france

Faux Amis – False Friends: False Cognates With English and French Words

| Alan

What’s a “false friend?”

“False friends” are pairs of words in different languages which have similar spelling, so you assume they must have similar roots and meanings.  Well that assumption can sometimes be embarrassingly wrong.

Our total immersion into French culture and language has presented many opportunities to embarrass myself, thankfully not all of my assumptions made it past my lips in front of Tracy or folks on the street. I am still inching my way toward a basic working knowledge and fear there will be many more of these opportunities to embarrass myself with a “false friend.”

While many of these words may be well understood by anyone with a couple of years of high school French, I’ve posted below some of my more embarrassing/funny misunderstandings:

1.  La Mie de Pain

I assumed with the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey that this might be a S&M dungeon.  It’s actually a bakery whose name is “The Breadcrumbs.”  Pain is the French word for bread.

La Mie de Pain
La Mie de Pain

2. Hôtel de Police

A travel hotel exclusively for visiting police officers?  No, the local offices of the police department.

Hotel de Police
Hotel de Police

3.  Librairie

Rather than being a public library with books to lend to the pubic, this is a very comprehensive bookstore and stationery business.

bookstore

4.  Menu

Where as in the US the menu is the brochure with a listing of meal offerings, menu in France is often posted on a notice board with a fixed-price meal of three or four courses: “Menu = Plat du jour (the plate of the day, the day’s special with meat and vegetable) + 1/4 vin (1/4 liter of the house wine) + desserte (dessert) + café (after meal espresso).”  Asking for a menu may result in the arrival of an unexpected meal.  The menu is also known as the formula.

Menu
Menu
Formules
Formules

5.  Entrée

This has got to mean the same thing, right?  We use the French word in the U.S.  However, entrée is France is not the main course, it is the starter course or appetizer.  The main course is the “plats principaux.”

Entrée

6.  Immobilier

I kept walking around and seeing Immobilier offices on every block of the business district.  My mind went to a “wheel boot,” a wheel clamp used to immobilize a car with excessive parking violations, but I couldn’t understand the need for so many offices.  A closer look revealed that these were real estate agencies (real estate = immobile property.)

Immobilier
Immobilier

7.  Lycées

Lycées in large buildings in residential areas are obviously not Asian lychee fruits.  Lycées are senior high schools for pupil 15 to 18 years old.  Lycée général and lycée technologiques normally lead to university study.   Lycée Professionnel leads to different kinds of vocational diplomas.

Lycee
Lycee

8.  Collège

 Collège in France is not post-secondary education.  It is junior high school for pupils from the ages of 11 to 14 years old.  These collégien and collégienne (boys and girls) are taught by a professeur.  Institutions of higher education in France are referred to as université and taught by professeurs des universités or a professeurs titulaire d’une chaire.

Collège
Collège

9. Defense

Rather than defense meaning “personal protection,” défense d’entrer means “no admittance!”

Défense d'Entrer
Défense d’Entrer

10. Cabinet

A cabinet is not a piece of furniture, but a business or professional practice like attorneys’ or doctors’ offices. Think about the term like the President’s cabinet.

Cabinet
Cabinet

In addition to the language faux paus I have also had the joy of trying to translate the operator’s manual for our clothes washer/dryer from French into English to sort out the directions on how to safely wash a load of laundry without ruining our minimized wardrobe.  I am fairly certain that I didn’t study that hard for my Ph.D. comprehensive exams.

What We Know About the French Train System (So Far)

| Alan

Tracy’s MacBook waited until after we arrived in Carcassonne to start having difficulties, so a trip to the Apple Store was in order.  That accelerated us making use of the French train system sooner than we anticipated.  While we have taken trains in Europe before, it was never with a set appointment at the other end so we needed a bit more planning.

Some background first.  France has three levels of train service run by the SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français), the French National Railway Company.  That includes the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) high-speed “bullet trains,” Intercités for long distance express passenger trains, and the TER (Transport Express Régional) for urban and regional passenger rail travel.

Since we are now retired and on a fixed income, we are very aware that we need to save money where we can on everyday items to have more money to spend on the luxuries.  Twenty of France’s twenty-seven regions (a region being roughly equivalent to a state in the US) with TER service has a discount plan that allows discounts train travel for residents within a region.  Within our region of Languedoc-Roussillon, for 26€ a year you can purchase a Carte Via Liberte discount card for up to four people to receive a 25% discount on weekdays and 50% off all weekends and school holidays.  There are some additional discount plans for outside the region too.

With my trusty Carte Via Liberte’ in hand, Tracy and I strolled over to the Carcassonne Train Station (Gare de Carcassonne) which is .6 miles away from the apartment.  The train station was built in 1857 and has one of those classic clock tower passages .  It is located next to the Canal du Midi, the canal connects the Garonne River to the Etang de Thau on the Mediterranen Sea and along with the 120 mile long Canal de Garonne forms the Canal des Deux Mers joining the Atlantic to the Mediterranean in 1681.  A barging canal like the Erie Canal in New York, it is kind of the French equivalent of the Panama Canal connecting two major bodies of water.

My French is very, very basic at this point.  My old “police Spanglish,” high school-college German, and Italian are all better than my French.  My “go to” method at this point is to anticipate what I need to request and to pre-write the questions that I translated using Google Translate into my handy pocket notebook (some police habits never go away).  If the ticket agent doesn’t speak English (and we are finding very few people do speak English) I hand them my notebook so they can read my request.  That and a friendly bonjour, big smiles, and many s’il vous plait and merci.

“S’il vous plait Madam, est‐ce que vous comprenez l’anglais?”  Good Karma day for me.  The very helpful ticket agent spoke English fairly well. She scheduled Tracy and I for our round-trip ticket from Carcassonne with a train change in Narbonne for final arrival in Montpellier.  Since the trip was on a Saturday we received a 50% discount with our Carte Via Liberte‘.

The TER trains are modern, clean and very comfortable.  They arrive and leave on the minute to their schedules.  (Although there has been rail strikes in the past.) We travelled  second class, the only real difference between first and second being reservations and seats three abreast in first class and “first come – first served” and seats that are four abreast in second class.  There are large windows to watch the scenery go past with sunshades on all the windows. Arrival and departure times are indicted on electronic display boards throughout the stations, although in French but easy to puzzle out.

While no one checked our ticket outbound, on the return trip our tickets, along with my Carte Via Liberte’ was checked by friendly conductors.  Apparently some people try to ride for free.  They are escorted off the train by the conductor and met by Surveillance Générale, which I understand is SNCF’s private security that has limited police authority.  My understanding is that riders without tickets are fined on the spot.  There are also divisions of the Police Nationale that work on the train lines and metro in Paris and its suburbs (Police Regionale des transport) and major rail lines (Service National de Police Ferroviaire.)

The trip to Montpellier was a pleasant way to do some sight-seeing from the train, get Tracy’s MacBook repaired, and better understand the train system. And we get to do all again in a week or so when Tracy’s MacBook has been repaired.

Today’s Lessons

| Tracy

Some people learn by watching others, some people learn by reading and doing, some of us learn by trial and error. Here are today’s lessons:

Our daily routine has suffered a bit being nine hours off of a lifetime schedule. We have found over the last few days that naps help, but that we also get up at the ungodly hour of 3 a.m. when we have had one. That being said, this morning at 6:30 a.m. we found out several truths about making friends with our neighbors.

1: 3 a.m. is an unreasonable time for any living person, over the age of 30, to be wide-awake.

2: 6:30 a.m. is an unreasonable time for any living person, who is retired, to be wide-awake.

3: Being wide-awake for hours on end in the dead of night does not help one make good decisions.

4: Breakfast at 6:30 a.m. is a reasonable idea if:

a: one remembers that one is not alone in the building

b: one remembers to turn on the fan above the oven

c: one remembers to not burn anything when the fan is off

d: one has the slightest clue where the shut off switch is to the smoke alarm

Lesson 1: One does not make friends, in France or elsewhere, by waking them up at the horribly early hour of 6:30 a.m. with a screaming alarm for nearly 20 minutes. Suffice it to say that we are extremely blessed that no one called the fire department as we do not have the language skills to explain ourselves.

Lesson 2: When moving into a new apartment learn how to turn off things that make loud noises.

Lesson 3: Turning off the main power switch from the circuit breaker does not cut the power to a hard-wired smoke detector with a battery backup.

Lesson 4: A man of 6’4″ and a cane of 3’4″ does not equal enough height to remove the battery from the smoke detector of an apartment with 15 ft ceilings.

The award for French faux-pax #1 goes to the Husband. And I must add that even after 20 minutes of trying to silence the smoke detector my eggs were wonderful if just a bit chilled. Tomorrow we should try them again without the alarm!!

First Visit to La Cite

| Tracy

Our first visit to La Cite was quite an experience . . . and we still haven’t made it past the second wall! La Cite is a double-walled fortress here in Carcassonne and it is quite magnificent. It sits atop a hillside east of our apartment across the Pont Vieux (old bridge). The walls are well over three feet thick and dwarf anyone standing near them. It doesn’t take long for you to start imagining yourself as the leader of an army attempting to gain entry into this fortress.

La Cite has over 3 kilometers of outer wall, nearly 1.6 miles, and we wandered through approx. 500 yards in all on this first visit. We headed over from our apartment about 20 minutes before sunset and approached the avenue that goes up the hill to one of the entrances between the two outer walls. From our vantage point we could see seven of the 52 towers on the outer walls.

The wall was built over centuries and it is apparent even with this first visit that the architecture of the times changed throughout the building process. We noted both romanesque and gothic arches built within a space of a few feet of one another. Overall the outer wall appears very romanesque in design which makes sense since most of the walls were built over the original Roman foundations from approx. 100 BC.

The colors are amazing in the early evening, the sky is very, very blue and the grassy hillside is very, very green which gives La Cite an almost cartoonish feel of color, especially in photographs.

While we were exploring we met a group of people on their way to the round tower to the left of area we were exploring and on our way back home, we noted there were flames and fire spinning and drumming happening in that open turret.

Not a bad first experience.

Relocation – delays, disappointments and delights

| Tracy

In our journey towards living abroad we have done years worth of research and planning and decision-making and dreaming. Our dream of living in Italy was recently squashed by the Italian Consulate when after months of requesting additional documents and having to delay our original departure date we are still without a visa.

However, we are resilient as only the parents of eight children can be. When Plan A falls apart, Plan B moves to the Plan A spot and becomes a completely suitable replacement without regret. So our Plan B location was next on our visa application checklist. We found another apartment, with a totally awesome landlord – who speaks English – and went online and requested a visa appointment. This time we lucked out and the location of the consulate was in San Francisco.

So on January 2, we made the 4 hour trip to one of our favorite cities in the world, parked the car near Grant Street, located the Consulate for our meeting later in the day, had a delightful lunch at John’s Grill [where Dashiell Hammet wrote the “Maltese Falcon”], took a stroll through the Westfield Mall and all of our favorite SF stores – many of which were still decorated for the holidays – and eventually headed over to Kearny Street for our meeting.

We arrived on time at 88 Kearny Street and rode the elevator to the 6th floor and waited outside the locked door for another 10 minutes until a young man in a security uniform came and opened the door and had us go through the security screening and then on to the waiting room.

We didn’t have to wait long before a very nice young woman called us to the counter and asked for our documents. We handed her the entire collection as specified on the Consulate Website and in the order requested. She gave us a big smile when she noted that we were retirees and finished going through the stack of paper. We then signed the applications in front of her, got our fingerprints scanned into her computer system, had our photos taken and were told that we would have an answer in 7 to 10 business days.

So we headed back to the car and drove home thinking that at least the process was faster and better organized than our experience at the Italian Consulate in LA.

Saturday (three days after our mid-week trek to California) we get a “We tried to deliver” notice from the post office. Making the assumption that there wasn’t enough time to get the actual visa we believed we would be receiving a request for additional documentation, similar to our experience with the Italian Consulate. Today Alan headed to the post office and called me from the car to let me know that our visa was approved and that we would be spending the next year speaking French.

As our new Plan A, Carcassonne France will be our home for the next year, with the option to renew if we decide to stay there a bit longer. Carcassonne is in the Langedoc-Rousillon region of southern France about 40 minutes from the French Riviera, Nice, Cannes, and Provence.

Carcassonne is divided into two main parts: the Cité de Carcassonne, a medieval fortress settlement with a history that exceeds two and a half thousand years. Picturesque fortifications with over 3 km of walls with 52 towers, (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was partly shot here) and the town centre, known as the ville basse (literally ‘lower city’), where the other sights and hotels are located. Our second floor apartment is in this area.

The two areas are separated by the Canal du Midi, a canal built in 1666 to connect the Atlantic and Mediterranean Oceans shortening shipping time from one month to one week. Both the Canal du Midi and the medieval fortress are listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

All in all, our plan to retire abroad has been a work in progress for quite a while from choices in South America (Belize, Panama, Costa Rica) to Florence, Italy to our new destination,. We are delighted with our new Plan A and expect to spend the next year enjoying our new city and doing a wee bit of sightseeing which we fully expect to share with all of you!

Viva la France!!