It's fascinating to be in a U.S. city that oozes French at every turn. From the ubiquitous fleur-de-lis:
to street signs:
and other signage:
Paris has its balconies:
as does New Orleans:
Paris has statues of Jeanne d'Arc:
as does New Orleans:
Paris has wonderful doors:
as does New Orleans:
And to complete the picture, New Orleans also has fashionable dogs:
but with a jazzy twist!
I was thrilled to find this little bit of Paris while visiting the mammoth AQS (American Quilter's Society) Quilt Show in Paducah, Kentucky.
Culture shock had been killing me in Kentucky. Paducah is a small town (pop = 25,000) in western Kentucky that swells each spring when over 40,000 quilters arrive for this show.
It is also the site of the National Quilt Museum and has become known as "Quilt City".
Quilt shops are everywhere and I was even able to buy fabric in a coffeshop! The show is a major driver of the area's economy and the entire town caters to quilters.
Rooms are booked by August for the week of the show and we were lucky to find a B&B about a half hour away. A B&B with large portraits of Jesus everywhere, an explosion of doilies and doughnuts for breakfast. All the food was fried, including fried pickles and fried pie.
I struck up a conversation with an Australian woman who was shocked that her tour bus stopped every block in town because the women wouldn't walk more than one block. Massive obesity was everywhere and I've never seen so many women in wheelchairs or using rollator walkers.
No wonder the south is called the Stroke Belt!
But once I started searching for Paris and France, I was able to find remarkable examples. Stay tuned.
Nowadays, most people are aware of TED talks.
TED is an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design. Talks are available free online at ted.com. They are a great way to learn something new, hear inspirational speakers and connect with great ideas in bites of 18 minute or less.
But did you know they are available in over 100 languages, from Afrikaans to Vietnamese? I've been listening to talks in English with French sub-titles. It's a good way to pick up new vocabulary. Or see if your translation matches the one supplied by the francophone translator. Just click on 'translations' at the top of the opening page:
It's another technique to add to your language learning arsenal. Enjoy! And share your favorite TED talk with the rest of us.....
I found this word thanks to my dog, Olivia.
She chews everything in sight. We've gone through quite a few dog toys, not to mention two remote controls, five dog beds, two brand new area rugs and much more.
So I bought a new toy to distract her:
Et voila, there it was:
Une friandise is a bit of candy, a sweet treat. The new toy dispenses les friandises pour les chiens.
And I hope that the Divine Miss Lil, a magnificent dog who lived long and was well-loved, is munching on les friandises on the other side of that rainbow bridge she recently crossed.
RIP Lilly
What does this photo have in common with the next photo?
Both show une punaise. Yes, a punaise is both a bedbug and a pushpin or thumbtack. It's also a verb (punaiser means to pin or tack something up).
We arrived in France and spent our first night in Barbizon, an artists’ colony near Fountainbleau. It’s charming and not overly commercial (like Carmel and Mendocino in California). The next day we took off for Fountainbleau. As you turn down a mundane city street, the palace appears suddenly before you, as if you stumbled upon a spaceship plopped down on a rue.
We were searching for the childhood home of my friend, who spent time growing up at age seven in a tiny village near Fontainebleau, Fontaine Le Port. After stopping by La Poste, we finally obtained directions. This spot wasn’t on our map and was so tiny it didn’t even have a boulangerie or café. The mairie was closed, but we hollered up at an open window (very politely, of course, with multiple litanies of ‘Excusez-moi de vous dérangez’). A young girl with multi-colored highlights in her hair, giving her the appearance of striped locks, eventually poked her head out the window and then telephoned an older woman who worked with her in the mairie (when it was open) and this delightful woman and her spouse came down from their home to show us around.
They drove us around the village and pointed out every residence where an American lived currently or indeed had ever lived. They showed us her husband’s childhood home, the château, winery and vineyard being restored by the sultan of Oman (and pointed out all his security cameras). They even took us into their own home (2 complete strangers from a foreign country!) and offered us drinks and food. My friend’s former home had been occupied by a coiffeuse who had recently died and the home was locked up tight. The coiffeuse had sold her house as a viager (reverse mortgage), but she lived to be one hundred years old and the man who bought the viager never got to live in the house!
They also told us a tale from just before the end of World War Two, when an American parachuted into the forest at the edge of their village. He had been seriously burned and was picked up by the Germans who took him to a hospital in Clichy where he died. Apparently the American soldier had a one-year-old daughter he never got to see before he died. Our guide to the village spent twenty years trying to find the soldier’s family, which he finally managed to do. The soldier’s family came over to Fontaine Le-Port and the town had an enormous fête in their honor and unveiled a memorial they had constructed for the soldier. To this day they remember the young American soldier killed only days before the end of the war.
And this day in Fontaine Le-Port, two other American strangers were treated like honored guests by this charming couple.
Right now we’re in rural Burgundy without reliable internet access and I’ll be posting as catch can.
I was about to toss this packaging until I 'Found French' on it. And a 'moo' word at that. Maybe now I can conquer my pesky 'moo' problem - I frequently confuse un mousquetaire (musketeer) with un moustique (mosquito). So now I either confront 'moo' in all its aspects or I add another moo (un mousqueton - a snaphook) to the muddle.
A moose (un élan) is not the same thing as la mousse (moss, foam, suds, lather). Bonus word: bubblebath is le bain moussant. In case you were getting cocky, did you notice the change in gender? Suds are feminine, but bain is masculine. And I sew and quilt and thus have to know that la mousseline is not a small dessert (à la mousse au chocolat) but muslin, a type of fabric used for draping a pattern. Don't forget that hair mousse is la mousse coiffante. I wonder if the French have to remind themselves that 'mouse' in English is not the same thing as their mousse with a double 's'?
And don't get me started on moule. Une moule (feminine) is a mussel, while un moule (masculine) is a mold or type of pan.
Oh,there are just too many French moo words! Un mou is slack (like slack in a rope) or colloquial French for a wimp, but une moue is a pout or a grimace. I'm not in the mood (moo-d) to go through the rest of my list so I'll end with one final moo:
- a French cow does not say "moo", it says "meuh". To moo is meugler in French and mooing is le meuglement.
I was up late last night into the early morning. This is not my face, but this morning I also have les poches sous les yeux and les cernes. Yes, in French you don't have 'bags' under your eyes, you have 'pockets'. And today les poches are more like duffle bags. Les yeux cernés are eyes with dark circles under them. Not to be confused with a black eye which un œil au beurre noir or un coquard or un coquart. In any case, you can use this to hide (or fool yourself into believing you have hidden) les poches, les cernes ou l'œil au beurre noir:
I thought a rubber band was un élastique in French. But I picked up a box to fetch a rubber band and discovered this:
The French word for rubber, caoutchouc, is one of those weird multi-voweled words, like yaourt (yoghurt). When I saw 'Rubber bracelets' I thought it was a funny mis-translation. But then I turned the box over and found:
