One afternoon some time ago Jul and I encountered this horrible falsetto of a song, wherein the woman (or castrated man) kept on singing about getting to ‘Funky town’ and how he/she couldn’t wait to get there. When the song ended, Jul, irritated, turned to me and said, “She doesn’t even say what she’s going to do in funky town!”
Ho, I have a magic drainer. You know, that kitchen thing you use when you’re cooking to drain the water out of the pastas. It’s silver and magical and I bought it yesterday at the market down Croix Rousse square.
I don’t cook but I have a magic passoire!
And the magic passoire, along with our yellow plates, blue bowls, and wooden spoons are coming with us to Aix-en-Provence, the south of France, which will be our current location.
Aix-en-Provence where the sun shines and where fountains spurt (that doesn’t sound so right) and where there are strawberries and other curious fruits.
Aix-en-Provence where it’s hard to find parking space (as the case is in the whole of France).
Aix-en-Provence where it’s not as cold as Lyon.
Aix-en-Provence where maybe we can get a loving, affectionate cat and call him Euclid.
Aix-en-Provence which is more or less near the beach.
We could very well dub Aix-en-Provence Funky Town.
Man, the thing about moving is that you’re obliged to lug around all your stuff in crates and boxes, install them somewhere new, forget about them while you’re there, and discover them once more when it’s time to move again. It makes me sad to pack things you know you aren’t even going to remember when you get there. I left all my books in Manila because I didn’t think of them that much, and now that we’re moving I wish I’d brought them along. Like my Don Skiles short story collection that I bought for around 10 pesos at the Booksale that was filled with all these winner short surrealist stories. How could I have done that?
The ugly thing about forgetting and remembering is that you can only have them one at a time. And you always end up with some sort of unavoidable pang of regret.
However, going back to Funky Town, I can’t wait to continue my French lessons, where I shall be ‘Degree 2 Niveau 1′. I had some funky classmates at Alliance Française Lyon, though. We are linked by the unanimous goal to speak perfect ‘Fransh’ and to be understood by the ‘Fransh population’.
Yuichi is from Japan and his boots have fur. He also has a black-and-white checkered pair, but that is another story. He smokes cigarettes whose brand I’m not familiar with. He’s going to be a fashion designer in Paris as soon as he’s fluent. He wears this nice hat with a little ball of yarn on top. The thing I like about him, aside from his being shy despite the loud clothes, is that he has a Magritte notebook.
“Tu aimes Magritte?” I asked him as we were packing our books after a day of lessons, pointing at his notebook cover.
“Hai. Oui,” he replied. There was a Magritte museum in Japan which he liked, he explained.
The next day he arrived two hours late for class, looking like a guy with a very healthy alcoholic hangover. Still, he showed this Japanese girl and I his newly-purchased Magritte calendar from the store Artés. Even while his head was probably still spinning, can you think of that. Years from now I’m going to be wearing a Magritte-inspired dress. Hopefully, without the fur.
A boy from China in my class is a genius. I can hardly understand him speak, but he’s a genius. He’s the earliest one to arrive in class (I know because I’m the second) and he’s always mumbling to himself, memorizing irregular verbs or Subjonctif conjugations. All that, and he doesn’t even own the required class books!
I sat next to him most of the time in class, so he always shared my book when we had to read something. “Did you lose your books?” I asked him – not to be rude or anything -but just because I was amazed that for someone as ‘obsessed’ with learning French as he was, he didn’t seem to give a horse’s ass about not having a book.
He gave me a long, lengthy answer complete with hand movements, and ended with a hearty laugh. I stared at him blankly. A conclusion as to why I probably don’t understand him is because he ignores the periods in sentences. He just doesn’t like them, I guess; much less respect their presence in a sentence. He’s going Univeristy in Lyon afterwards.
In a class discussion, he always looks like he’s bored, and to prove his point he yawns occasionally, but when everybody’s stumped and can’t answer a question tossed at us for the last five minutes, he suddenly gives the correct answer, his expression a bit impatient, bulldozing his way into sentences without stopping for the periods, of course.
So that’s how he is, the Chinese genius. Occasional bursts of rain and thunderstorms, in comparison to the weather. At one breaktime, we were all discussing about our countries when suddenly he joined in the conversation, out of the blue in dominant decibel level, wanting to know if we knew something-or-other about China. He clear cut off the Spanish girl in midsentence, too. We were kind of shocked that Chinese Genius spoke to us. He wrote down Chinese syllables on a paper, explaining to us that in Chinese, you wrote words according to syllables. We were talking about oceans and he was talking about another thing, but that was all right with us. He’s really intelligent. I know it because he got the highest score at the end of the course. And because he didn’t buy the 20€ workbooks, which we used not-too-often, when you really think about it. I could almost see him smiling at us for ‘falling for the book trick’.
It’s really sad that I have to go to another school, especially since we were more or less in the same age range and there were some pretty terrific people I’ve made friends with.
But life goes on, times are a-changing as Dylan says, and I wouldn’t mind making more friends down at Funky Town.
