Two we hope to see on Wednesday


The top house is quite recent and right at the top of our budget. It's about the same size as the house we are renting now. The lower house is 1958, built in reinforced concrete. It's a little bigger, and cheap for the size, and should be near the Pessac town centre and the trams into the city. And I'd like to know what all that wrought iron is about.. (We didn't see them on Wednesday. Maybe Thursday?) Posted by Picasa

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hmm, possible security with a bit of decorative thrown in. I bet you'll have to look up 'wrought iron' in the dictionary! Though it's probably in the house 'blurb'. We, bilinguals have to think beforehand about what we say sometimes, not a bad habit, and one I need to cultivate.
8:55 am
Alan said…
Haha! I am pretty sure (without looking it up) that wrought iron is fer forgé.

But I'll look it up to make sure. Especially after The Great Jug Disaster, when I put the Welsh word for jug in a translation into French. The French word is pichet, and the Welsh word means something quite different in French.
9:03 am
Anonymous said…
Hmm... It reminds me of the gite we were staying in just outside Castillonnes, not too far from you. There was a lovely, really old-fashioned set of hand held scales mounted on the wall. This house was usually left unoccupied so I thought and hoped that our landlady might be prepared to part with them for a consideration. Her English is even more non-existant than my French so imagine the subsequent hillarity, (I still haven't heard the last of it!!), when she came across to the gite to confer with number 2 daughter,(A level French don't y'know). I thought that the French word for 'scales' was 'escallier'. Oh no it isn't. Those who are fluent French speakers will know that I had offered to buy her stairs!!! I now know, in case anyone is interested, that the French word for 'scales' is 'balance'. Yes, well.
9:16 pm
Alan said…
Did she sell 'em to you? What did she want for 'em? And how did she get to the first floor afterwards? And how did you get 'em home?
11:55 pm
Alan said…
the Welsh word in question was piser, meaning jug.

I was stressed, and I hadn't slept much the night before, and someone was doing a geography exam and tapping away with their pencil, and it was a momentary lapse of concentration. Anyway so many words are the same or similar - pont, ffenest, toit, mur, môr, église, ysgol, livre. It was CLOSE. It COULD have been right.

OK, it couldn't.
12:03 am
Anonymous said…
No, she wouldn't sell them, the scales that is. Sadly.

It's a good job that she didn't sell us the 'escalliers' anyway; I think that might have been the year that our roof rack collapsed on us. Who knows what else would have collapsed with a solid set of French wooden sweeping stairs on there. By the way, the 'sweeping' has nothing to do with a brush, rather, its architecture. It swept round with a rather magnificent curve. No, now I remember more clearly, it swept round with a curve, - there was nothing magnificent!

Ah! Now I see that it should have been a sweeping set of.......etc.
1:43 am
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