On language

12th Oct, 2007 again..

The language situation in Luxembourg was intriguing, you might remember. It‘s equally so in Switzerland, where German, French and Romany all exist - as well as Swiss German. The latter is their ‘native‘ language, but is so different in pronunciation from German itself that I found it impossible to recognise words when people were speaking. And yet they read and write ‘High’ German as their language, because it‘s the common denominator. Very confusing. Swiss German is even more gutteral than ordinary German, which sounds relatively soft by comparison. Celia reckons if she goes along making gggghhhh noises with her throat, she’s doing a pretty good version of the language.
She’s also discovered that the word, Migros, means supermarket in Swiss - it’s obviously a brand name but it helps to know what sort of shop it is. In some Migros stores there is a great range, but in the one we went to the other night on the way home from Thun, we went round and round struggling to find any sauces to use with the chicken we were going to buy. In the end we bought yet another couple of packets of Pelican filets - I don’t know they were filets of, apart from being fish (and they certainly weren’t Pelican; that’s the brand name) - which we’d already tried before and found quite tasty, if a bit salty and buttery. But to buy fruit and veges in this particular store you had to sort out the price ticket yourself, which meant getting the number from above the item you were buying, taking the goods to a weighing machine, pressing the number on the screen and waiting for a ticket. We’d already got to the check-out before we discovered this and had four items needing prices, which flustered the woman at the counter not a little. Rather too much in the way of self-service, to my way of thinking. Though in England, in some of the big stores like Asda and Sainsbury’s, you can check out all your items yourself. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s quite fun in the end.

York, day one

Spent most of today in York, which turns out to be a pleasant city, with no apparent excess of traffic. Celia had to visit the dentist first thing, and got an appointment for 11.40 am. She’s had a painful toothache on and off for about a week, and it was time to deal with it. Fortunately the dentist diagnosed it as a problem of the gum receding and exposing too much of the tooth. Some particular dental gel sorted it out, and the problem was resolved with a small fee - smaller than we expected.
It’s always complicated having to go to the doctor or dentist or whatever while on holiday - especially in another country. So we were relieved that this particular issue was dealt with relatively easily.
The inner city of York still has its old city wall mostly intact (or well restored) and you can walk for more than three kilometres along it. The pathway is quite narrow, and now has a metal fence alongside to stop you falling off, but it can’t have been much fun in the past if people started rushing along it in a crisis - knocking somebody from your own side off the wall would have been a common hazard, I’d suspect.
On our initial sortie into the city this morning, we found that the first street we entered inside the wall had no less than six op shops almost in a row, plus the SPCK bookshop (a Christian bookshop for those who don’t know the magic letters SPCK), and a National Trust shop. Too many riches!
We did a quick tour round York Minster and then had to go back to the car and find the dentist again. After that we came back into town, found Sainsbury’s supermarket by accident, bought some lunch, ate it in the carpark, and then went for our second trip inside the wall.
Now we had more time to explore. After dealing to the op shops, and the SPCK, and the National Trust (where we found that the toilets were very convenient), we went on and checked out The Treasurer’s House. This is a place near York Minster which was restored (rather oddly) by a former City Treasurer. He seldom lived there, apparently, but used it to house his collection of paintings and treasures. It didn’t strike either of us as very inspiring. Many of the paintings looked rather like copies by lesser hands than paintings by original masters, and the antiques and such weren’t up to much compared to the usual NT standards. Or maybe we’ve just had enough of those sorts of places for the moment.
Anyway, on to York Minster, that extraordinary cathedral in the centre of the city. It’s large - very large - and yet, when I walked around inside it didn’t somehow appeal. Maybe it’s overwhelming, and doesn’t inspire much reverence. Having to pay to get inside it, and having guides all over the place telling people at the top of their voices what this was and what that was, and having crowds everywhere, rather took away from the sense that this is really a church. It seems very much geared towards making money. Though admittedly the money is being put to good use in the sense that there’s been an enormous amount of restoration done. And things look very good inside. Maybe the grand scale doesn’t appeal so much to me. We went inside a much smaller church just down the road (York, like Norwich, has a church on every corner) and you felt that God probably did visit the place more than once in a blue moon.