people-watching
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Accepting the sweet song of a foreign language
This new Learner Tale begins with the imagined voice of a character in a photo by Robert Doisneau and wanders into the experience of a migrant learning a foreign language in the wild, far from a language classroom. How do we learn to accept the arrival of the foreign language without giving up the identity drawn from our mother tongue? A testimony based on true events from my own learning of French on moving to France.
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Going against the flow : faces in the crowd
Crowds can make us feel safe and give us a sense of belonging, but they can also make us feel uncomfortable and leave us dreaming of a space of our own. The same can be said of life online, where the invitation to click or share to show our approval or dispproval as one of the crowd is so difficult to resist. But how do we percieve somebody who breaks free from a crowd of whatever sort and takes their own path? A street photo by Alejandro Diez invites us to explore precisely that question.
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No Ordinary Rider
What's independence? Freedom from being governed by another country. The ability to live your own life. The capacity to make decisions and do things for yourself. Here's a picture of somebody who you may not immediately turn your head to look at in the street, but who was noticed by a photographer. The result ? The very picture of independence.
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The art of people-watching
People-watching requires no specific qualifications, just a little time and the curiosity to do something other than scrolling through irrelevant notifications on your phone. This means that, instead of looking down, you look up. What may turn up in our immediate environment has not been chosen by an algorithm. At least, not yet. This next piece in this scrapbook of travel tales is about a people-watching experience et Gatwick Airport.
