Conversations in French and German

It was becoming difficult for me to find enough time to carry on arranging and hosting the weekly conversations of my German-speaking group, as I've been doing since 2014, so in September I asked for help and got some. Marie Danielle offered to halve my workload by taking responsibility for our meetings every other week.

While it was still warm enough, we had a couple of meetings out of doors, in Mooney's Bay and Rockcliffe Park, though of course the people who participate from outside Canada couldn't join in then. Otherwise we have continued to meet by Zoom with either me or Marie Danielle as the host, and it's never hard to find a subject to read about and talk about. At the start of the season we read about the Austrian mathematician who won the Olympic gold medal in cycling this summer, Anna Kiesenhofer, then about the lighthouse in the mountains that marks the source of the Rhine and the new footbridge that crosses the Rhine from Strasbourg to Kehl considerably further downstream. We spoke of favourite Christmas recipes, the last time we met; some of us held up to the camera what we had been baking. This made for a pleasant end to the year, particularly as Vjia was playing Christmas music on the piano while we were arriving. Uschi signed in from Berlin and Judith from Vienna. Our Viennese connection made a good impression on Ariane, our new member, representing Afghanistan, meeting our group for the first time, who had learned to speak German when she lived in Vienna and wants to practise.

There have been a few meetings of the French conversation group as well, on Mondays, with some of the same people overlapping. Marie Danielle leads those sessions and she too welcomes diplomats to the circle, Ariane again, for example and Socorro from Brazil. We've read Proust's famous passage about tasting the evocative madeleine, and an extract from the French-Canadian novel, Maria Chapdelaine (also a popular film). It's an education for me to hear about Quebec culture; recently we discussed Un Noël canadian français: what are their habits, what do they eat? Their réveillon meal after midnight mass on Christmas day is served in the middle of the night after a day-long fast, which would have been a recipe for disaster in our family. To cope with this, you'd need a stomach of iron:

...un souper [...] comprenait des tourtières, un rôti de porc, des patates et des pâtisseries. Les desserts communs des fêtes incluaient la tarte aux œufs à la muscade, la tarte à la farlouche (mélasse), la tarte au suif, la tarte au sucre, la tarte au vinaigre blanc ou de cidre, les biscuits et les gâteaux de Savoie.