A tempermental spring day in Strasbourg

Bon soir à tous!

Today I felt just like I was back in Ohio. The weather was predicted to be sunny, but when I opened my apartment door, it was gloomy and smelled like rain. At lunch time, I went out to get bread and it was drizzling. Two hours later the sun was shining invitingly outside the classroom window. Another two hours passed and the sun disappeared abruptly behind a cloud, where it sulked for another couple of hours. Whereupon, it came out and shown merrily for another little while, before disappearing from sight below the horizon.

In other news, my mother tells me I take this blog to seriously and shouldn't be afraid of writing short posts without pictures. Thus, thank my mother for this post.

Today, I got the grade and evaluation back from my conversation test and was frustrated by the grammar problems I was aware of and the pronunciation problems the teacher told me about. Further, we have been learning about the nasal vowels in French in pronunciation class this week. The "an" nasal vowel gives me the most trouble. So I have devised a solution. I now pace the streets of Strasbourg with a glazed look in my eye, my mouth slightly open as I practice my "ans" and the other two nasal vowels. I hurry along, staring at the ground and muttering to myself as I practice little conversations using the conditionnel, the conditionnel passé, the subjonctif, the passé composé, the plus-que-parfait, the passé recent, the imparfait, the futur simple, the futur proche, the futur anterieur. Oh, yes! and every now and then, the present tense as well. So if you next hear of me from the French insane asylum, you'll know why.

Also today, I confused futur anterieur and futur proche and got the whole grammar class in trouble. Yes, I'm just that talented.

And finally, today we went to the hospital. What, you may be asking yourself, were we doing at the hospital? We were seeing the oldest cask of wine, with wine in it, in the world located in the wine caves beneath the Strasbourg hospital. It dates from fourteen hundred and seventy-two, before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It is a Riesling, but because it's been in the oak cask for so long it is now a beautiful, rich amber color. We were priviliged enough to be allowed to sniff the huge cork from the cask and then to be shown the huge glass bottle containing some of the wine. There were also some other interesting casks (and we're talking biiiggg - around 26,000 liters big), but not half as exciting. For example, there was a cask that had been a wedding present and was inscribed with the year of the wedding, the name of the gentleman, and the initials of the lady. They had to look in the city records to find the name of the lady. Also of interest were a couple of casks that were egg-shaped on one end and a perfect oval on the other. Each strip of wood has to be carved a different shape to make that work, so it's a difficult feat to accomplish. One of these casks dates from Louis XVI, which means it was inscribed with his name and the fleur-de-lys. So during the revolution, some people came through and etched off all the inscriptions, but, according to our guide (who was quite the character), they didn't know enough to etch off the fleur-de-lys. So, the fleur-de-lys is still there, for our full enjoyment.

There are wine caves underneath the hospital, because back in the Medieval period,  when people couldn't pay with money, they payed with a little bit of their vineyard. And you need somewhere to store the wine from the vineyard, so....

You know, maybe the French insane asylum in Strasbourg, at the hospital of course, would not be such a bad place to be. I mean, with the wine caves right there.... Apparently, back in the day when water wasn't well purified, they gave the invalids in the hospital two (2) liters of wine per day.

Bon nuit!