Disappointment

Hangzhou is no longer on our calendar for December, the reason being that Chris is urgently required to work on a different assignment instead. For more reasons than one, we are both disappointed, but at least we shan't now have to contend with Christmas-time crowds at the airports and can relax at home for the holidays. Chris didn't have time to brood over the change of plan because he was obliged to go out to teach at the flying club. To get over my own sense of disappointment, I took myself out on impulse to be entertained by a gentle and original French film at the Bytowne, La Tête en Friche. The actress in it was a lively 96 year old playing the character of a 95 year old and the other main character was acted by Gérard Dépardieu, so yes, it was well worth going out on a chilly evening to see. Here's the trailer.

This morning about twenty of us drove to Elvira's for a Christmas get-together where we sat around chatting in German (and in English to her pretty Australian grand-daughter from Melbourne who poured the coffee and handed out the Leckerbissen very graciously), then singing some German Christmas carols together. There was still some time to spare so someone asked me to read a story to the group. I chose a children's story from the Christmas file I'd brought along: Die Legende von Nikolaus und Jonas mit der Taube, by Willi Fährmann. A previous German member of the Konversationsgruppe, during the time when I was its convener, had left us with a collection of Mr Fährmann's stories. This one was about a miracle brought about by St. Nicolas in Myra.

After saying goodbye and fröhliche Weihnachten to our friends, Lolan and I drove back downtown talking about China (Lolan was born in Sìchuān—Szechuan—but has lived in Canada for the last forty years). I had her drop me off at the Rideau Centre so that I could do some shopping. Since we're still expecting to be in China (not perhaps, in this case, but definitely), for the sake of George's hūnlǐ, I went into Chapters and bought myself the Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary so as to learn another 15,000 or so words by next May. It lists the Chinese characters in alphabetical order of their pinyin equivalent, so that I can actually look them up without too much difficulty, and includes notes about the words and examples of their use, a bit of grammar, an index of "radicals" (I haven't even begun to get to grips with those yet, can't even grasp what they are), "measure words", and the basic rules for writing Chinese characters—the order and direction of their strokes.