Month: February 2007

Language barrier, problems reaching out

My parents sent me to the UK for 3 weeks, one summer, when I was 10. I stayed at the Carvers’, in Frome, not far from Bristol and Bath.

I don’t know why, but today I was reminded of watching TV during a weekend afternoon with their daughter, who was 13 years old. A soap opera was on and I was struggling (and quite failing) to understand what was going on.

I thought I had figured out the main female character was in early pregnancy. At this point I was barely paying attention to the show. I was looking for ways to speak to my companion. So I was rehearsing my side of the conversation, over and over.

Is she waiting for a baby?

That was the translation of “elle attend un bébé?”, which is the French for “is she pregnant?”, which I had never learnt to say.

And I rehearsed it (and other variations) for so long that eventually, it wasn’t worth saying anymore.

I had been concerned not only with the language barrier –I suspected my words weren’t right–, but also it was difficult for me to initiate the conversation. Yet, I wanted to. I didn’t.

I am not sure whether I wanted to find out if the woman was actually expecting, or if I simply wanted to talk.

Where are you travelling, m’ darling?

I was in London, headed to Los Angeles to hop on a flight to San Jose, California. It was a 19 hour trip, with 15 more to go. I stayed in California less than two days. I walked a bit (as a rule, I walk to the meeting venue), I scribed 1.5 day of meeting (a little less than 1200 lines in the IRC logs, a little more than 13000 words), I happily met with a friend and his wife that I hadn’t seen in a while.

The next batch of flights didn’t go so uneventfully. The flight from San Jose to Las Vegas was delayed by almost an hour. A shame since I had a shortish connection to make it to the Boston flight. So we landed mere minutes after the Las Vegas – Boston flight had left. The good thing was that I was were my suitcase was. I spent an hour in the America West customer assistance line, wondering where my legendary luck was and reflecting on how worse it could have been without the said luck. A very helpful lady booked me on a Delta flight to Boston. I had 5 hours to wait.

I walked from the airport to Las Vegas, at dusk, camera in hand. It was interesting. There aren’t a lot of people on their own in Las Vegas. (How mundane is that, for a comment?) I purchased a few gifts that I ended up misplacing on the next day, unfortunately. I took a few photos that turned out blurry; somehow the selector of my camera was on Manual Focus… I had a gourmet dinner at Wendy’s. And I walked back to the airport. It took 45 minutes. Only to find out that the 10:10 pm flight was delayed… “Est. 12:45 am”. Oh well…

I walked through security at 12:15 am. I was selected for further screening. They patted me down (and didn’t find the lighter in my left back pocket). They opened my bags, my computer, ran their sample pads on my jacket, on my shoes, detected explosives, ran some more sample pads on my shoes, x-rayed them again and eventually let me go. I was late by that time. I took the monorail to the gates, ran to gate D41 and boarded at the last minute. It would have been pretty ironic to miss that one. I arrived in Boston 9 hours after schedule. And my suitcase had made it.

I’m back in Boston for 3 months. Yay!