POPPIES, ZOOS AND SAFARIS

When I was an exchange student in France, the summer between high school and college, I would crawl into bed at night with a paperback bilingual Larousse dictionary and look up my vocabulary words for the day. I was living with a French family in Auvergne, in central France, under the auspices of the American Field Service. No one in the family spoke English. By the end of the day most days, I had a fierce enough headache from listening to French all damn day that looking up words in the dictionary was the last thing I wanted to do. But I was hellbent on learning the language.

It didn’t take long for me to notice a phenomenon whereby I would detect a new-to-me French word for the first time, like, say, coquelicot. I’d avail myself of the nearest family member, and try to get a sense of the word, in French, of course. We'd go back and forth. (Mais, c'est quelle type de fleur? Rouge? Mais, quelle type de fleur rouge?) If after further volley I did not have a satisfactory sense of the word, I would look up it up that night. Oh, coquelicot. That’s a poppy. And I’d add it to my swelling registry of French Words I Know. Then, sometimes the very next day, I would start hearing the word I’d just added to my active vocabulary. Coquelicot this, coquelicot that. And I’d wonder how I could have gone all these days without having noticed the word, a word that did not seem to exist one day, and then, suddenly, after I'd looked it up, was on everyone's lips the next.

Maybe linguists have a name for this.

All this is to say that a similar phenomenon is happening with this sweeps business. Before I started this blog (three weeks ago yesterday, if anyone’s counting), I did not pay travel sweeps much attention. Now, they seem to be cropping up like poppies. The first week, there was the Las Vegas Sweepstakes Lady who called, the second week, there was my friend Lorraine who’d met a friend because of a travel sweeps. In the mail yesterday, I received a sweeps offer from my neighborhood zoo, the Friends of the National Zoo. For all I know, they’ve been sponsoring sweeps forever. But I’d never noticed any.

There are oodles of goods to be had. The grand prize is three nights at the El Dorado Hotel & Spa in Santa Fe, plus airfare, for two. The second prize is a two nights in Chicago, at the Crowne Plaza, plus airfare. They are asking for a suggested donation of $5 per ticket. I believe this is a variation on the way my friend – code name Ms. Shoes – won her trip from the local public television station.

I’m going to contribute something. As problematic as zoos are, the zoo has played a huge and wonderful role in my son’s development. It’s practically our backyard. We wake some mornings to the sounds of the whoop-whoop-whoop territorial cry of the gibbons. When my son was younger, we went there nearly once a week, sometimes more. On his first birthday, while he was fixated on the monkeys, I promised I would take him to the rainforest one day, to a beach where monkeys swung overhead from tree to tree. We went to Costa Rica two summers ago.

I wisely did not promise to take him on a safari. A safari is more complicated than the rainforest, more expensive, farther away, too. Plus, he seemed too young. Now that he's older, I think a safari would be grand.

So far, I’ve entered one safari sweeps, for this trip to South Africa that includes a wine tour and a stay at the Makalali, a private game reserve (www.makalali.co.za). (There are more on the way.)

This is one of the sweeps that closes in the next two days.

If you enter this one, be sure you open the email you'll get with the subject line “Kumala Safari Sweepstakes and Newsletter Confirmation” from this sender: webmaster@vincorusa.com. I thought it was a thank-you, and did not read it for over a week. It turns out the email contains a link you have to click to complete your entry.

Go for it.

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SOUTH AFRICAN WINE COUNTRY/SAFARI TOUR: 8 NIGHTS TOTAL, INCLUDES 3 NIGHTS AT MAKALALI PRIVATE GAME RESERVE AND AIRFARE

DEADLINE: March 31, 2006
TO ENTER, CLICK: www.kumalausa.com/sweepstakes
SPONSOR: KUMALI WINES
THE DIGS: www.makalali.co.za (among others)
THE INELIGIBLES: Residents of Hawaii, Alaska, California
ARV (APPROXIMATE RETAIL VALUE): $10,000
MY PERSONAL ENTRY: March 20, 2006
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