castrated

[friday, april 25: castres, france]

as anyone who's crossed national borders knows, international travel -- particularly when an extended stay is involved and the geographical distance between Departure and Destination is significant -- is full of cultural awakenings: an onslaught of epiphanies about how objects look, how language is used, how people tend to think and behave. immediately, you begin to assess your new and unfamiliar surroundings: sacré bleu, these french public washrooms are sketchy (not to mention hard to come by)! holy Hollande, having chocolatebreadcheeseandwine at every meal is genius! and then, slowly but surely, you begin to re-consider various aspects of the surroundings you'd been immersed in before your trip: much of what used to strike you as "normal" back home now registers either as just one of many ways of doing/making/thinking about something -- like measuring flour and sugar in cups and teaspoons instead of by weight -- or as "normal" only in relation to the place you're from -- like having squirrels scurry past you every day (and wondering why a tourist would think to take a photo of such rodents).

but, in all likelihood, you won't be reflecting on your home country all by your lonesome. several people you encounter abroad will help you out, by sharing a thing or two about you. typically, it'll be something "hilarious" that you've heard a billion times. if you're colombian, there'll be a crack about cocaine (crack? cocaine? did you get that?). if you're from the states, you will probably hear about obesity and georgedubya. if you're canadian, you hear about lumberjacks, caribou, maple syrup, snow, céline dion, and (alas!) rofo.

other times, however, what you hear is completely new. like this afternoon. my friends are at work, and so i've solo-settled into Thé ou Café tendance, in jean-jaurès square, in the centre of castres (a town whose name is, incidentally, a conjugated form of the verb "to castrate." yowch!) i've been here for no more than five minutes when, over a steaming chocolat chaud cannelle (yee-um!), i overhear the following from one of the two sixty-something women at the nearby table:

tu sais, quatre-vingt pourcent des canadiennes sont des femmes battues!

[translation: you know, eighty-five percent of canadian women are beaten!]

it's definitely surprising, as a canadian, to be in france (or almost any other country, really) and happen upon a conversation about canadians. (let's be honest: recent rofo-ing aside, canada's hardly at the forefront of The World's mind.) even more surprising, however, is discovering that, all this time, you'd been so in the dark about your own people! the woman has shared this news with her friend in a hush-hush, gossip-hound tone, but the remaining authority in her voice says it all: i mean, the cited stats simply must be true. (particularly in light of her sophisticated general knowledge, as later evidenced by her insights into UFOs.) thankfully, now armed with this data, i can spread the news upon my return home (phew!). i only wish i'd caught the tail end of her canadian lecture -- the part that began with: soixante-quinze pourcent des enfants canadiens sont [seventy-five percent of canadian children are]. d'oh! now we'll never know.

and now back to translating...