Tuesday, November 23/2010

Signs are always in Arabic - which might as well be curly decorations for all we can make of it (though we can read the Arabic numbers, which are actually Persian) - and French. In tourist areas hey are also frequently in English and German as well. Spotted one in Finnish. Translations vary in skill and spelling: thus a building site notice reads "Excusez le dérangement" and "Sorry for the distrub."

Find in my pocket a sheet handed out the other day by someone in clown regalia advertising a showing of Avatar in 3D, more or less next door to us, and presumably in French. Entrée 12 TD ($8.70 CAD, £5.25). Seems pretty reasonable, not that we were desperate to see it.

Reading aloud The Case Against Owen Williams, by Allan Donaldson, one of my old UNB professors, the book borrowed in London from Jean. Nice momentum, credibility and sense of period.

In the dining room J spots one of the guests carefully removing the chocolate decorations from a large cake and placing them on his own plate. As I leave the room, the head waiter, mistaking me for one of the German majority, asks "Schmeck?" and I have just enough memory of Mennonite cooking to translate this as "Tasted good?"

Signs are always in Arabic - which might as well be curly decorations for all we can make of it (though we can read the Arabic numbers, which are actually Persian) - and French. In tourist areas hey are also frequently in English and German as well. Spotted one in Finnish. Translations vary in skill and spelling: thus a building site notice reads "Excusez le dérangement" and "Sorry for the distrub."

Find in my pocket a sheet handed out the other day by someone in clown regalia advertising a showing of Avatar in 3D, more or less next door to us, and presumably in French. Entrée 12 TD ($8.70 CAD, £5.25). Seems pretty reasonable, not that we were desperate to see it.

Reading aloud The Case Against Owen Williams, by Allan Donaldson, one of my old UNB professors, the book borrowed in London from Jean. Nice momentum, credibility and sense of period.

In the dining room J spots one of the guests carefully removing the chocolate decorations from a large cake and placing them on his own plate. As I leave the room, the head waiter, mistaking me for one of the German majority, asks "Schmeck?" and I have just enough memory of Mennonite cooking to translate this as "Tasted good?"