Aug 5, 2013
Project 365 – Week 31
This week, I discovered that being a translator is probably not a career alternative I should pursue. My friends, in the spirit of keeping things bilingual for their wedding, had asked me to help out with certain tasks (e.g. translating wedding ceremony programme, speeches), and working from English into French, oh dear… I am lucky I have other wonderful friends around me who helped to proofread my translations, and I also roped F into translating some particularly tricky texts. What would I do without them?
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29 Jul: This piece of street art reminds me of the sculpture of Le Passe-Muraille to commemorate Marcel Aymé that can be found in Montmartre. The main differences? This is on the other side of the wall, thus forming a continuation of sort to the sculpture, and this is a very modern take, for I don’t think hoodie fits into the setting of Aymé’s story. Disclaimer: I don’t know if the artist intended this as an echo to Le Passe-Muraille. Total speculation on my part.
30 Jul: A delicious break in the daily ho-hum today as I went to lunch with Céline at a Tibetan restaurant on rue St Jacques. From the lunch menu, we both went for tsampa (here, they serve it as a simplified roasted barley flour soup) and steamed momo (dumplings that resemble the Chinese bun but with texture like jiaozi). Our meal was supplemented by their blend of house tea, which from what I can see, contains green tea, rose buds, dried Chinese dates, goji, orange peels, and rock sugar. I love the tea, so I’m thinking maybe I should try to make some of the blend myself…
31 Jul: Métro (and RER) stations in Paris are not mere transportation hubs, occasionally double-up as cultural stations. They are also pretty much the first ports of call for anyone needing ID photos for various administrative purposes. Nobody that I know here go into an actual shop to get ID photos taken anymore. Instead, armed with €5 worth of coins, we head into one of these photobooths and pray something decent will come out of from one of the 3 tries that we’re allowed by the machine. No smiling for administrative photos, so no cheeeeeeeze.
1 Aug: Project wedding-co-organisation-for-my-friends continues. I’ve just about finished up all the translations and typeset them, so they were pretty much good to be printed at this stage. I then turned my attention to the fingerprint guestbook, which will bear a papercut house with strings for the fingerprint “balloons” that will go above the house. Think Pixar’s Up to visualise where I am going here. One small problem, I do not have the right colour paper at home that goes with the wedding theme colour, so this is just a mock-up. Not too shabby, right?
2 Aug: Life is pretty much a continuous construction site. Each day, we build something, we replace something, we tear something down, we patch something up. We also send a bridge across to reach out to those whom we care about, and at times, burn it up when things become untenable and go beyond repairs. We don’t get it perfectly right every time, but we certainly learn from every step that we take in the process. The key is to lay down a solid foundation, so a sudden crash into a heap of mess doesn’t take place. At least, that’s the hope.
3 Aug: Months of preparation came down to this – the W-Day. We started off the afternoon with a church wedding ceremony, where Anne-Laure entered the church in a truly stunning wedding dress! Once we got to the reception venue, a second Jewish ceremony was held outdoor under the sunny sky and a delicate hoopah. The cocktail reception that followed was truly gastronomic (no run-of-the-mill pains-surprise to be found here) and needless to say, the dinner kept up the tone of fine dining. Was I crazy busy throughout the day? Yes. And it was worth all the effort to see my friends beaming with happiness on their special day.
4 Aug: After a very long day (plus hours of late-night dancing) yesterday, a slow start to the day was needed. With the sun shining on the terrace outside of our room, we opted to have our breakfast here instead of the dining room. A basketful of croissant, pain au chocolat and sliced baguette, amidst the tray filled with home-made jams, butter, freshly squeezed orange juice, tea and coffee – it doesn’t get better than this. Simple pleasures to be savoured :)
That is really random – my last year in Bretagne, I lived about a km away from the Manoir du Kercadio!
Quite! Were you in Erdeven or Ploemel?
nice cut out ;) …2ng aug…so true
i’ve just realised that the wedding photographer didn’t have any photo of the actual final papercut and i didn’t take any either, booo…
wheee! wedding duties done! i’m sure you did an excellent job too :)
yup, wedding duties done! :)