen or understand a word they say until they learn it)
It is not, as is widely believed, that English pronunciation rules are merely piles of half-baked vaguely worded ambiguous *norms* that each apply to only a few of the many possible syllabic combinations in the English language, and still fail to hold true more than 50% of the time. (Although that is accurate.)
What makes English so difficult and frustrating to master is, in fact, the existence of a certain insignificant something that we do in weird ways that barely anyone else does: helping verbs. HELPING VERBS. Don't nobody do them like we do. (except of course for speakers of a few Celtic languages like Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh.) (now you know!)
So what have am I been doing in Europe? We'll I'm was glad you asked!
- Going places. Seeing things. Meeting people. Eating food. Walking. Sitting on trains. Taking pictures of random small animals like hedgehogs and snails. Looking at cathedrals. And a basilica. And a weird cathedral/mosque hybrid pitiful yet fearsome man-made mutant beast of a communal gathering place. (more on that later.) Infinitives.
 |
| RELEVANT. Also cool because it looks like the snail is going so fast that the fabric of time and space around it is being bent and twisted and melted. Either that or it's so slow that the snail stays in one spot while centuries of change go on around it. THE SNAIL TRANSCENDS TIME. (is the only possible conclusion. moving on.) |
- Observing cultural things which are different and/or unusual, both on a large and overly generalized scale and on a very specific obnoxiously esoteric and detailed one. One thing you probably didn't know about Europe: There's a lot of tourism! They also speak a lot of different languages! (English is spoken in Europe too, [waaaaatt????] but the only place it's natively spoken is in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which are actually on ISLANDS SEPARATED FROM THE REST OF EUROPE! [weiiiiiiiiird.])
(I'm pretty sure that was potentially seriously offensive and degrading to a large quantity of people (i.e. Eastern Europe(eans). Disney's hands are tied for reasons I'm not at liberty to discuss.); luckily I (ordinarily) live in AMURICA, where I can say whatever I want about large quantities of people without fear of repercussion. (save for the occasional riot or boycott or bombing))
Another thing: everything is so much more musical over here. Now by that I don't mean that Europe is like Disney World or Glee or High School Musical and that people in lederhosen regularly burst into choreographed and well-rehearsed performances of popular pop songs or campy less popular songs about summertime or bratwurst. (That's only on festival days.) What I mean is that instead of just mindlessly hurling random music all over the place like America, Europe is musical in that it uses musicality. In very (usually) subtle ways.
For example: car horns. In America, every car horn plays a single note, or just a mass of sound. It works; it's obnoxious. In Europe, however, a lot of car horns, completely individually, will play a specific dissonant interval--often the infamous tritone. That means that they play two notes at once, which, instead of merely being obnoxious like the American horns, immediately grabs your attention and usually makes you want to rip your ears off and bathe your head in salt so the pain will drown out the vaguely nails-on-a-chalkboardish wail which is assaulting your senses. Now that is an effective car horn. ("That" is super intense but for some reason "That's" doesn't feel or look very emphatic. Contractions are wimpy? Maybe that's the conclusion to be drawn from this.)
(Real men do not take shortcuts, even linguistic ones.)
(ESPECIALLY NOT LINGUISTIC ONES.)
It should also be mentioned, however, that Spanish people appear to have negated the helpfully jarring effect of this car horn by HONKING ALL THE FRICKIN' TIME. They honk when someone else is going slow; they honk when someone else is going fast; they honk when someone is in their way; they honk when someone else gets out of their way; they honk when the light is red; they honk when the light is yellow; they sometimes inexplicably honk when the light is green; they honk when their fútbol team wins; they honk when their fútbol team loses; they honk before, during, and after a fútbol game occurs in which they have any sort of remotely vested interest; they honk to say hi to friends; they honk to harass attractive women; they honk to make fun of ridiculously dressed people on the streets; I'm pretty sure a lot of Spaniards just honk because they can--I'm definitely working too hard at trying to come up with rationalizations for them. (They honk just for the heck of it now because just over 35 years ago the ultra-catholic fascist regime being in power meant that honking was forbidden? I SAID STOP IT MICHAEL)
Also instead of making similarly monotone ringtones or using random catchy dancy music clips as ringtones, some phones in Europe also use music to be more effective and efficient with their ringing. When I was visiting my German rock-star friend and his family outside of Dusseldorf, I was convinced that their house was haunted for my entire first day there, partly because of the ghost that kept taking my socks, but mainly because I kept hearing an eerie ringing, like the music that usually precedes a grotesque fanged creature jumping off of a roof into a dark graveyard, interrupting an ordinary funeral or a misguided attempt at black magic by a silly British secret society; it also reminded me of the X-Files.
It took me until half-way through my second day there to realize that the hauntingly simple and tremendously spooky three-note melody that I kept hearing was just their telephone ringing. Then everything suddenly made sense; up until that point I just thought it was witchcraft that made someone leave the room every time I heard the noise.
So hypothetically that spookiness can help people answer the phone well? I'll have to think that one through.
And I haven't even mentioned church bells yet, which in southern Spain are as loud and obnoxious and dissonant and intrusive as possible. (A singular church bell would do just fine on its own--butNOOOOO--we need a symphony of randomly timed random notes to chime and inform the city that another hour has passed or that it's time for mass or whatever.) It's unclear why exactly this is but it's hilarious because that's kind of what the role of the Catholic Church has been reduced to in Spain; an extremely loud and pervasively intrusive in its influence yet almost entirely passive government-supported venture.
- Was I trying to make a list out of this? That's unclear, but another bullet point seemed necessary.
Another factoid that you should glean from all this is that Europe is large--enormous even. One does not simply "travel across all of Europe by bus or train or car" unless they have a great deal of time and money on their hands.
(I will also accept "Being chased across the globe by international spies/an organized crime syndicate/Slovakian human traffickers that want to take my life/freedom/9-year-old daughter" as a reasonable rationale.)
Spain, for instance, the first country I spent a large amount of time in, is nearly the size of four North Carolinas. Let's get a better idea of what that means. Hypothetically, if you were to drop Spain on the United States so that North Carolina roughly lined up with the southeast region of Spain, all of North Carolina would be crushed by the mass of sweat and Arab palaces that is Andalucía. Madrid, due to the mountainous terrain of Virginia and Central Spain, would probably end up suspended above Richmond or the general area outside of Richmond, so that, not only would the good people of Richmond be able to say that it was raining cats and dogs, they would also be able to say in all good conscience that it was raining the capital city of the Kingdom of Spain. (the precipitation would mostly consist of people, beer, and the occasional art museum or royal palace.)
West Virginia would be mercilessly smashed into the mountains of la Sierra de Guadalupe in western Spain, while Portugal would end up stretched across two-thirds of Ohio and just enough of northern Kentucky to crush Frankfort with its beautiful mountainous beaches. (did anyone else know that Frankfort was the capital of Kentucky? I didn't even know that was a city. Wow.)) Northwestern Spain would cover nearly all of Pennsylvania and still leave a little bit of Galicia hanging over Lake Eerie, while all of Cataluña and Aragon and the Pyrenees in northeastern Spain, a region a little smaller than the state of New York, would be untouched--not that that would help all of Barcelona from falling into the Atlantic Ocean.
You'll notice that I didn't mention Washington, D.C., Maryland or Delaware. This is not because they would somehow remain safe from falling European countries; this is because they would never stand a chance and their effect on Spain would be negligible at best. New Jersey, however, can take solace in the fact that it would be quite efficient at absorbing a large portion of the weight of the Basque Country and its neighbor regions, while the northern-most portion of New Jersey would remain untouched.
If we extended this hypothetical scenario, of course, then the beaches of Normandy would end up in Maine and all of South America would be ultimately squashed by Africa, but those consequences are unimportant for the purposes of this mental exercise. If we were to delve that deeply into it we would obviously need to inquire as to how the eastern hemisphere somehow managed to flip itself over before being dropped on its western counterpart.
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