A lovely, and rather attractive French lady named Olivia Zanucchi has just completed a 3-month placement at the delightful McDonald's UK HQ, a break from her Accounting degree in Paris. As you can imagine having a foreigner working with you who doesn't speak much engerlish is a daily delight! But looking back it's been wonderful to see her engerlish develop, despite the influences of a Sutton-Brummie, cockerney and Staines-girl!
Highlights have included cockerney Marcia referring to Olivia as "French Bird"..... something 'Livvy' still does not quite understand, believing she was somehow being compared to an actual flying-thing!
She lived with her boyfriend in Earls Court so I had the pleasure of tube journeys with her, this week we even managed to watch 30mins of Oceons 11 on my VAIO between Leicester Sq & East Finchley!
The most exciting thing for me is that she now owns AND is reading a French-translation of 'The Shock of Your Life" by Adrian Holloway (whom I just so happen to be lodging with).......... for those of you in Sutton with the surname Stafford you'll know this as "Le Shoc de ta vie" Oui Oui?? Pourquo? Je suis desole! Je ne sais quoi? This book I gave to her as a gift and feel quite happy with this mini-evangelism act!
Last night a few of us ventured to Covant Garden and enjoyed some fine engerlish food and French wine whilst having some banter over the French-English language barrier. Ashamedly the French & English parties did at one point teach one another a few expletives! Meeting Olivia's boyfriend Remee (spelt wrong) was fun as he doesn't have a good a grasp of the engerlish. Fun was had over cartoons such as Ducktales, Dogtanion, Albert the 5th Muskateer, Tin-Tin & those loveable but annoying Smurfs, but sadly they were non-plussed when I brought up Postman Pat!
I will miss having Olivia around at work, but now I have 2 friends I can look up in Paris or Nice so God's planted a few seeds there =D
A few pictures......
No comments:
Post a Comment