am I nude?!?

In the midst of my travels I find my voice a lone thin quiver in the crowd. My Midwestern accent feels very bare in the hostels among the rolling r's of the Spainiards, the up down motion of the Swedes and even the tickling z's and Ous off the French tounge.

Perhaps it is because it is what I am used too.. why it sounds so plain. But I've always been of the opinion that Midwesterners have a very straight, no-nonsense sound in their words. Not as thick as New York or as casual as Californians.. its isn't as ornamented as the South or choppy as the North. It is the sort of bland sound that news anchors adopt. Bland.
Boring.

So as my friends will tell you, I have a strange ability to pick up accents. Like a sponge. It may somehow make up for the fact that I cannot retain languages just the sounds and emphasis.
If you would sit in on a conversation at my table in the Coe 'U', you would wonder where I call home. The combination of 2 Frenchmen, a Swede, German, Irish and Indian leave me with a very muddled accent indeed!

As I am in Ireland, I anticipated picking up a lovely, lilting tone.
Instead, I ended up with some sort of lower class, Belfast accent. UGh! why couldn't I have a cute Derry accent? Or at least the melodic tone of Donegal. NOPE! When I speak it comes out in this harsh.. EUuuw sound.

"How 'er YUUueeehhHH?"
"I'll take a strEEWWwwbura one"
"bout yeeu?"
"will yeeu 'ave a cuppa?"

The trick to the Norn Iron accent is the intonation, which I cannot relay appropriately via computer. It's a sort of slide up at the end of the sentence the important words emphesized at the back of the throat. As it is a tricky one to master you'll have to catch me fresh out of Ireland if you wanna hear my impression. Or else it will be gone as I reabsorb my Iowegian tongue.