Un tout petit leçon de provençal

Today, finally deciding to take a break from my studying (I have to memorize like 25 sculptures, the names of the artists that made them, and their dates of production each week), I went to a little Provençal class with our French student director, Caroline Gallego, who is, by the way, the sweetest person EVER. She gave us a brief history of Provençal, a dialect of the French language that was spoken all over Southern France up until the early 20th century when classic French became the mandatory language for teaching in all schools...and then sadly, the dialect died away and there is virtually no one who speaks it anymore.
But Caroline studied it in high school and can speak it, so she taught us some vocabulary and also brought us some yummy traditional Provençal treats. Here is some of what I learned:

To say that you have to go to the bathroom, you would say "Vai chanja l'aigo dis oulivo", which translates directly to "I am going to change the water for the olive trees". Yeah.

The word "mesclun" like for the salad mix comes from the Provençal word for "mélange" which is French for "mix".

"Le Mistral", the very very very strong and freezing-cold wind that whips through Southern France every once in a while during Autumn and Winter, is named after Frederic Mistral, a very famous Provençal writer who is famous for his plays and poems and was also a fierce advocate for the preservation of the Provençal language and culture in his time.

And to close this blog, a very beautiful Provençal proverb:

Es pas bèu ço qu'es bèu, es bèu ço qu'agrado.

Which means (sorry for the incredibly bad translation):

It's not beauty that is beautiful, it is everything that pleases us and makes us happy that is beautiful.