Salvador Dali (1904—1989) was one of the most popular of modern artists. The Pompidou Centre in Paris is showing its respect and admiration for the artist and his powerful personality with an exhibition bringing together over 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings and more. Among the works and masterworks on exhibition the visitor will find the best pieces, most importantly The Persistence of Memory. There is also L’Enigme sans Fin from 1938, works on paper, objects, and projects for stage and screen and selected parts from television programmes reflecting the artist’s showman qualities.

The visitor will enter the World of Dali through an egg and is met with the beginning, the world of birth. The exhibition follows a path of time and subject with the visitor exiting through the brain.

The exhibition shows how Dali draws the viewer between two infinities (无限). ＂From the infinity small to the infinity large, contraction and expansion coming in and out of focus: amazing Flemish accuracy and the showy Baroque of old painting that he used in his museum-theatre in Figueras,＂ explains the Pompidou Centre.

The fine selection of the major works was done in close collaboration (合作) with the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain, and with contributions from other institutions like the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg.

   Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga，Spain in 1881.When he died in 1973，he was ninety-one years old. But he still took up his paints and brushes to start a new picture as if he were seeing things for the first time，which is why we have called him the youngest painter. Young people are always trying new things and new ways of doing things. They don't hesitate to attempt one thing after another. Eager to experiment, they welcome new ideas.

When he was over ninety this great painter still lived his life like a young man. He was still restlessly looking new ideas and new ways to use his artistic materials. No one knew what to expect from him next. No one could be sure what kind of picture he would produce. If he had painted a picture of you, it might have looked exactly like you. Or it might have been all lines, squares, circles and strange-colored shapes. It might not have looked like human at all.

At such times Picasso was trying to paint what he saw with his mind as well as with his eyes. He put in the side of the face as well as the front. He may have painted it flat, as though it had no depth. Sometimes he seemed to paint just as a child painted, simply for his own pleasure. He didn't imitate others.

Most painters discover a style of painting that suits themselves and stick to that, especially if people admire their pictures. But Picasso was like a man who had not yet found his own particular style of painting. He was still struggling to find perfect expression for his own uneasy spirit.

The first thing one noticed about him was the look of his large, wide-open eyes. Gertrude Stein, a famous American writer who knew him in his youth, mentioned this hungry look, and one can still see it in pictures of him today.

Picasso painted a picture of Gertrude Stein in 1906. She visited the painter's studio eighty or ninety times while he painted her picture. While Picasso painted they talked about everything in the world that interested them. Then one day Picasso wiped out the painted head on which he had worked for so long. "When I look at you I can't see you any more!" he said.

Picasso went away for the summer. When he returned he went at once to the unfinished picture in the corner of his studio. Quickly he finished the face from memory. He could see the woman's face more clearly in his mind than he could see it when she sat in the studio in front of him.

Picasso was often attacked for this new, sometimes frightening style. It produced pictures like some of our worst dreams. The camera has made it unnecessary for painters to make exact representations of what they see. A camera can reflect real life more exactly. What great paintings give us is a view of life through one man's eyes, and every man's view is different.

   A good joke can be the hardest thing to understand when people are studying a foreign language. As a recent article in The Guardian noted，“There's more to understanding a joke in a foreign language than understanding vocabulary and grammar.”

Being able to understand local jokes is often seen as an unbelievable icebreaker for a language learner eager to form friendships with native speakers.“I always felt that humor was a ceiling that I could never break through，”Hannah Ashley，a public relations account manager in London，who once studied Spanish in Madrid，told The Guardian.“I could never speak to people on the same level as I would speak to a native English speaker. I almost came across as quite a boring person because all I could talk about was facts.”

In fact，most of the time，jokes are only funny for people who share a cultural background or understand humor in the same way. Chinese-American comedian Joe Wong found this out first-hand. He had achieved huge success in the US，but when he returned to China in 2008 for his first live show in Beijing，he discovered that people didn't think his Chinese jokes were as funny as his English ones.

In Australia，meanwhile many foreigners find understanding jokes about sports to be the biggest headache. “The hardest jokes are related to rugby because I know nothing about rugby，”said Melody Cao，who was once a student in Australia.“When I heard jokes I didn't get，I just laughed along.”

In the other two major English-speaking countries，the sense of humor is also different. British comedian Simon Pegg believes that while British people use irony（反话）一basically，saying something they don't mean to make a joke—every day，people in the US don't see the point of using it so often.“British jokes tend to be more subtle and dark，while American jokes are more obvious with their meanings，a bit like Americans themselves，”he wrote in The Guardian.

   I had often dreamt of the possibility of spending a year away from my hometown of Leeds in England, living in a foreign country. When I was old enough, however, I thought that my language was going to hold me back.

However, luckily for me, University of Leeds, where I was studying at the time, made it possible for any student, even people like me speaking only one language, to study abroad. Before I knew it I was boarding a plane for Salzburg, Austria. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of the experience ahead of me but I was prepared to accept the challenge.

The university was quite small but the classes were large. Also, Austrian students usually take five years to complete their courses, so studying there was somewhat more relaxing than at home. Austrian students go home quite often, too. Therefore, the foreign students had to socialise with each other quite a lot, which didn’t help with our language skills.

Salzburg itself is a picture-postcard Austrian city. It is also famous for being the birthplace of Mozart and the setting for The Sound of Music. As a result, it is usually very busy with tourists. I also found that it doesn’t have a lot of entertainment for young people, in comparison with Leeds.

There are, however, many advantages of living in Salzburg. For example, get on a train and you can be in Prague, Rome or Krakow within a matter of hours. By the end of my year in Salzburg, I had visited eight other countries in Europe.

After spending a year overseas, I went back to my courses in Leeds and I was much more focused on what I wanted to get out of my last year and more appreciative of the opportunity the university provided. The year in Salzburg really showed me that you get a lot more out of a place when you live there compared to when you are just travelling through. I’d recommend all students spend a year studying abroad if they can.