This morning my deutschsprachige Konversationsgruppe was at Luci's house ---Luci is Brazilan --- talking about the places where we originated or grew up. It was my idea to use our home towns as a topic of conversation; I lead the group. Last week I started the ball rolling by describing Scarborough in Yorkshire, Sue spoke about Ottawa as it used to be in the 1950s, Füsun talked about Izmir in Turkey and Ariane described Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso! This week we heard from Danielle about old Aylmer (close to Ottawa on the Quebec side of the river); Christiane described Vianden in Luxembourg near the little village where she grew up, and Judith spoke very proudly about her hometown, Vienna. Next week we're going to have Abla talking about Alexandria in Egypt, Vija talking about Riga perhaps (though because her parents were wartime refugees she considers herself more Canadian than Latvian), Ursula is going to say something about Winterthur near Zürich and Luci is going to describe Rio. And so on ...! We still haven't heard from the Lebanese / Dutch / Chinese / German ladies, either. There are over 25 of us, but the normal number of people joining in each week is between 12 and 15.
Christiane was also intending to send this morning's photos to Uschi, a German who left Ottawa last summer and now lives in the mountains of Kazakhstan!
Isn't all this extraordinary? And wonderful?
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