Just a short post – I still quite jetlagged – I think the older I get the more my circadian rhythm refuses to get messed with. There is also a new grand-daughter in the house, and her hours are… erratic. She’s doing well, just considers life to be made up of hour-and-a half snooze time. We’re delighted to have her, but I am reminded again of quite how hard babies can make adults work.
Now, we’re with family, cared for, and somewhat insulated. It’s a first world country, even if it is where all those convicts came from, and the people speak something very close to English in England… but it is still something we writers put our characters through all the time. It’s… well, strange. Not at the logical level, perhaps, but at a visceral level. It smells wrong, it sounds wrong, the air tastes wrong, and the light and humidity are all just subtly different. That’s without me coping with people of which there are (for me) far too many.
We cope. I have minor repetitive strain injury from waving greetings to too many people, and they have mostly avoided crashing their vehicles craning to see who was waving and WHY? But… it’s not business-as-usual. And this is without the extreme changes and threats we give our characters.
I need to remember this feeling and capture it in my stories. Because at some level I think we all feel it.
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “A stranger in a strange land”
There’s always a feeling of something being “off” in a new place. All the little subconscious cues – sound, smell, sights – are missing or changed. It takes time to settle in.
And of course the food differences. A number of years ago we were in Canada and I wanted a can of chicken for making chicken salad. Now, in the US, canned chicken is recognizably *chicken.* Shredded meat, but chicken. I bought a can of Canadian chicken, opened it….and found a solid mass of, well, jellied chicken. I think. I ate something else for lunch.
My German language skills skyrocketed after my first visit to a grocery store. I discovered that I’d better learn every-day German right quick pronto if I was going to be able to tell beef strew from high-end canned dog food. (Same sized can, both cases on floor side-by-side before being stocked in the appropriate section. The labels were … rather similar, at least to me.) Milk-in-a-box on the shelf was another intriguing difference.
In some ways, going to a place where you know they speak a very different language and have a very different history is easier. You expect things to be “off,” and to feel odd. The strangeness is anticipated and allowed for. Deepest, darkest Canada, coming from Texas? Um … strange. The wilds of rural Yorkshire coming from the States? Really strange. Not comfortably strange like Poland or Moravia.
I was fascinated when I was in a British mid-country pub in the ’70s and listened in on a conversation between well-educated young career folks trying to stump each other with their “native” accents (prior to school clean-up) to see who could properly guess their respective (micro-)origins. I had listened to trad folk so I had a handle on the big regional accents, but to hear the parlor-game they made in such a small country, with so many identifiable (to them) distinctions of accent and class, was on a whole different level.
And then there was the train ride from York to London, where a lovely elderly farmer entertained me all the way with stories in (to me) broad Yorkie. Not only could I not follow the stories, I couldn’t even tell what they were about.
Rural Quebecois is not the French you learn in school. It’s more the equivalent of Late Middle English in a mirror world, with a touch of backwoods variance in drifted pronunciation and local terms. You can make yourself understood (and vice versa) in Quebec and Montreal, but not so much elsewhere.
When my husband & I tooled off into maritime Canada decades ago for fishing, I was quite confident with my schoolroom French. I remember my first encounter with rural Quebecois when I started seeing signs along the farm roads selling “meubles” (closely related to “moveables” = “furniture”) and particularly “Vers a vendre”. In the latter case I understood they were selling something, but I didn’t expect it to be poetry (it wasn’t). (Apparently the annual stream fishing crowd creates a market for “Worms”.) Bar delicacies included a form of pickled clam/snail/godknowswhat in a jar that it took us many years to identify pronounced something like “bourgeaux” but apparently spelled “bourgot”) (https://www.lapresse.ca/vivre/gourmand/cuisine/201308/19/01-4681070-le-bourgot-escargot-meconnu.php). Before the internet (and even after) this is not the sort of article that ever appeared in English, and if you couldn’t spell it you were out of luck.
After a necessary encounter (swollen knee) at a medclinic in really rural Quebec, I discovered that even the well-educated, confronted with someone not in the Canadian healthcare system, were reduced to sign language in response to my adequate (Parisian) French. Once I figured out what the hubbub was about and pulled out an Amex card and declared “Je peux payé”, we found words became unnecessary for treatment.
But the funniest was when we walked into one of the fancy hotels at the mouth of the Saguenay River (a literal fjord — who knew?–) and tried to babble something innocuous in the French we had, causing the entire well-occupied lobby of upscale folks to stop talking and stare at us hostilely, until they realized we were just Americans rather than literal Parisians, whom they loathed. After that they relaxed and ignored us as American rubes (i.e., non-combatants).
After that, our conversations for the many hours of our drive home from salmon fishing excursions were always executed for as long as possible in Pepé le Pew fractured French.
The original Star Trek did not gain traction in France (relative to other parts of Europe) because was not dubbed into European French until the late 90s or early 00s. There was an older Quebecois dub (I assume to meet some kind of bilingual requirement for syndicating it in Canada), which some family members and I stumbled across while traveling in France in the early 90s. I didn’t have enough French to do more than think “That doesn’t sound like regular French and they gave Sulu a WEIRD voice” but the family member who was fluent in Parisian and conversant in a couple of regional patois, including Cajun, thought it was great fun. That relative said though that it probably wouldn’t be broadcast very long in France, because of the low regard Quebecois is held in over there.
Couldn’t find a Trek example on youtube, but here’s a compare/contrast of Francais versus Quebecois for a scene from Revenge of the Sith: