Winter solstice

Today is the darkest day on this hemisphere and the official beginning of winter, though with two heavy snowfalls already in these parts, we switched to winter mode (and mood) at least a few weeks ago. But today we get an official reminder that three more months of cold, grayness and possibly quite a lot of snow lie ahead. All in all, not a day with a great joy potential and long winters are not something I usually enjoy or look forward to, but today is a great day because it is, in a way, the worst of the season. It only gets better from here.

Tomorrow, we will have two more minutes of daylight, the day after tomorrow will be four, and so on. Of course we won't notice any of that for weeks to come, but at least we can be safe in the knowledge that things are getting better, and that we are moving (crawling maybe, but let's not split hair!) in the direction of something beautiful (a.k.a. spring, sun, long days). That's the power of incremental change for you.

Besides, 21st always means that holidays are near, and some well-deserved rest will soon be enjoyed. Or some well-deserved skiing, skating, or reading by the fireplace with a mug of cocoa (the sound of kids bickering muffled in the background).

Happy winter solstice, then, and enjoy those two more minutes of light tomorrow!

Two left feet or a dancing queen?

It has been about five years, and possibly more, since I wanted to learn to dance salsa. Come end of the year and I would put it on my mental list of NY resolutions, again. These are some of the excuses I came up with, at various times, for missing yet another dancing season:

1. I was too busy with two small children
2. Husband was traveling too much so we would miss too many classes or I would have to (shock, horror!) dance with some stranger
3. Taking classes with the said husband would imply a complicated logistical babysitting operation
4. Too costly
5. I wouldn't understand the instructions in Hungarian

All of them are so lame that I am embarrassed to even write them. The real reason? I have long suspected that I had no gift for dancing. I was convinced that I had two left feet and would very likely make a fool of myself and get completely frustrated by that dancing business. So assuming I would not be brilliant I was afraid to try and fail--enter lame excuses--but kept wanting to push myself outside of that particular comfort zone. Ah, the internal struggle...

Then I moved to Geneva, found a course next door, during lunch time, at a reasonable price, so I had no choice but to bite the bullet and face the scary and fascinating world of salsa learning. Of course, I am loving it! The joy of learning something new and the pleasure of sheer physical exercise are immense, and now that we are two months into the course, there is a certain camaraderie forming in the group. We might still not know each other's names, but everyone dances with everyone else and we end up joking and laughing a lot. It's great fun.

Certain skeptics (you know who you are) will say that salsa is simple and what's the big fuss? Except that I don't think it is. It might be easier and less sophisticated than, say, tango, but there are dozens of different steps and variations within steps, if you want to go beyond the basics. There is no preset choreography--you can mix and match the steps as you like, with only a few exceptions--so you need to read your partner's signs very well if you are to be in sync.

Salsa is the kind of dance in which the male dancer leads, so he decides what is happening next. The really fascinating bit for me is that he should communicate his intent only through gentle movements of his hand. If he wants you to turn, he lifts your arm; if he lets go of your hand, you are both turning; a gentle push on your back lets you know that the next is dille que no.

The entire communication lies in his hands, literally, which is why salsa is usually more difficult for guys to master (or so my teacher says). We are supposed to just follow the cues, even if being led does not come naturally to some of us ("You have to let him lead!"--teacher to me). It doesn't take long to realize how much smoother everything flows if the person you dance with knows how to lead as opposed to moving about indecisively. Sending mixed signals, in salsa just as in real life, is a big no-no.

Back to the title: as of today, I can officially announce that I do NOT have two left feet. Dancing queen? I'm not sure there are huge reserves of untapped talent here but the keyword is: fun.

Those quadrilingual kids

Two months ago, Boris and Andrej did not speak a single word of French. I can only imagine how completely lost they must have felt those first days in French public school, unable to make sense of anything around them. We had taught them, strategically, to say "Je veux faire pipi" (I would like to pee) and with that they were thrown in at the deep end.

Thinking rationally, I expected them to learn fast, or at least faster than your regular kid, because they already spoke three other languages fluently. But reality seemed too formidable--so many hundreds and thousands of words, plus grammar. How could they cope with that?

In a way, they had never learned a foreign language before--they simply had three native languages. I know that this is an unscientific view, since everyone is supposed to have only one really native language, the strongest of the ones you speak. But Boris and Andrej were exposed to three languages simultaneously, and picked them up more or less at the same time (Bulgarian lagged a little bit, then caught up). We could never say which one was the strongest.

During the last year of our life in Budapest they switched to speaking Hungarian among themselves, even though the quality of the other two languages didn't suffer. When they moved here, they continued using Hungarian during play. Then one day about a month and a half into their French schooling, I overheard them speak French to each other. They were parroting the words and phrases heard from other kids and it was a limited number of sentences that they used, but it was French alright. They just quietly dropped Hungarian and adjusted to the new reality. Of course, they are far from full comprehension and fluency, but ils se debrouillent beyond my most generous expectations.

I don't think they are exceptionally gifted--they just grew up in weird linguistic circumstances, and many of our friends' children are exactly the same. When you think about that ability of children to absorb whatever language is thrown at them you wonder why, even in countries with multiple official languages, bilingualism is such a hard sell. In places like Switzerland you'd think they would had bilingual kindergartens from here until next week but, in reality, multilingualism simply means that different regions speak different languages. That is a real shame (on the positive side, that means I can live here and not have to learn Swiss German--whew...).