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pallas_athenaToday was a day of interesting conversations with random people.
It started out with a couple of non-random meetings which went well, including getting some excellent language coaching from a Welsh friend. It's a lovely feeling when an entirely new language starts to make sense of a sort. I feel rather elated by it. The key to it, so far, seems to be that Welsh has a whole different alphabet which just happens to use English letters. Once you've learnt the alphabet the pronunciations seem to be mostly phonetic, except the letter Y, which is just weird.
In the evening I went to Borough Market, where I ended up chatting to the amiable proprietor of East Teas. His stall is always an oasis of calm, even when Borough is heaving. He let me taste some Chinese tea which had been aged since the 1970s! That's pretty old. They dry the leaves, then dampen them, then make them into a sort of round brick called a bing and leave them with a weight on top until they dry out again. The resulting tea tastes sort of like lake water-- that warm-decaying-vegetation smell-- but in a good way.
Then on the Tube home I got talking to a man in full Highland dress who was about to do some bagpipe busking on Westminster Bridge. He turned out to have served in the military-- I didn't ask where. We had a surprisingly interesting conversation about waterboarding.
So... Welsh, tea and waterboarding: just another day in this fascinating city of ours.
It started out with a couple of non-random meetings which went well, including getting some excellent language coaching from a Welsh friend. It's a lovely feeling when an entirely new language starts to make sense of a sort. I feel rather elated by it. The key to it, so far, seems to be that Welsh has a whole different alphabet which just happens to use English letters. Once you've learnt the alphabet the pronunciations seem to be mostly phonetic, except the letter Y, which is just weird.
In the evening I went to Borough Market, where I ended up chatting to the amiable proprietor of East Teas. His stall is always an oasis of calm, even when Borough is heaving. He let me taste some Chinese tea which had been aged since the 1970s! That's pretty old. They dry the leaves, then dampen them, then make them into a sort of round brick called a bing and leave them with a weight on top until they dry out again. The resulting tea tastes sort of like lake water-- that warm-decaying-vegetation smell-- but in a good way.
Then on the Tube home I got talking to a man in full Highland dress who was about to do some bagpipe busking on Westminster Bridge. He turned out to have served in the military-- I didn't ask where. We had a surprisingly interesting conversation about waterboarding.
So... Welsh, tea and waterboarding: just another day in this fascinating city of ours.
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no subject
on 2010-11-22 01:04 am (UTC)