I own a parrot. It’s name is Maisey. Maisey is “rescue” bird, a parrot who was abandoned by it’s owner who did not realize how time-consuming a tropical bird can be. So, I have a reputation of being good caretaker of parrots.
A doctor friend of mine asked me if I would bird-sit his Naylan Conure while he and his wife visited their daughter in Equador. Connure’s are the smallest of hook-billed birds. They are very frisky, loving and devils for attention. Little did I realize that “Lorita,” this little devil, would really become a bird from hell.
They came by our house, with the bird, it’s cage, bird food and bird toys. I hovered around the buffet that I had cleared of nick-knacks for Lorita’s new home, making sure that she would be happy with the location and the view.
Lorita was delightful. She perched on my finger, tried to cuddle into my pocket, preened my hair, showing off for her mom and dad. Doctor and wife was satisfied that their little darling would safe and well cared for during the next two weeks. I hadn’t noticed the beginnings of the two horns that had appeared on the top of Lorita’s head.
They left. I cooed to Lorita. I was making little bird-baby noises to her. “Nick… nick… nick… nick…” Lorita responded back… “cheep… cheep… nick… nick.” Maisey heard the commotion and answered back with enjoyment. All was well in my parrot world. I went to bed feeling that Lorita had become a happy member of my household.
The next morning I was up early. Maisey had awakened. Maisey was screeching. “Hello… hello…” I chirped to Maisey and I paid special attention to Lorita, removing her cage cover and opening the cage door. I wanted Lorita to understand that I wanted her to feel at home. Lorita climbed out of her cage, scurried up the side, planted herself on the top of her cage and focused her eyes on mine.
“Good morning… Lorita” I said. Then that damm bird jump off the cage, fastened herself to my robe (right above my ribcage) and proceeded to bite me on my neck. I grabbed the bird (gently, as according to the way to hold a parrot) with two fingers on each side of her head, palm on her back, and I placed her back on top of her cage. Lorita paced back and forth across the top of her cage… and then I noticed the horns.
Ok… maybe she really didn’t have horns… but she should have. For the next two weeks I had to put up with six gouges into the back of my right hand, an attempt to tear off my lip, and when she couldn’t do me bodily damage, Lorita would ALWAYS manage to poop on me.
And then right on schedule, the doctor came back and stopped by to pick up Lorita. Lorita jumped onto his finger, and looked me right in the eyes. And I swear I heard the bird say “Don’t you tell the doctor anything.” And as the doctor walked out of my apartment with the bird and cage, like a possessed person I chanted… “Take a look at those little horns on her head... Take a look at those little horns on her head.” Maybe I’m getting to old to take care of pets?
Monday, November 12, 2007
If you can’t beat them, learn French.
If you have never traveled to another country, your first trip can be a real culture shock. To help you be prepared for the possible differences you may experience in another country, I offer some observations from my first trip to France in 2001.
Garbage Cans
The garbage cans in France are so small. Maybe there is some law in France mandating small garbage cans. Once a can is full, you are forced to hide your excess trash. I suspect the French have been hiding their extra garbage for about 76 years. When it reaches critical mass the whole country is going to tip into the North Sea.
The flip side of the trash issue is we Americans. We buy a five-foot tall trashcan for our kitchen, fill it to the top, and then stand there and look at it. Then we decide that we need a bigger trashcan. And then once a week a very unfriendly man comes by and hauls our trash away. And we store it someplace for the entire world to see. We are proud of our trash. We even have a name for the place. It’s called a Public Landfill.
Glasses and Ice
All of the glasses in France are very small. Certainly there must be one French person who has a stomach capacity of more than a half-ounce? But then again, most of the French are healthy, firm and fit. Maybe that has something to do with reasonable consumption and small glasses.
France has an ice cube shortage. I’ve been in France for 3 days and I haven’t seen a single cube. Maybe they grind them up and ship them off to the Alps to keep all those high priced ski slopes open. In my hotel room, I found an ice cube tray in the small refrigerator. It was empty. Even the ice cube tray was small. That makes sense. Even if the French knew the recipe for making ice, they couldn’t put LARGE cubes into those tiny glasses.
Cars
Maybe I’m being to narrow minded about this small business. It does have some advantages. Most of the French cars are very small. I live in Denver Colorado where almost everyone owns an SUV. When you have 50,000 Denverites driving downtown to see a baseball game someone always winds up having to park in Colorado Springs. There is just no place to park all those tanks. But if you drove those SUV’s down a street in Paris, the French would swear the Germans were invading again.
Day and night
Here we are in the middle of France, in Burgundy, in the middle of June. I’ve never been out of the United States before. I grew up scared to venture to far away from home. This could have been because when I was nine years old, my parents sent me out for some bread and when I got back home, they had moved.
So I don’t know a lot about other countries. France is further north than Colorado and the sun comes up and sets at different times then it does in Colorado. But I didn’t know this. Case in point. I am sitting outside of the hotel, it’s 10:30 at night and I could still see light from the sun. This didn’t make sense to me. At 11:00pm, with a glimmer of sun still on the horizon, I panic. I went to the phone booth and called the French 911. Within 3 minutes two very tired volunteer firemen drove up and saw this crazy American on his knees on the front lawn. I was performing some sort of Celtic chant, praying for the earth to regain it’s proper orbit and return the day to day and the night to night.
This of course amused the fireman immensely. With in a week everyone in the tiny village of St. Vallerin was calling me “The Sun King.” I don’t think they met that as a compliment.
Shopping carts
An interesting idea is used at French supermarkets. You pay a 10 Franc coin to bail a shopping cart out of the cart stall in the parking lot. This is automatic. There is a small box on the carts push handle. Place the coin in the box, and the cart is released from a chain.
After you are finished shopping, you bring your cart back to the jail, hook the chain up to the cart and your 10-Franc coin pops back into your hand.
I wonder how they keep you from walking off of the property with the cart? After all, 10 Francs doesn’t seem a whole lot to pay for a sturdy-shopping cart.
Shopping
I was wondering how the populace in these small French hamlets acquired their department store type items. It’s easy. Instead of having a shopping mall every 2 miles, Sears, so to speak, comes to the town.
Once a week travelling merchants set up stalls in the early morning, up and down the ancient streets. They hawk everything from furniture to clothes, housewares to CD’s. No parking lots, no traffic. The sun for lighting, the breeze for air conditioning and the streets for storefronts. And by lunchtime they are packed up, moving out of town leaving nothing but the quiet peace of a small French village.
Category Culture – Language
We have heard so much about the language barrier between the French and the rest of the world. But after my first 5 days in France, I suspect that the only barrier anyone has between the culture of one nation toward another is fear.
I am sitting here in the hotel reading “Le Journal De Saone-et-Loire.” See that word “Journal,” it means newspaper, pretty simple.
Other words from the paper jump out at me. Reduction, voyages, transport, grand, gala, solitaire, France, sanctions, confrontation, nature and so on and so on.
In the same paper I see English words peppered though out the pages. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Macdonald’s, Colgate, Marlboro, Winston, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the list goes on.
France has given us many of the words that we use on a daily basis and we have given them loan words that represent American consumerism. That seems like a fair trade… language barrier, I don’t think so.
Unisex Restrooms
I found a unisex restroom today. It was Sunday, June 10th 2001 and we were eating lunch at La Gourmandiere in the little town of Germangy in Burgundy. This was the first Sunday of my trip. The restaurant was filled with after-church families, children in their Sunday clothes and young French couples.
After eating lunch, nature called. I didn’t have a clue. I scanned the room and saw a door marked “Toilettes” (pronounced “twah-lets” in French). Clue number one should have been that the word was PLURAL. So I passed through the door into a rather large room. On the other side of the room was a stall marked “Hommes.” I was so proud of myself. I had been studying my French before I left the states and I knew that “Hommes” translated to “men.”
I open the door and went in and sat down. My second clue should have been “why is the word men hanging on the stall door INSIDE OF THE RESTROOM.”
So here I am sitting, waiting for that great big one, when I hear the restroom door open and two chatty restaurant patrons walk in.
They are women! I figured that my limited knowledge of French had failed me and then at that moment my bladder failed me. I couldn’t control it. Now I know why the French call restrooms “water closets.” I almost pissed all over myself. I tucked my feet up on the toilet seat, wrapped my arms around my knees and assumed a fetal position balanced on top of the shit can. I didn’t want them to get a peek of a pair of men’s shoes planted on the floor tiles of the stall.
I broke out into a cold sweat and went on an auto pilot prayer vigil. “Please God, don’t let them find me in the woman’s restroom. I don’t want to get to know the local police and end up wasting away in some rural version of the Bastille.”
I heard another stall door open and shut, two minutes of silence, toilet flush, door open and shut again and then the whole sequence repeated. If I were paying any attention my third clue would have been the fact the two women had used the SAME stall, never even peeking into my little cell.
They left the restroom. I wipe, zip up and bolt out of the stall. I looked around the room to make sure that one of the women had not stayed behind to powder up or fix her makeup.
And then I saw the light. A sign on the other stall read “Femmes.” Of course, this is a typical European co-ed restroom. I sauntered out and sat down with my fellow travelers, bragging about how much I understood the French culture.
Garbage Cans
The garbage cans in France are so small. Maybe there is some law in France mandating small garbage cans. Once a can is full, you are forced to hide your excess trash. I suspect the French have been hiding their extra garbage for about 76 years. When it reaches critical mass the whole country is going to tip into the North Sea.
The flip side of the trash issue is we Americans. We buy a five-foot tall trashcan for our kitchen, fill it to the top, and then stand there and look at it. Then we decide that we need a bigger trashcan. And then once a week a very unfriendly man comes by and hauls our trash away. And we store it someplace for the entire world to see. We are proud of our trash. We even have a name for the place. It’s called a Public Landfill.
Glasses and Ice
All of the glasses in France are very small. Certainly there must be one French person who has a stomach capacity of more than a half-ounce? But then again, most of the French are healthy, firm and fit. Maybe that has something to do with reasonable consumption and small glasses.
France has an ice cube shortage. I’ve been in France for 3 days and I haven’t seen a single cube. Maybe they grind them up and ship them off to the Alps to keep all those high priced ski slopes open. In my hotel room, I found an ice cube tray in the small refrigerator. It was empty. Even the ice cube tray was small. That makes sense. Even if the French knew the recipe for making ice, they couldn’t put LARGE cubes into those tiny glasses.
Cars
Maybe I’m being to narrow minded about this small business. It does have some advantages. Most of the French cars are very small. I live in Denver Colorado where almost everyone owns an SUV. When you have 50,000 Denverites driving downtown to see a baseball game someone always winds up having to park in Colorado Springs. There is just no place to park all those tanks. But if you drove those SUV’s down a street in Paris, the French would swear the Germans were invading again.
Day and night
Here we are in the middle of France, in Burgundy, in the middle of June. I’ve never been out of the United States before. I grew up scared to venture to far away from home. This could have been because when I was nine years old, my parents sent me out for some bread and when I got back home, they had moved.
So I don’t know a lot about other countries. France is further north than Colorado and the sun comes up and sets at different times then it does in Colorado. But I didn’t know this. Case in point. I am sitting outside of the hotel, it’s 10:30 at night and I could still see light from the sun. This didn’t make sense to me. At 11:00pm, with a glimmer of sun still on the horizon, I panic. I went to the phone booth and called the French 911. Within 3 minutes two very tired volunteer firemen drove up and saw this crazy American on his knees on the front lawn. I was performing some sort of Celtic chant, praying for the earth to regain it’s proper orbit and return the day to day and the night to night.
This of course amused the fireman immensely. With in a week everyone in the tiny village of St. Vallerin was calling me “The Sun King.” I don’t think they met that as a compliment.
Shopping carts
An interesting idea is used at French supermarkets. You pay a 10 Franc coin to bail a shopping cart out of the cart stall in the parking lot. This is automatic. There is a small box on the carts push handle. Place the coin in the box, and the cart is released from a chain.
After you are finished shopping, you bring your cart back to the jail, hook the chain up to the cart and your 10-Franc coin pops back into your hand.
I wonder how they keep you from walking off of the property with the cart? After all, 10 Francs doesn’t seem a whole lot to pay for a sturdy-shopping cart.
Shopping
I was wondering how the populace in these small French hamlets acquired their department store type items. It’s easy. Instead of having a shopping mall every 2 miles, Sears, so to speak, comes to the town.
Once a week travelling merchants set up stalls in the early morning, up and down the ancient streets. They hawk everything from furniture to clothes, housewares to CD’s. No parking lots, no traffic. The sun for lighting, the breeze for air conditioning and the streets for storefronts. And by lunchtime they are packed up, moving out of town leaving nothing but the quiet peace of a small French village.
Category Culture – Language
We have heard so much about the language barrier between the French and the rest of the world. But after my first 5 days in France, I suspect that the only barrier anyone has between the culture of one nation toward another is fear.
I am sitting here in the hotel reading “Le Journal De Saone-et-Loire.” See that word “Journal,” it means newspaper, pretty simple.
Other words from the paper jump out at me. Reduction, voyages, transport, grand, gala, solitaire, France, sanctions, confrontation, nature and so on and so on.
In the same paper I see English words peppered though out the pages. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Macdonald’s, Colgate, Marlboro, Winston, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the list goes on.
France has given us many of the words that we use on a daily basis and we have given them loan words that represent American consumerism. That seems like a fair trade… language barrier, I don’t think so.
Unisex Restrooms
I found a unisex restroom today. It was Sunday, June 10th 2001 and we were eating lunch at La Gourmandiere in the little town of Germangy in Burgundy. This was the first Sunday of my trip. The restaurant was filled with after-church families, children in their Sunday clothes and young French couples.
After eating lunch, nature called. I didn’t have a clue. I scanned the room and saw a door marked “Toilettes” (pronounced “twah-lets” in French). Clue number one should have been that the word was PLURAL. So I passed through the door into a rather large room. On the other side of the room was a stall marked “Hommes.” I was so proud of myself. I had been studying my French before I left the states and I knew that “Hommes” translated to “men.”
I open the door and went in and sat down. My second clue should have been “why is the word men hanging on the stall door INSIDE OF THE RESTROOM.”
So here I am sitting, waiting for that great big one, when I hear the restroom door open and two chatty restaurant patrons walk in.
They are women! I figured that my limited knowledge of French had failed me and then at that moment my bladder failed me. I couldn’t control it. Now I know why the French call restrooms “water closets.” I almost pissed all over myself. I tucked my feet up on the toilet seat, wrapped my arms around my knees and assumed a fetal position balanced on top of the shit can. I didn’t want them to get a peek of a pair of men’s shoes planted on the floor tiles of the stall.
I broke out into a cold sweat and went on an auto pilot prayer vigil. “Please God, don’t let them find me in the woman’s restroom. I don’t want to get to know the local police and end up wasting away in some rural version of the Bastille.”
I heard another stall door open and shut, two minutes of silence, toilet flush, door open and shut again and then the whole sequence repeated. If I were paying any attention my third clue would have been the fact the two women had used the SAME stall, never even peeking into my little cell.
They left the restroom. I wipe, zip up and bolt out of the stall. I looked around the room to make sure that one of the women had not stayed behind to powder up or fix her makeup.
And then I saw the light. A sign on the other stall read “Femmes.” Of course, this is a typical European co-ed restroom. I sauntered out and sat down with my fellow travelers, bragging about how much I understood the French culture.
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