Itinerary

Cindy and I bought our tickets for Australia a few months ago. We wanted to get in early before prices shot up too much further (we've been stung a couple of times in the past, buying our tickets too late). We managed to find some for a not too horrendous price (from STA) and we stopped thinking about it.

Then we received emails from the travel agent telling us that there had been schedule changes for our flights, could we please phone to confirm. But when we looked at the new itinerary, we saw that one of the changes had us getting to Chicago at 12.04 am and leaving for Indianapolis at 9.30 pm the day before! It took about a week for them to sort it out with the airline (United). We now have a temporally possible itinerary; we're just hoping they won't change it again!

Here 'tis:

20th December: Depart Indianapolis 5.32 pm (via Chicago and LA)
22nd December: Arrive Sydney

10th January: Depart Sydney 3.15 pm (via LA and Chicago)
Arrive Indianapolis 11.36 pm

So start marking your calendars!

Knowing one's own language

For the first week of my French class the teacher gave us a number of sentences to translate from English into French. One of them struck us all as a little strange and poetic: "The house smelt of size and new paint." When we were all suggesting French words like grandeur for "size", she asked us, 'Who looked up "size" in an English dictionary?' Of course none of us had, but apparently we should have because here it referred to sizing glue.

Despite having learnt my lesson, I still felt a bit sorry for the two American girls presenting their translations in French class this week. They made a big dialectical mistake with the word "semi".

The phrase was, "The houses were much larger than Wilt's semi." The first thing that came to their American minds was a semi-trailer. I must admit, that thought occurred to me too, but I dismissed it when I realised that it had to be a type of house and inferred that "semi" must be slang for semi-detached. (Thanks, Richard Thompson!) Not these two. They had the word "trailer" stuck in their heads and - because Americans call caravans "trailers" - they inferred that the character in question lived in a caravan park.

I must admit, "semi-detached" is not a term I would use, I'd probably use "duplex" in the broader (apparently American) sense. But seeing their embarrassing mistake has reminded me to keep looking beyond my own natural vocabulary.

Translating Foodstuffs

Today the Americans in my French class learnt another thing that I was surprised they couldn't work out for themselves. The text we were translating from English mentioned "bread and butter pudding". All the Americans were asking, 'What's that? Is it like bread pudding?'
So I asked, 'Does bread pudding have butter in it?'
'Yes'
'Voilà!'

The Frenchies in the class got to speculating on how one might translate the word pudding by itself. 'Crème,' one suggested.
So I had to explain that this was not one of those American puddings, those pseudo-mousses. That it was was starchy etc. 'C'est un gâteau, en fait,' the teacher interjected.
'Oh,' one of the Americans suddenly realised, 'Like a Christmas pudding?' Yes, bravo, it's a very enlightened American who knows what a Christmas pudding is.

Then we continued translating and got to "cheese and chutney sandwich". So an American girl had to ask, 'What's chutney?' These people have been living in caves!!