07/08/03 — Nîmes, city of music
And then to Nîmes, which was beautiful. Music on every street corner, open squares, lovely food, a tower to climb and see the world, roman ruins, and a generally good atmosphere. Not too many tourists, a festive space, with buildings old enough and trees enough to make me feel at home.
I was trying to find the Castellum because the map was atrocious and stopped some people. “Do you know how I get to the Castellum?” I asked them in French, “because the map is shocking. It looks like these streets go there but they’re all... I don’t know how you say it in French...” Pause. In English: “Dead ends.” They look at me blankly.
Slow grinding sound as the memorybots call up another word for dead-end and pass it to the english-to-french translatorbots for processing. The word is very acceptable and with slight adjustments for accent is passed onto the mouth which says “cul-de-sacs”. The boy nods, repeats the word and tells me the way there.
I miss most of it due to the alarming distraction as the french-to-english translatorbots, which are apparently always on duty even when I’m not aware of it, report screaming emergency halt signals that I have just said “bag bottom”. The crunching noise in my head as the actual meaning of the phrase and its connotation are reassigned a new place in the language hierarchy has a pleasant side effect of endorphin release.
I really should get on and do some work.
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