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Day 3: Books, churches and beer


Another glorious autumn day, and I am definitely starting to feel less jet lagged. I even went for a run around a field in front of the castle today. There are lots of churches , it seems. On my run I passed three. The universe, hey Great Britain (that's coded comment!).

At work I got right into continuing my analysis of the multilingual books I’ve found so far. The act of getting five languages onto a page is achieved by one Norwegian book of riddles by dividing the lefthand page into four coloured squares which each feature one of either Vietnamese, Farsi, Somali and Croatian. Norwegian is on the full righthand page in larger font (the book is published in Norway). When I looked up the Norwegian linguistic setting, and talking with my Norwegian colleague, it turns out that these languages match various waves of refugee arrivals in Norway- the Vietnamese in the 1970s,  the Iraqis in the 1980s, the Croatians in the 1990s and the Somalians after that.

Another book with four languages places each text on the same page which is extended with a left page full length flap. As you open each page you can see either German (the book is published in Germany) or German and Croatian, and the other two or three languages (Serbian, Croatian  and Turkish) are hidden under the flap.

One of the librarians came to help me with some more sophisticated searches in the catalogue to unearth more multilingual picturebooks. Your have to be a good lateral thinker, which is one of the benefits of being multilingual I am told.

So that will be my job for tomorrow, searching catalogues to find more books.

All of the researchers left work together today and we went to one of the oldest beer gardens in Munich, about a ten minute walk from the castle. The weather is still fine so we sat out in the garden under the trees and had some beer and snacks. Very pleasant.



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