Supposedly, Ben and I will both be learning some Turkish before we go there in September. We will be on a tour so it may not be that necessary, but I think it's good to know anyways and it would be nice to be able to interact with people there on our own, at least for basic things. But before I started with Turkish I wanted to brush up the rudimentary Italian that I know, which I learned for our summer 2006 trip. So I spent a lot of today reviewing that, remembering the vocab that was starting to slip. It's nothing ground-breaking but I really enjoy language; I wish I had the time to take a real language class. Maybe I will once all my coursework requirements for my Ph.D. are done. What is nice too is that I learned Italian with a Pimsleur-like course, though one that has a lot more vocabulary, so reviewing it today was something I could do while cleaning the kitchen and making a key lime pie. It feels both productive and mentally stimulating.

My French, which I actually received a lot of instruction in, I keep up by listening to French news podcasts. They are short and have too many soccer results, but they maintain my listening comprehension. I'm sure, though, that if I actually tried to speak with someone in French I would have a hard time making the words come out of my own mouth. I wish I had time to learn some crazy new language, like any of the Asian languages. I really ought to know Spanish but it's not as exciting to learn Romance languages because they are all like French but with different pronunciation.

This week at work has been the first time in about two months that I've had lab time. Basically, I hurt my knee and took a bunch of time off, had some time doing data analysis, and then had even more data analysis because Max really needed to finish things up before his last day, which was a week ago. And now there's lots of stuff that I want to get done before I leave... I would really like to wrap up my edge study, which is looking at how the projection of the 1 micron spot onto the CCD changes near the edge of the CCD (within 50 pixels or so of the edge). And I really want to do intrapixel studies... this would have been really cool and a great paper, even, but I don't think I'll be able to get enough done in the next three weeks to finish it. And there's all sorts of other stuff I'll probably never get to, like infrared diffusion measurements. Alas! Alack! But I got some good data scanning across the mystery structure today, which I'm very pleased about.

Even though Ben previously swore to me that he never wanted to learn another language, it seems he likes German enough to try one last time. Which has put me in the position of learning some Italian for our trip. I've been assured by some of my coworkers that it's okay not to know Italian, and lots of people speak English, but I'd still like to know enough to get around with relative ease. A good Italian accent (not perfect, but good) is SO much easier to cultivate than a good French accent. I've been learning from CDs for about a week, and have talked some to Sara, an Italian in the BFC who may be back in Rome when Ben and I are visiting. But so far I can only really say transportation-related things, not really have anything like a conversation.

Me: Good day!
Italian person: Hello, how are you?
Me: Where is the train station? I want to rent a car! To the airport, please!
Italian person: ......

Actually, when I first started learning French, in the eighth grade, what I really wanted to learn was Italian. I thought it was super-cool and neat-sounding, but my high school only taught the standard trifecta of Spanish, German, and French. Of those three, my mom wanted me to learn Spanish, so I didn't want to (which I now regret a little... I love French, but Spanish would be damn useful), and between French and German, French sounded more like Italian. I really envy Europeans in that it's much more encouraged and even necessary to learn lots of languages. Here it's challenging because it's difficult to find a way to practice. But languages are soooo cool.