French Soundtrack vs. French Subtitles

I bought Pulp Fiction and Casablanca. They have each with French soundtrack and French subtitles. So I figured that would be a great way to learn how to associate the text with what I'm hearing--especially since I already know so much of the dialog in each of these movies. I'd learn some slang at the same time (especially from Pulp Fiction).

But once again, the best laid plans...

It turns out the French dubbing and the French subtitles don't match! Ugh! Dammit! Oh well. I think I can do it for a French movie if I can decide which French movie I'd like to spend some time with. I guess I have to look for the French subtitles being for the malentendu or hard of hearing. Then they'll probably match up. Well, I can still watch them in French and try to learn. I can go over scenes over and over if I want. And since I own them, I can keep them as long as I want.


Also, on Tuesday night, Said might bring a book on CD that I could use for the same purpose. For me right now, the hard part is figuring out what people say to me. Even when they talk slow, I can't catch certain sounds. That sort of makes it hard to have even a simple conversation. Once I know how to associate what comes into my ear with sounds, I'll be in better shape.

Update:
I'm working on Ezekiel 25:17. I've watched it over and over and over and over.

Here it is as I know and love it:

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides
by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.
Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will,
shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness
for he is truly his brother's keeper and finder of lost children.
And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger
those who attempt to poison and destroy my brother.
And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

Here it is as in the French subtitles (without the accent marks):

En chemin le juste est assailli de toutes parts
par les iniquities de l'egoiste et la tyrannie des mechants
Beni l'homme de bonne volonte qui par charite
guide le faible a travers la vallee des ombres
car il est en verite le gardien de son frere et the Providence des enfants perdus
Et me vengeance s'abatrra sur toi et ma fureur
sur eux qui tentent d'empoisonner et de detruire mes freres
Et tu connaitras que j'ai nom l'Eternel quand j'exercerai sur toi ma vengeance!

Here is what I hear when I watch it--note that I don't get all of it at all:

Le marche de la virtu est (me do stac les qui sonne les entre pris)
egoiste sa que sofa cherchiche (l'erve ou de mala)
Bene soit il l'homme de bonne volonte qui en nom de la charite
se faire le berger de faible qu'il guide a la vallee de l'mort et de larmes
Car il est gardien de son frere et le providence de son frere egare
Je abattre alors la bras de en terrible colore
et de vengeance fureuse effrayant
sur le (ord) a bi qui po sa se la lui ?? de deui
Et tu connaitras por quoi mon nom est la Eternel,
quand se toi s'abbatra la vengeance de tu (piso)

It is interesting because just before Jules starts into Ezekiel 25:17, he asks Brett "Do you read the Bible, Brett?" The French dubbing is "Connais-tu bien le Bible?" which I think means "Do you know the Bible well?" But Samuel L. Jackson's lips mesh very well with it. It just goes to show how much of an art it is to make translations that also match the movement of the lips. I'm also unable to the catch how he says "17" in 25:17. It must be some biblical way of saying numbers. I just can't catch it.

Another Party!

We've been here a few weeks and already we went to our second house party! Is this a fluke? Is it the nature of the south of France that you find yourself invited places? I'll need more time to know. I hope it's just the nature of things in southern France, or maybe more generally, the Mediterranean area of Europe.

It was a potluck "international" party. The organizer was an Australian woman, Cressida, and the provider of space was a French man, Alain. There were 10 of us. We were supposed to bring something representative of our home country, but we brought eggplant curry and cous-cous. Hey, where else but America can you use a Moroccan grain with an Indian dish? So we ate a lot. Another guy brought curry, and his excuse was that curry is not what most people in England--they go out for beer and curry. Yum! We had caviar d'aubergine, australian meatballs, some deserts. Probably more, but I can't remember all of it. Lots of wine.

This was our second potluck, and again, the potluck method was a bit different from how we do it in America/Canada. Instead of each dish being placed on a table and everyone attacks the table in a free for all, each dish is served as a course.

We had a good time speaking English and French and talking about all sorts of stuff. Elena even got to try her camera's self timer so we could all get in the shot.



Four of us left a bit early since we had stuff to do the next morning. On the way back we went by the aquaducts at Arceaux and saw three hookers working the streets. I suppose they were female--dressed that way at least.

La Plage Via VeloMagg Plus a Shopping Trip

Today Elena and I decided to head down to the sea by bicycle. We had wanted to go last Saturday, but the weather was perfect and when we got to the bicycle rental place, they bikes were all gone. Well, today was kind of crappy and it's a weekday.

We went to the main station VeloMagg which is the place where you rent the bikes. It costs 1 euro for 4 hours or 2 euros for the day. You need to give them a piece of ID. Fortunately, our driver's licenses worked even though, I'm sure the French have no way of distinguishing between a real one and a fake one. I'm just glad it didn't have to be my passport because I don't like having my passport in an unknown place. So we paid our 2 euros, learned how to operate the locks, and we one our way. Elena had her helmet (thanks for sending it, Mom) and I had only my rain hat (20% of rain, after all). We headed out.

The brakes of the rental bikes aren't so strong. They will slow you down gradually, but you won't be using these brakes for laying rubber. That aspect worried me a little bit. I like the security of brakes that can stop me quickly when I want to stop quickly. Oh well. C'est la vie. We headed toward Carnon, a resort town. We passed the Carrefour, then the Auchan, then a few other ^&@%@%# roundabouts (don't get me started on those roundabouts) and finally made it to Carnon. As it was a bit chilly and Thursday, the city was pretty dead. We biked around and finally made it to the beach. There wasn't much to do so we snapped a couple of pictures of ourselves and headed back. Carnon has plenty of condos as second homes where people can get a place to be near the beach. There are bars and restaurants a plenty--just not open yet. It looks like a nice place once the season is under way and the bars of full of fun loving patrons and the beaches are full of sun bathing girls. But now, it's a veritable wasteland. I'm sure there were people there on Saturday though. Somebody made it an event on onvasortir.com and got 420 people to sign up! Beat that meetup.com!

On the way back, we stopped at Carrefour and bought a bunch of stuff. We got 4 50cl Braubiers for 0,35 euros each and 2 Pelforth Brunes for 1,30 euros each! What a price difference! We also got some pickles, olives, croissants, grape bread, tomatoes, fruit tartelettes, 4 little rounds of chevre, and 2 wedges of Roquefort cheese. It was 20,36 euros. The best part is that with bikes, we could get it all back to our place without much effort. For a mere euro, you can rent a bike, go to Carrefour, shop, bike back, and have all the stuff you bought for the next few days.

Then we came home, returned the bikes, and had a wonderful snack with bread, cheese, wine, beer, pickles, and olives!

Le Dome Brasserie Language Exchange

On Tuesday evenings, a bar just down the street at Gambetta and Clemenceau called Le Dome holds an evening of language exchange. They also do philosophers cafes and other such events. On May 8, Elena decided to head down. We actually wanted to go on May 2, but I was sick then.

So we got there at 8pm. Already there were over a dozen people there. We knew some of the people who would be there because it was on onvasortir.com (as I found out that night, we can called it OVS). So we found the OVS crowd and started chatting. About half--probably a little more--the people there were French and the other half were from somewhere else. I was the only American, there was a Spanish woman from Barcelona, A Swiss guy from Bern. Elena is Canadian.

I ordered a beer (it is a Brasserie-self styled as a "Maison de Biere" after all) and Elena got a coffee. Then we started chatting with the people around us. People moved around a bit. Sometimes someone would catch wind of a language being spoken, and they'd head over there to speak that language. I wished my French were better. One woman helped me quite a bit. She asked me a question, and then corrected my answer to say it exactly correctly.

At the peak, there were probably a couple dozen people. Mostly speaking English and French, with a smattering of German and Spanish. The gender ratio was favorable--many pretty women who had to put up with all us old men--actually there were a lot of lady-killers there, too.

I plan to go there again with Elena. It's a fun event and you can't beat the fact that it's only about a 3 minute walk from our place.

On Va Sortir dot com

Just like kijiji.fr is a sort of craigslist for France, we found onvasortir.com which is sort of like meetup.com. But, in my opinion, much better.

Here is my account and here is Elena's.

You create a little profile and then you can join events. The events show the maximum number that can join. There is a spot that indicates when and where the event will take place and the deadline for signing up. A waiting list is shown. There are all sorts of events. The genders are separated by color (when I first met Elena after a hike down with Inside Edge, I asked what the male:female ratio was. She didn't like me asking. Here you can easily see it for yourself.) Members get colored stars (grey, bronze, gold, platinum, titanium) according to how often they join events.

I will go to Le Dome down the street for language exchange. It is something I was planning to do anyway, but now it's posted as an event! So it counts toward my colored star credit. Elena might go, but she's going on a hike the same day.

Quiz Night At Shakespeare Pub

I went to the Shakespeare Pub in Montpellier to leave Elena alone for a while. When I got there I realized it was Quiz Night. Normally Quiz Night is on a Tuesday, but sometimes Tuesday fields a much more important football game (and I thought football was only on Sunday, Monday night, and Thursday).

So I played along. I sucked bad. I had heard about Quiz Night but had never seen anything indicating what kind of questions there are. So to fix that, I will now go over the questions from the evening of May 7, 2008.

There are four rounds starting at about 9 (after the daily 7:00-8:30 happy hour where a 4,50 Classic John Bull becomes 3,20 euros). The rounds are about 20 minutes apart from each other--giving you ample time finish your beer and order more. The first round is a picture round where you try to identify 10 people. The next two rounds are questions rounds. Finally the last round is a music round where you try to identify the artist and name of ten songs. I think the music round counts double--10 for the artists and 10 for the song title.

So here were the 10 people:

• Silvio Berlusconi
• Aurthur C. Clarke
• ? Crane
• Dustin Hoffman
• Natalie Portman
• Janis Joplin
• Indira Ghandi
• Robbie Coltrane
• Johnny Depp
• John Wayne

Wow! I got 4--Berlusconi, Hoffman, Depp, and Wayne.

The first set of 10 trivia questions:

1. What country in Africa was once known as South Rhodesia?
2. King Zog was king of what country?
3. Who was the first man in space?
4. Which mammal lays eggs?
5. Which superhero's real name is Dick Greyson?
6. Who was Edward Teach better known as?
7. In the 1988 Olympics, Ben Johnson was disqualified. Who got the gold as a result?
8. If you have a beard, in what Olympic sport can you not participate?
9. What is Donald F. Duck's middle name?
10. What actors middle name means "a cool breeze over the mountains"?

Gee! In the end I only got 2. I'm so bad at trivia now. I knew I had recently heard "Edward Teach". I was right that I had heard it and I knew from where as soon as they said the answer. He was not Eddy the Eagle--my guess.

The second round of questioning went like this:

1. The Han River flows through which capital city?
2. Who was the last king of Iraq?
3. In what year was the tunnel between England and France opened?
4. What was the name of Napoleon's horse at Waterloo?
5. Astana is the capital of what country?
6. In what year was the first atomic bomb exploded?
7. El Hajj Malik El Shabbaz is better known as?
8. What was the job of lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth?
9. How do you say "Good day" in Japanese?
10. What boxer said "he can run, but he cannot hide"?

Gee! I only go three of these?

The music round came next. Ten songs. The only one I knew was Johnny B Good--Chubby Checker? I guessed "Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass Band for one song. Sad Sad. I left before they announced the results or the names of the songs.

Here is the answer key. What's the HTML tag for "upsidedown"?
1) Zimbabwe, 2) Albania, 3) Yuri G..something, 4) platypus, 5) Robin, 6) Blackbeard, 7) Carl Lewis, 8) Boxing, 9) Fontleroy, 10) Keanu Reaves
1) Seoul, 2) Faisal II, 3) 1994, 4) Marengo, 5) Khazakstan, 6) 1945, 7) Malcolm X, 8) Actor, 9) konnichiwa, 10) Joe Lewis.

So that was the Shakespeare Pub trivia night on Monday. Remember it's usually Tuesday, unless there's a soccer game. And happy hour is 19:00-20:30 by their clock.

Evasions: Another Outing

On Sunday, we had another outing with Evasions. This time, we knew how long it takes to get to the Esplanade d'Europa, the meeting place where the Lez meets the Antigone. We walked there a bit more leisurely. I wasn't feeling too leisurely, though, because I only had two 10 euro notes. When we were almost there, there was a post office and I tried their ATM. No luck. Then I tried the ATM of another bank. Again no luck. Yikes. I tried my credit card. Whew! It worked, but now I have a cash advance $300 collecting interest at some ungodly amount. Yikes. It isn't even posted yet. Oh well, it was the weekend. Anyway, cash in hand, we headed to the Nike of Samothrace and there was nobody there. Nobody at all. Elena told me to check down stairs where all the restaurants are and voila! About a dozen men and women, and even a little boy--probably about the same age as the boy in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road".

We had a coffee and hit the road in three cars. Our destination, as much as I can piece it together by remembering what I remember, and using google maps, was a small town called Crespian near another small town (that doesn't show up as a name on Google Maps) called Cannes/Clairent or something like that (I'll correct it later if I learn it).

Our objective was to taste wine and honey. And, fortunately for Elena, go on a little hike. We made it to the place where they have the wine tasting, but they weren't exactly open yet. Even so, there were a ton of cars in the land they use as a parking lot. I didn't see any dogs around. It seems like if you're going to do this:

it typically means your long term plan is to always have a mean dog around. But nope! Maybe they bring it out at night when all the tourists are gone.

Though we had just parked, we immediately unparked and headed to a restaurant in Quillac called La Baraka. We sat outside in the nice temperature. Elena got a salmon salad and I had a chicken pasta. We got carafes of red and rose wine. The total bill for all of us was 99,80 euros or $150. Not bad. We put in 22 euros. Of course half the people overpaid because they were dealing in 10 euro notes, so there was some left over. When we were set, we loaded up into the cars and headed out.

We drove to the miellerie or what we might call and apiary. I didn't see any bees there, but they had all sorts of honey. We got some coffee. It was the first good coffee I had in France. Christine declared the coffee to be bad. LOL! That's why we haven't seen Starbucks in Montpellier--the 8th largest city and chock full of students. The French and Americans simply don't see eye to eye about what constitutes a good cup of coffee. I like a coffee I can hold in my hand without pinching a tiny little ceramic handle. They like their coffee in shot glass sized cups.

Christine told us that it was our last chance to make purchases. Elena got a honey sampler with 4 honeys and a jar of nuts preserved in honey. I can't wait to try them. :-) Then onto the hike. We weren't really sure where we were going. Elena had the impression that we'd do a loop, and I had the impression that a few people not going on the hike would drive to the wine tasting place, but that we would walk there.

There were six of us on the hike. We went by vinyards--currently not growing anything, just T shaped bare shrubs about a meter high and all held in line with tight wires strung across the rows of vines. The vine plants were probably about 4 feet apart and there were probably about 6 or 8 feet between rows. Roughly--I didn't think about it at the time, so these estimates are from memory.

We went through mountains, and villages. The villages are really old--stone building everywhere--probably hundreds of years old. The street names are really practical--"Street of the X" where X is the landmark that's on the street--church, forge, etc. There aren't many streets in these tiny hamlets, so no need to dip into the names of historical figures, artists, Greek/Roman gods, etc. I'm not sure what this particular street refers to, but it struck me as funny for whatever reason:


We got lost briefly, but a guy near the Cooperative of Cannes? (la Italique, la Italique, la Italique) put us on the right path. And off we were.

Here are a couple of pictures at a little bridge:



When we were getting further along we looked back and saw a group of people on the trail. It was a close packed train of about 200 hundred people all hiking a parallel trail. Yikes! That's a lot of hiking tourists!

It took at little doing--cutting through vineyards, and crossing a highway, but we made it to our destination--the wine tasting place. Ha ha! I was right! ;-) Christine and the guy with his kid and the others who didn't hike were there. The kid was really excited because the wine tasting place had a chocolate fountain. I went into the 20'x20' room and got through about 2 items in the chocolate fountain and was about to try some wine, when that huge train of tourists entered--they just kept streaming through the door. I was trapped for a while, being near the chocolate fountain, but I managed to escape. It took Elena and the kid a while to get out. When they came out, the kid was covered in chocolate and Elena was smiling and talking about how much she ate at the chocolate fountain.



And that capped off our outing. We got back in the cars and headed back to the Esplanade d'Europa. We had a great time, and Elena finally got to do a little walking!