The first Easter I celebrated away from my family was during my undergraduate years at McGill. Lent and its culmination, Holy Week, had always been important features of my faith,…
Choosing the Where in Your Study Abroad Adventure
The shelves are filled with rows of glossy magazines, the walls hung with framed pictures of architectural marvels (the Eiffel Tower and the Great Pyramids are among the most popular…
Laughable Languages: Funny Phonology, Strange Semantics, and Other Adventures in Foreign Language Acquisition
I should start this article by apologizing for the technical terms in the title. Now in my final semester as an undergraduate student, I made the dubious decision to…
Les implications de la langue, or how I learned to obsess about language
Note: this article is also posted on Not Another Wave. A few years ago, a friend and I were talking about language and gender balances. I don’t remember how we…
Translanguaging
Another facet of Tanzanian culture that intrigued me was the art of the language: be it Swahili, English or Maa (the language of the Maasai tribe). The few weeks leading…
Translation Please?
At the start of my time in London, most of my flatmates agreed that a dinner all together was a good plan. The other American in the flat and I…
Yoga en Español
Travel is usually a series of unsettling movement- turbulent planes, tumultuous taxis, and hauling your luggage between cities and foreign living spaces. How can a traveller remain balanced in a…
Bridging Worlds
At the hotel, Kevin sits alone at the dinner table for six. He’s from Scotland and he’s never been to São Tomé before. We don’t know this, though, when we…
Triumphant Return, Tearful Goodbye
There are some things that never change, and where I am in the globe certainly isn’t one of them! Somehow, after a long plane ride over the Atlantic, I ended…
Chita
Before I left for Haiti, my boyfriend’s mother, who is from Port-au-Prince, called me to give me a quick lesson in Haitian Creole. “Chita,” she said. “Sit.” “Couche. Lay down.”…
Salaam/Salut/Hello!
When you go to a foreign country, you expect to hear a different language that what you’re used to (except if you’re traveling to an English-speaking country, of course). However,…