Making Progress

This week I had one of those moments where I suddenly felt all those weeks of French lessons, all the headaches, all the hours spent feeling like my head was going to explode, are beginning to pay off. The occasion was a meal at the home of some French friends. They are a lovely  couple, who are interesting and interested in the world around them. Now retired, they were teachers and have travelled extensively. They also speak very good, clear French and are prepared to be patient with people who are making an effort to communicate.

When we go out with English friends Ian is normally the quieter of the two of us, preferring to limit his discussions to technical bits and pieces. I have always enjoyed a more in depth debate about things and the ability to be able to do more than just talk, but to express my ideas, ask questions and discuss current issues, is really important to me. My aim for my French was to be able to speak it well enough that I was able also to express a little of my personality and humour. Up until now, although I have been able to get by in most everyday situations this aspect has alluded me and when we are out with French people Ian has taken the lead in conversation, with me chipping in, if and when I was able to follow what was being said.

My French had sort of reached a plateau over the past year or so and I hadn't felt I had made much improvement. Fortunately I found a new more advanced class and got back into the studying in September. I hadn't really noticed much progress for a while but last week I spent three days in Bordeaux and suddenly found that I didn't have to think all the time to communicate and that I could make jokes with the students in French that made them laugh (and not just because of my accent!) The meal last week marked a turning point as for the first time Ian was silenced and I was able to talk!

For anyone who thinks that you can come to France and 'be fluent in two years'.. it's taken me 6 years of lessons to get this far!

Gaining confidence

Fortunately I did not overturn the trailer or damage the car in my two hour lesson on 'how to drive with a trailer'. My instructor was called Pascal and despite the fact that he spoke no English and my French is limited I still managed to understand the complexities of driving backwards with a tall box fixed to back end! The worst of it was that the lesson started at 8.00 a.m. so we had to leave at 7.15. By 10.00 I was finished, we went and had a coffee, went shopping, stopped in and booked a doctor’s appointment on the way back and were done by mid-day in time for lunch. We almost felt French! I am, however, spared the joys of driving the van complete with trailer just yet as Ian discovered that one brake had gone and the bearings need changing; making it unsafe to take it back to the UK with us next week. I remarked at how I am developing a strange vocabulary in French. I know all the words for most things on a building site, am learning the words for many medical terms through my work and know the names of all sorts of strange wildlife that appear in the field. What I don't know is how to have a conversation with the check-out girl in the supermarket. (Mind you, that is difficult in the UK !).
Talking of strange wildlife, we have a mad March hare in our field, running hundreds of miles in frantic circles in search of sex. Spring is definitely sprung!

So, another two days in Bordeaux and then next week we are off to see friends and family and to buy more materials for the house. It will be a busy week and today I wondered how I ever found time for work and holidays.

Lost in translation.

We have had a day off work today. At 9.30 we had a visit from a salesman about a swimming pool. We are not really that bothered about a pool for ourselves but when Ian got planning permission for the house it was dependent on us having a source of water for the fire brigade. It was either a pool or a fire hydrant and the cost for the latter was not much less than a basic pool, so a pool it is! As Ian has been focussing mostly on the outside of the building and the groundworks we decided to at least give some thought to the pool.

So.. after lunch we went pool shopping, around the many pool merchants of Bergerac. We have several appointments booked to get opinions on what is possible and we have some nice glossy brochures. The best one has been rather poorly translated into English, to the extent that Ian had to download the French version so that he could understand it. Here are some gems.

The etancheity of your swimming pool is ensured by a resistant coating, the liner

Amongst a pletoric choice, you will give substance to your ideas... your swimming pool will become a reflection of your desires.

Worldwide Pools disencumbers you of the inherent concern of the earthwork. This stability confers you the insurance to arrange the beaches quickly..

and my favourite:
Some common sens, a little bit of dexterity, a knowledge of work of masonary and an imense desire to give pleasure to yourself...

Your friends will be astonished, your close relations will be proud of you and you will have a great satisfaction from this experience.

This is a great example of why you shouldn't use Google Translate!

Phew

When I told Madame Martenago that I was going to Bordeaux for two days to work she was so exited and started telling me about the wonderful buildings, the opera, the concerts and what a great time I would have! I thought about her comments as a I struggled up the road from the station to the hotel; carrying my luggage; as I walked past the sexy lady peep shows and the all night supermarkets and laundries that line the road from the station and I thought that this was probably not the good time she had in mind!

It's been a long time since I was in a city. Bordeaux seems busy, young, trendy and amazingly warm for January! I spent the day saying 'il fait chaud' and' il est comme printemps' only to be told; well you are in the South of France now! I found the day quite hard and spent most of it feeling out of my depth. To make it worse, I arrived in the middle of a hot flush and spent the entire day feeling sweaty. Now I am only fit for bed!

Gordon Ramsay does French

Continuing from where I left off on the last post, it was amusing to see that the French seemed to be as obsessed with cooking programmes, and Gordon Ramsay in particular, as we are in the UK. Channel 9 was showing an evening of the Gordon Ramsay programmes where he visits failing restaurants to tell them where they are going wrong. The programme follows a set format. Gordon visits, tastes the food and spits it out making sick noises, looks in the kitchen and finds rotten food and filth and then within two weeks turns them round to become modern and hopefully profitable. All this is interspersed liberally with Gordon swearing at the chef and the owners and anyone else that comes his way. It makes for what some people might see as an entertaining programme but you can’t help thinking that what he actually does isn’t exactly rocket science. I was amused to see how they handled Gordon’s prolific use of swear words in French. Mostly where he uses them as an adjective (‘the f*cking sauce, the f*cking plates’) they just ignored them. Where he uttered ‘f*ck me’ under his breath, this was sometimes translated as ‘merde’ ( or sh*t) and when he called someone a d*ck head this was translated correctly as ‘connard’. On one occasion he told someone to ‘go f*ck yourself’ and this was correctly translated as ‘ va te faire foutre’.

Ban 'La bise'

French lessons have resumed and last week in the class we had to bring in a photo of something to discuss. Someone brought in this photo (originally from the daily mail) of Carla Bruni with

Nicolas Sarkozy, indulging in what the French call 'la bise' or the little peck on the cheek that the French do when they meet. Apparently the French government have decided that in the event of a swine flu epidemic they will ban 'la bise'. We discussed this in our class and quickly concluded that this would be impossible to enforce; a view that seems to be shared by many French people!

I wrote an entry about the kissing custom last year, where unfortunately I spelt bise incorrectly and referred to the practice as a bissou. Bisou (with one 's' and not two) means a kiss and I guess that explains why the most common keyword used to access my blog through a search is Bissou. Those reaching the blog in this manner are usually from web addresses in places where neither English nor French are the native tongue and I would guess they are hoping to find a site about French kissing!

I can do that...

My meeting with Virginie, the Head of the School of Occupational Therapy in Bordeaux, was an experience. Firstly it was one of the few times that I was on my own without Ian as my interpreter, so I had to depend on my own French. The train from Ste Foy Le Grande was on time and comfortable although not cheap. I arrived in Bordeaux however to find that the public transport system required the use of something like an Oyster card, and as is the case in London, I could not find a convenient place to purchase one. Time was running out so I decided to get a taxi.

Problem number 1- taxi driver was like taxi drivers all over the world and drove off without really knowing where he was going (and as it happened in the opposite direction to where he needed to go) and then proceeded to try and call a number I had to get directions while driving. I put my French into practice and managed to do a very convincing rendition of 'irritable old woman' in French, commanding him to stop the car immediately as it was dangerous to drive when he wasn't looking where he was going. The journey was expensive but I got there in the end!

I arrived and found Virginie. She was about my age, very pleasant and introduced me to her colleagues. "Ahh, she speaks" French, they said. From then on the whole afternoon was conducted in French! I was shown round, we discussed research and why people don't do Masters degrees, the difficulties of working and studying and then they gave me some work to look at! I must admit it is going to take a while to read!

I was exhausted afterwards but quite pleased that I managed as well as I did, although at times I did feel a bit like this!

Tale of the tomatoes and mistaken identities

The problem with going to France for just brief periods is that they are very intense, both in relation to the amount of work that we have to get done and the amount of people we have to visit.

We caught up with Stephane and Stephanie, our neighbours from the village. In fact, we were able to return one of the many invitations that they have given us and invite them for an 'apero' on the terrace at the aperitif hour of 7.00 p.m. I spotted Stephane tending his garden one day while I was cycling home with lunch and decided to put my French to the test by inviting him up to the house 'one evening next week'..At least, I thought that was what I said! When I got back I told Ian. "I think that's what we agreed, but I'm not sure. Maybe you'd better phone them to check". A bit later Ian phoned and I was delighted that Stephane had in fact understood the invite. However, he had not recognised me in my cycle shorts and helmet and thought the invite had come from one of our other cycling neighbours! Turns out we are very confusing! There are three of us English women living virtually next door to each other, who ride our bikes wearing helmets (no self respecting French cyclist would wear a helmet) and other elements of disguise like cycle shorts and dark glasses. The Mayor's secretary calls us 'Les sportives'. We all speak pigeon French with a funny accent and strangely enough we all have blond hair so really the locals don't have much chance. Apparently when trying to distinguish one from the other they say 'you know, the blond one' and then laugh! Anyway, to this day Stephane still thinks he is owed an invite from one of the other blond ones!

Stephane's vegetable garden is very productive and we were given some tomatoes and peaches from their overspill! Ian happened to mention that I really liked French tomatoes and in fact did not eat the English ones. (This is true. To me the watery English variety are so insipid and acidic compared to the sweet, juicy tomatoes that you get further south). With that, Stephane promised to bring us some tomatoes to take back to England the day before we left and true to his word on the Friday evening he arrived with this enormous box of tomatoes!

As lovely as they were there was no way Ian and I could use up that many tomatoes before they went bad so last week I had my first attempt at making and bottling tomato sauce! I searched for recipes on the Internet and in the end decided to go with just putting the hot sauce into sterile jars with a tight lid that fortunately sealed as the jars cooled. Hopefully I have done enough to avoid botulism! Peeling the tomatoes took a while and I'm afraid I did not have the patience to remove the seeds but I have 16 jars of summer tomato sauce to remind us of France over the winter.

Courting Le Chasse

There is one set of neighbours that I haven't mentioned yet and that is Stephane and Stephanie (despite their matching names they are a married couple). They live in the village in a small house in between the road and the church and are around retirement age although neither seems to have fully retired! They have a vegetable patch opposite the church and a large barn on the opposite side of the road and speak with a strong local accent! They are always welcoming and pleased to see us and like to be kept up to date with the local gossip including our news. I stopped in to say hello on my way to take lunch to Ian and his friend on the last day and we got invited for aperitifs that evening at 7.00 (thus ensuring that the building had to be finished by then!) The aperitifs consisted of Stephane's home-made wine (tastes nice but gives you a shocking headache). The wine improved my French enough to join in the conversation and we had a good laugh about the events with Herman, the state of the world and le chasse or the hunt; for which Stephane is a key figure! From what I can understand le chasse seems to be an organisation broadly similar to the Freemasons in England except that in France they go out with guns and try to shoot things. Certainly the movements of le chasse are considered extremely important and usually most conversations with us end with 'when are you coming over?' and 'will we still be able to hunt on your land?'. Our view so far has been that while we are not here they can but once we get animals in the field then this will be more difficult and I can see that this is one area where we are gong to have to negotiate very carefully if we are not going to upset a lot of people. We were then told that a family of hares had set up home in the base that has be scraped for the garage but not to worry as le chasse had got them all! We were later presented with a jar of home-made hare pate! In her colander on the sink Stephanie had two enormous animal hearts. I was amazed to see them and made a comment but she just thought I was asking what sort of animal they came from and tried hard to explain that they were from something shot at the weekend! At least they eat all the bits of what they kill!

Stephane and Stephanie are the sort of people that enjoy and appreciate every moment of their lives! They are always smiling and always welcoming and make such an effort to understand my poor French. They both have that special spark of passion for life inside them and you can see it in their eyes.

More French

I have found a new French class and started last night. Peter is a native French speaker and teacher and lives locally. He runs classes in local community halls and centres at a variety of levels that don't follow any national curriculum or lead to an exam. The great advantage of that is that I don't have to spend a year learning how to talk about ipods, pop music and going to the disco (as covered by most A level texts) and I don't have to learn marketing French as taught by the universities! I was surprised to see that there were 12 of us in class and all but 3 had been coming for a number of years. The other surprise was that the class consisted entirely of femmes d'un certain âge (The polite way of saying middle aged women in French!). The group seemed nice, Peter was enthusiastic and a good teacher and the class was enjoyable so lets hope it works!

Gold star

It was my final French class last night. We had wine, cheese,cakes and tried to talk in French for the most-part! I was pleased to discover that I got a merit for my exam.

Le Grand Bornand

This is the subject of my presentation. I have my second French exam coming up soon and for this we have to do a 10 minute presentation in French on a subject related to an aspect of French life and culture. I am doing it on Le Grand Bornand and the Haute Savoie, including details of the local produce, the buildings and the love of the cow. (Le Grand Bornand is the world capital of cow art!). It is where Ian and I went skiing at Easter. I have spent several evenings preparing in between blogging and think I have got it sorted. Although it may be basic I think my presentation in French will be more interesting than candidate 1's presentation to the troops!

Cyling co-incidences 2

I wrote before how there is a cycling connection throughout various aspects of my life. Yesterday in my French class Keith, one of my fellow pupils, said that he used to race when he was younger and had all the programmes from the Tour de France going back to the 1950s and 60s! He used to race for Barnet cyclists and he raced at Crystal Palace so he probably raced against Ian's father at some point.

Pas Merde

Well, quelle suprise, I got 64% for my French exam!

Merde deux!

Well the exam truly was merde! Perhaps it was because I haven't done an exam for a while and have lost the touch or perhaps it was because I haven't really done enough homework, maybe my brain has decayed with age or maybe the test was just hard; but after 10 minutes of staring at the paper I realised that I knew very little, nearly had a panic attack and then managed to calm myself enough to do the second part of the test, which was a little easier. After restoring my self esteem I was able to face the first part again and managed to attempt a few guesses at a few questions, but whether that is enough for 40% or not, I am not sure! I then had to go straight to the oral exam, which I did find a little better, but then I did more work for that! Oh well..

Merde!

I have my first French exam tomorrow and needless to say I have not really done enough work (too busy blogging!). Today I went to a conference in London and took my French book on the train with me in an attempt to do some last minute swotting. I was reading a rather dull paragraph about where people were going to go on holiday (a ploy to get the reader to practice the future tense) when a voice next to me said 'if you need any help, let me know, I am a French teacher'. The speaker turned out to be a Belgian man around my age. I told him that I had my exam tomorrow and we talked a bit about learning and teaching French and the importance of being able to communicate! As I got off the train he told me that in French rather than saying 'Bonne Chance' or good luck before an exam you say 'merde'(Shit). So he wished me merde and off I went!