If I weren't up before with the jetlag...

...I most certainly am now.

I really, honestly don't know why the guy next door to me decided to have at least two people over at three in the morning. The guests seemed to be English speakers (though I've never heard my neighbor speaking English on the phone through the paper-thin walls). Why the late-night festivities? An Olympics party? A polyamorous booty call? Lunch break for night shifters? Or just, like me, jetlag? He did this last night too. This time, though, it really was a party, with some kind of vaguely Spanish music at a volume where I could very nearly hear the words.

I mean, what were they thinking?

I was getting ready to bang on their door when the guy downstairs did. Pounding on the ceiling, yelling up the stairs (got quite a lot of resonance in his sinus cavities, this guy), banging on my door, then on the other one on this floor where the culprits were, yelling like he was going to kill them. They yelled back. From where I was (ahem, behind my door waiting to see who was going to kill whom) I couldn't understand what was being yelled. The French guy downstairs went out to the window on the other side of the apartment and yelled up in heavily-accented English, "Go back to your fucking country, man." Possibly not getting that adding man on the end of an utterance softens it (I've got a friend who's worked on the meaning of man at the end of utterances, by the way). Anyway, I feel that he didn't get that subtlety, because I gather he definitely didn't mean to soften his utterance. Did I mention his resonances? Resonant.

Silence after a while.

Then my next-door neighbor put on some rap music, louder: a big fuck you in any language.

At that point I did get dressed to go out and tell them, you know, I know you are having this feud with the guy downstairs but there are other people living here too. By the time I got dressed they had turned the music off. I went out anyway, to the floor below where a woman from one apartment was telling off the guys (a gay couple? anyway, not who I thought lived there) who had been yelling, that she didn't care whose fault it was, you don't make that much noise at this hour of the night. "C'est les Americans!" the one resonant guy kept saying.

As I left he was saying "Excusez-nous" over and over in that way that doesn't really mean sorry but does mean that one is kind of embarrassed, or at least defensive.

More silence.

Then more yelling, pounding on walls or doors, a crash, and I really did think someone was going to kill someone, though I couldn't tell where this was and hadn't heard the door open next door.

"No more of that," the yeller downstairs yelled several times in English. The guy upstairs yelled back in English and French - definitely not American, I'm happy to say.

The woman downstairs told everyone to dormir.

Eventually, at last, and only as I've been writing this, silence.

Odd way to meet one's neighbors.

Sandman

Seen at Paris Plages. Wish he'd come my way at the right hour.

Vocabulaire : Les Jeux Olympiques

I've been up at night watching the Olympics live. (Yes, I still have jetlag a week later. I go to sleep fine at night but my body treats it like an afternoon nap. But I digress...)

Sports commentary is good French for me to listen to, as they usually don't talk over one another.

In no particular order...

l'entraineur (m.)		'the coach' (but entraineuse is usually 'prostitute')
l'échappée (f.)		'the start/breakaway'
la manche		'the heat' (literally 'sleeve')
la série		'the heat'
l'épreuve (f.)		'the trial, heat' (but also a stage of a multi-stage event)
la finale		'the final' (match/race)
le relais		'the relay'
le couloir		'the lane (on a track)'
la ligne d'eau		'the lane (in a pool)'
la sortie		'the dismount'
le virage		'the bend (in a track)'
le tir à l'arc		'archery'
le simple messieurs/dames		'men's/women's singles' (tennis)
l'haltérophilie (f.)		'weightlifting'
le/la leveur/leveuse		'weightlifter'
le/la basketteur/euse		'basketball player (m./f.)'
médailler		'to medal'
médaillé d'argent		'won the silver'
double/triple médaillé		'medalled twice/thrice' (JD, I put 'thrice' just for you :)
prendre sa revanche		'to get even'
perdre d'un rien		'to lose by a hair'
And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some English borrowings I heard:
le top dix		'the top ten' (cf. les dix premiers)
c'est des warriors		'they're warriors'
ze big man		'the big man'
la recordwoman		'the (female) recordholder'
le starting block		'the starting block'

As usual, francophones, let us know any précisions or corrections.

Anti-semitic shirts for sale in Belleville

Not anymore, but apparently they were. According to the AFP, whose reporter visited the shop, the shirts bore German and Polish phrases that both translate as 'Jews forbidden from entering the park'. The assistant at the store said she hadn't known what the inscriptions meant. (Sure, the old Tibetan flag defense.)

The AFP got its tip from the Bureau National de Vigilance Contre l'Antisémitisme, which also says that Jewish youths often complain of gangs of other youths trying to keep them out of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. The BBC is only willing to offer that there have been "scuffles" between Jewish youths and youths of North African descent.

Escrime, you scream...

On Paris Plage this year there is a fencing (escrime) workshop for kids. "Attaquez!" said the teacher, and les enfants obliged, each with an enthusiasm roughly correlated with their age.


Modern fencing has origins in France (though Italy and Spain are also implicated), and many of the terms are French. There's a lot of "allez" and "en garde". But so far this year France hasn't been doing that well in the fencing events at the Olympics. The only one to medal thus far has been France's Fabrice Jeannet, who lost the final in men's épée yesterday and was visibly devastated.

On the other hand, the US women swept the medals in women's sabre. Not bad for a country without fencing workshops.

So we meet again, jetlag.

I have endured another coccyx-compressing pond-jump and am back in Paris. Getting off the plane I immediately overheard one woman saying Ça m'emmerde ("That pisses me off", literally 'that enshits me') and another woman saying Fait chier (ditto, lit. '(that) makes (me) crap'). Nice to be home.

I always do quite poorly with jetlag. It usually takes me a couple of weeks to really recover, and until then I spend a lot of my waking hours in a fog. In French the analogue of jetlag is décalage horaire, 'time shift,' but I prefer the Japanese jisa boke, 'time-difference stupidity.'

This time I'm trying to arrange my light and dark times according to this calculator. Though I didn't get the light-avoidance time in today. Instead I sat at a café with JD, who magnanimously brought me groceries and then lugged them and my luggage up those forever-damned six flights, and generally poked me until the late afternoon so that I didn't fall asleep. I will try the first day's program of light and darkness tomorrow, which says to avoid light between 8am and 1pm, and then to have bright light between 1pm and 4pm. Wish me luck.

I missed my chance to pick up some melatonin while in the states; it's not available here. But another soporific I like, courtesy my friend Jf, is Celestial Seasonings' new offering Sleepytime Extra tea (really a tisane), which Jf calls "Sleepy Opium Bear". I mean, just look at that bear. Obviously he's on something pretty fly. The difference between Sleepytime Extra and classic Sleepytime tea is valerian root, which apparently, as they say on the box, makes it extra. Oddly I never seem to be able to find Sleepytime Extra in the states, but it's available at Thanksgiving.

Expats and world travelers, how do you beat the jetlag? I know some people don't really experience jetlag... and to them I say, ça m'emmerde.

French they never taught me in school

When I stepped off the plane and arrived in Paris, armed only with my high school French, I was a very long way from being able to communicate easily in French. My being a linguist didn't help much, just like being a physicist doesn't necessarily make you a good ball player. Actually, being a linguist made things a bit worse, because everyone assumes linguists are great at languages.

Anyway, the following French words/phrases are ones I never learned in high school, that would have been helpful to know. Do you know what they mean? (Francophones, yes, I know you know what they mean, please be quiet and let the anglophones think...then afterwards, let me know any précisions eventuelles... )

1. bouquin
2. aisé
3. moche
4. arriver à (not the 'arrive at' meaning)
5. avoir à


Pencils down!

1. bouquin, 'book'
This one really annoys me. It's a cognate with the English word for goodness' sake (that is, the words sound alike and have the same origin). In high school we learned livre for 'book'. But no one ever says livre. They always say bouquin. The people who line the banks of the Seine selling books are bouquinistes. Yet somehow we never learned bouquin in class.

2. aisé, 'easy, well-off'
Another cognate. This one is less-frequently used, I think, than facile. Maybe some of my francophone readers can comment on the difference between aisé and facile. I guess the teachers didn't want us to know about aisé for fear we wouldn't use facile. But sheesh, to come across a cognate like that after all this time!

3. moche, 'ugly'
Ok, my sister-in-law says she learned this one in class. But we didn't. Instead we learned laid, which no one ever says.

4. arriver à 'manage to'
Once I was able to decode the sound signal and figure out what people were saying, I realized they were saying j'arrive (pas) à a lot. Why were they always talking about (not) arriving at something? Turns out (thanks, JD!) that the physical meaning of arriving at a place has been broadened to include managing to do something (if you squint with your mind's eye you can see the connection). And arriver à is used a lot more than manage to is used in English. My ad hoc rule is that if you can say arriver à instead of pouvoir 'be able to', do so. Of course there are some cases when you have to use pouvoir, for example, when it's a matter of permission rather than actual ability.

5. avoir à 'have to'
'Have to' as in "I have to do something this afternoon'. This is another cognate that I can't believe we learned in school. I'm quite sure we didn't learn it. Instead we learned il faut que, 'it is necessary (that)'... which, to be fair, is used all the time. I'm sure the case of avoir à is like aisé, where they didn't want to teach us the one that was like English for fear that we'd use it all the time. But as a result, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I recently learned that you could use avoir à for 'have to'. (I'd love to hear about differences in meaning between avoir à and il faut if any francophones are so inclined to comment.)

So there you go. Now you know more than I did when I stepped off the plane.

Visit en route

Yesterday my dear friends Jo and Ca landed in town with their 19-month-old daughter. Our house is at the halfway point between where they live and where their families live so they stopped here on their drive and stayed an extra day.



While the morning on the beach was relatively calm, by the afternoon the wind had picked up in a serious way. We had left our beach toys on the beach while we went up to lunch, but when we got back we found that they had almost been swept away by the waves, the water was so high. Fortunately we hadn't lost any of them, though.

Ca and I had a great time jumping waves:



And S said at the end of the day, "Beach fun!"



You know where to find more photos of these guys.

Tomorrow they're off for points east, and I too will sadly say goodbye to the beach (this beach, anyway) for another year. And no, Paris Plages can't compete.