The Friday Five on a Sunday

[nanila]

1. If you could live in any city in the world, where would you live and why?

London would still probably be the top of my list. While I was living there, I loved not having to drive and being able to access so many remarkable things for the price of a £1.50 bus journey. I’m also too consistently tired and too completely absorbed in my job and my family to learn another language, so selecting places where English isn’t the lingua franca and introducing a greater level of difficulty into daily communications, isn’t feasible. On the other hand, London is horribly expensive to live in, the Tube is disgusting, and it is exhausting being smashed up against all those people all the time. I'm not sure city life is for me at this stage of my existence.

2. If you could speak any language fluently, what would it be?

Tagalog, because I'm still upset I was deliberately not taught it as a child.

3. When was the last time you rode a ferry and where did you go?

The last one I can remember, which may not be the most recent, was the ferry to Staten Island when I went to New York in 2008.

4. What was the longest plane ride you've ever taken?

Probably the LHR to LAX flights - 11ish hours. I have done a fair few of those.

5. If you discovered a country, what would you name it?

I’m going to interpret this literally and assume that this is about Earth. Given that the land masses on Earth have been populated by humans already, and my belief that the world has had enough of colonists, I'd call it whatever the people who already live there do.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I had seven years in London and that was quite enough!

[nanila]

Six for me, and agreed.

[soliano]

Learning the language of your culture/family would be cool. I am sorry that for whatever reason your parents decided not to go there. Maybe someday you will be in a place to take lessons.

[nanila]

Learning the language would be cool. I don't feel like I missed out on the culture so much, I grew up with a load of cousins who were being raised similarly. Our parents just wanted us to sound like All American Children (TM) and thought if we were bilingual / with accents, we'd be at a disadvantage.

[cmcmck]

I was never given any clue to my Romani and Yiddish speaking ancestors so have had to pick up bits of those languages along the way.

[spiffikins]

My mom's parents spoke German at home - amongst the *adults* - and never taught any of the kids more than a handful of household words. Some of it was wanting their kids to 'fit in' - my grandparents were both children of immigrants, and probably struggled with not having English as their mother tongue, growing up, and thought they were doing their kids a favour.

But from my mom's perspective - her parents spoke German when they didn't want the kids to understand what they were saying :D

It did make my mom VERY interested in signing us up for French Immersion when it was offered - she wanted us to be able to speak more than one language, even if she couldn't!

As it turned out, Spanish would have been more useful in my day to day life, now - but I do find knowing French helps me puzzle out some Spanish, and probably gave me a leg up in learning the smidgin of Spanish that I do have.

[nanila]

The attitude toward language preservation seems to vary so much between generations and in different cultures. It's interesting that your mum chose French - I'm guessing that was due to your location at the time?

[spiffikins]

Partly it was the only option - French Immersion had *just* started to be offered - the first class was one year ahead of me. And French, because Canada has 2 official languages, English and French. It was kind of weird to be learning French in British Columbia - school was the ONLY place that I would ever be exposed to any French language.

Well, other than every single cereal box and food product, or tags in clothing - I grew up seeing "S/P" (small/petite), "M/M" (medium/moyenne) and "L/G" (large/grande) in every t-shirt, LOL. Everything for sale in Canada, generally needs to be labelled in both English and French.

[rmc28]

I like living close enough to London I can go there easily, but somewhere small enough I can walk home from the far side of town if I have to. I do like living in a university town though. (technically a city, but really a moderate-sized town)

[nanila]

Yep, I always liked those aspects of living there too. I think we'd have stayed if the option were there. But I'm sure if we had, I wouldn't be in the role I have now.

[kirundo]

I used to love London, first time I went there I was 13 years old but somehow now it feels so generic, it has lost its charm to me. Besides that it's way too expensive and too crowdy. I don't think I could handle that anymore :O

[nanila]

It's stupidly expensive. I got invited to speak at a conference there next month and they sent an email to say "we've secured discounts at local hotels for you!" I opened it and the cheapest one was £260 a night for a 3*. Lol no thanks.