It occurred to me at Vancouver International Airport, while waiting for a Lufthansa flight to Budapest via Frankfurt:
Language is music — especially when I don’t understand it.
My question shifts from:
“What are they saying?”
to
“What image am I left with?”
Sitting there, surrounded by linguistic diversity, I pulled out my notebook and wrote my impressions. I honed and revised them while flying to Europe over the Canadian High Arctic, Greenland and Norway.
.
Now, those words appear in PicFic—an online Twitter Fiction journal.
It’s my second piece as PicFic’s featured contributor.
Here it is → Flight 493
This blog post is included in Issue #1 of the BluePrint blog carnival: > language > place.
Living ?s 
I love your stories behind the stories :)
Thanks Jessie ~
I love doing this too, at airports and train stations…. By coincidence, the “ads by google” which came up at the bottom of this post are about plane tickets: fly Qantas to Australia! is one of them. Another, in Spanish: Vuelos en Oferta! Aprovecha la oferta web y reserva tu pasaje ahora!…
Hi Jessie. :)
i was just reading elsewhere (but where??) how good it is to be in a setting where you don’t understand anything. makes it easier to hear the music not only outside of you, but inside as well.
way cool
re: “makes it easier to hear the music not only outside of you, but inside as well”
So true Sherry, and so well put. I’m considering signing up for Hungarian language lessons, but wonder if it would kill the magic on return visits …
ps LOVE the ice photos. just what i was yearning for…
Thank-you!
[The ice photos Sherry referred to are here.]
Airports are such inbetween spaces. Are you here, are you there, as you are on your way. Inbetween spaces, to inbetween places. Do we think differently there?
I certainly do.
hey, i’m back again, following the language carnival. this time i am all caught up in this term: the canadian high arctic. love the way that sounds. in montana we have an area we call the “hi-line” which refers to the stretch of state just south of the canadian border. i’d swap that term for the canadian high artic. the term takes me places.
Thanks for stopping by Sherry! So interesting to hear about the ‘hi-line’. I can’t help but wonder what it looks like. Perhaps any phrase or term with the word hi(gh) in it brings to mind something magical and mysterious; beautiful and potentially mind altering :-)
It’s quite a catchy entry – I checked it out and the stories behind before but didn’t note.
I’m hosting the Dec edition of Lang/Place and I hope you’ll send something again!
Thanks Nicolette! If I come up with something appropriate and fitting, I certainly will ~