Travel Math

Now that I've been riding a bike through the countrysides of Poitou-Charentes for nearly five months, new roads and towns are getting harder to come by. I've covered some of the smoother, more scenic routes dozens of times. In order to expand the limits of my cycling universe, exploring more routes and towns farther from Poitiers, I've decided to combine the two most convenient forms of travel here, bikes and trains.

Instead of biking in loops, always ending up back home, I've decided to try riding one way and taking the train back. The weather has been improving and I'm in much better shape than when I got here, making longer rides much more enjoyable. In addition, I can eat lunch and spend an hour or two exploring a city before hopping on the train back to Poitiers with my bike.

First destination: Niort.
Niort is around 80km from Poitiers, and is almost the same size. Biking there takes about 3-3.5 hours. Since Rebecca's students don't have class this week (because of Carnaval? Or Ash Wednesday? We're not really sure) she decided to take the train to Niort so we could have lunch together and explore on foot.

First step: Wake up early. Normally, I ride in the afternoon, but to make it to Niort in time for lunch, I'd have to leave by 9:30am. The trains stop running before I would be able to finish dinner, so I have to stick with lunch.

Wake up Jefe!

I got to Niort a bit before Rebecca's train was scheduled to come in, so I rode around a little to familiarize myself with some of the parts of town. Then I went to the train station...

...where I met Rebecca and got to change into real clothes (which Rebecca had kindly brought for me).

We found a nice place for lunch. Actually, we were looking in the window of a random place and then a customer came out to smoke his post-lunch clope, and he pretty much forced us to go in.

We sat down to recount our adventures of the morning. Rebecca *just barely* made it to the train on time thanks to the self-service ticket kiosks and their convenient option to "buy a ticket for a train that is departing immediately." Jefe found a really nice route from Poitiers to Niort with lots of smooth roads, nice scenery and not much traffic.

The part between Mothe St. Heray and Chavagné is especially nice, with views down into the neighboring valley.

Rebecca ordered une salade de thon, and Jefe had the plat du jour: roast chicken with spanish rice. We had just about finished up when...

--ok, now I have to recount an exchange I had with the waiter at lunch. It's embarrassing for me, but I feel that it bears an important lesson about French café culture--

...after the meal (in french)

Waiter: Vous êtes terminés? C'était bien? Vous voulez un dessert?
All done? How was it? Would you like some dessert?

Me: Non, merci, euh... {il donne un coup d'oeil a Rebecca} un dessert, peut-être?
No thanks, uh...{glancing at Rebecca} how about a dessert?

For some reason, I thought he had asked if I wanted the bill (l'addition). Perhaps it was my fatigued state, I'm not sure. Besides the obvious humor in rejecting and then asking for the same thing in a single sentence, Rebecca reminded me of two things one must understand about French waiters: (1) they will never offer the bill, and will wait until you ask for it (unless you're just getting coffee or drinks, or if you're in Paris & are perceived by the waitstaff as incompetent to do such things properly) and (2) they will always offer dessert. How I could have mis-heard and failed to take into account these two cardinal rules of the café, I will never know.

Giggling, we wandered through the streets of Niort, stopped by the Donjon, and island hopped in the middle of the Sèvre Niortaise River. We also saw this interesting alternative to standard bollards.

Serpent guarding the pedestrians from the evil cars

When it came time to leave, we got tickets for a local (TER) train to Poitiers. I packed my bike up for the train ride and covered it with a fitted bedsheet that Rebecca got that morning just for this purpose.

So much easier than taking it fully apart!

Everything worked out great. I got to try out some new roads, and we both got to explore a new place. This leads me to my new Theory of Travel Math:

more sweet math, for all you nerdfighters

On the Untranslatable (L'intraduisible)

In America, this gesture might translate roughly to "I don't know";

in France, it means "c'est normale!"

There exist some words in French for which there are no exact English translations. This is apart from idiomatic expressions like Quel dommage or Grâce au ciel. There are, of course, plenty of loan phrases, such as laissez faire, la pièce de la resistance, or noblesse oblige, which we use in English; but these often do not have the same connotation in the context of a French conversation.

No, the "untranslatable" is something different altogether.

The existence of untranslatable words points to conceptual areas that exist in French but not in English. Perhaps one of the most representative examples of the untranslatable are the french words normale and normalement. Many dictionaries will tell you that normale means "normal," and online translation engines will turn c'est normal into "it's normal" and normalement into "normally" or "usually." I find these translations misleading, but I've been struggling to find a way to convey the appropriate nuance.

Here is a typical conversation in which normalement would appear:

A: Est-ce que vous pouvez m'aider? Je n'ai pas bien compris la dernière annonce. Ils ont dit que le train departra ou pas?

Can I ask you a question? I didn't quite hear that last announcement. Did they say that the train is leaving or not?

B: Normalement on part dans vingt minutes, mais on ne sait jamais.

We should be leaving in twenty minutes, but you never can tell!

As you can see, in the above conversation, the term normalement has the sense of "theoretically" or "ideally". But this is also not a perfect translation, as it would not make sense to translate the phrase c'est normale into "it's theoretical." Below is a conversation that hinges on the nuance of c'est normale:

A: Je suis desolé, mais mon vélo est bloqué par votre voiture. Est-ce que vous pouvez avancer juste un petit peu?

I'm sorry, but your car is blocking my bike. Could you move forward just a little bit?

B: Bof, je veux bien mais il faut attendre cet camion.

Well, I'd like to, but we'll have to wait for that truck.

A: Ah oui, c'est normale.

That's how it goes.

In a corollary to the Wharf Hypothesis, I would like to argue that the words normalement and normale evoke a sensibility that doesn't exist in other cultures. Maybe we could call it "French resignation"; what's normal in France is not necessarily normal anywhere else.

When you start to think about it, I think you'll notice that we (meaning English-speakers) have adopted many French terms and phrases in order to express feelings of regret and resignation. In American politics, we use the phrase laissez-faire to describe the kind of government that shrugs its shoulders (see photo at top) and consents to let its people do whatever the hell they want. And if an English-speaker says c'est la vie, he or she is communicating the inevitability of an inconvenient situation. What c'est la vie actually means is c'est comme la vie française; the implication is that inconvenient situations are French in nature, which many French people would confirm.

What are some other examples of these kinds of untranslatables?

c'est normale

(nerdy math joke)

Update:
It occurs to me that I should reread Doug Hofstadter's Le ton beau de marot, which is all about the art of translation. I've also been thinking a lot about translation in movie titles and subtitles. There's a movie that came out a while ago in the US called Religulous; the word "religulous" is a mash-up of the words "religious" and "ridiculous," which evokes the movie makers' beliefs about faith. You can imagine that this would be difficult to translate into another language. However, the French translation is rather impressive: "Religolo," a mash-up of the words "religieux" (meaning religious) and "rigolo" (meaning funny or odd).

A nos lecteurs/lectrices Francophones--Merci!

***mise à jour***

-Zkark, LO, et William: merci pour vos idées, nous vous tiendrons au courant!

-Si vous n'avez pas encore fait une suggestion....n'hésitez pas à nous laisser un petit message (et corriger notre français, si vous en voulez)!

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Vous êtes Poitevin? Vous n'êtes pas? Quand même, nous avons besoin de votre aide...


Évidemment, nous adorons Poitou-Charentes, mais c'est le moment d'explorer d'autres régions de la France, n'est ce pas? Il ne nous reste plus que sept ou huit mois de notre année à l'étranger.

Mais où aller? Nous ne savons pas, et c'est pour ça que nous vous demandons de nous faire vos suggestions. Quand vous prenez les vacances, vous allez où? Où sont vos endroits préférées?

Quelques détails : nous n'avons pas une voiture, et nous préférons ne pas conduire. Nous aimons voyager, manger, explorer, bouger, rencontrer des gens and des expériences nouvelles. Nous aimons faire du velo, marcher, être actif, nager (sauf s'il fait beau!), les festivals du vin, du fromage, du cinéma (même du graisse de canard, si il y en a). Nous pourrions prendre un train ou un avion, selon la distance et le prix, mais nous ne sommes pas riches! Aucun doute que Monacco est trés jolie, mais il faut être économique dans nos choix...

Quick translation:
Tell us where to go on vacation in France. We like to ride bikes, swim, go to wine festivals, cheese festivals, film festivals (duck fat festivals, if there are any). And we're a little poor.