Did you know?
- Recently, there was an article in Times Magazine that was entitled, "The Best Last Place in Europe." The article was about Nantes, France.
- Nantes is the 6th largest city in France.
- There's a French saying about wine:
"1 glass, you're fine. 2 glasses, hello problems!"
- There's an internet site called "Travel Tracker" that IES students are recommended to use during travel. It's a site that logs exactly where you're located, so that if IES Administrators or your host family needed to know where you were, they could. At any time.
- There is no direct translation for "I am full." You say "J'ai bien mangé" (I ate well) or "Je n'ai plus faim" (I'm not hungry anymore). At the beginning of the semester, many IES students, after eating too much bread and Nutella, would say, "Je suis plein," because we thought "plein" meant "full." We were actually saying, "I'm pregnant." (You can use plein when ordering gas for example, "Le plein, s'il vous plaît," which means "Fill her up, please.")
- The term for "homeless person" in French is an abbreviation: "SDF," short for "Sans Domicile Fixe," or "without permanent residence."
- The majority of SDFs have at least one dog.
- People don't often pick up after their dogs (even though the city provides free doggy-bags left and right).
- There are 82 Universities in France.
- Saoul = Soûl which also = Drunk.
- We were taught in the States that "embrasser"/"s'embrasser" (to kiss) are synonymous to "baiser." During orientation here at IES, we were taught that "baiser" is slang and has a much more vulgar meaning.
- When we arrived in France, all of the IES students noticed that French food has fewer preservatives than that of American food. But we quickly learned that the word for preservative in French is "conservateur" and NOT "preservatif," which is the word for condom.
- Dates are written differently than in the States. Instead of mm/dd/yyyy, it's written dd/mm/yyyy. My birthday is September 16, 1990. Back home that's 09/16/1990. But here it's written 16/09/1990. It's taken a while to get used to, but now I write the dates in my class notes the European way!
I will continue to update this page as I discover new and interesting things!
"Thing" = "le Truc" (<- and they certainly use it just as much as us!!)
