Skip to main content

Nantes, or not

Our field trip to Nantes is all set, again; this time with a group of undergraduates who are studying on one of the many modules in French language studies.  Crossing the Channel in January was perhaps rather ambitious of me, so this journey is set for 4th May 2016.  We travel to Southampton by train from Plymouth on the Tuesday, staying overnight in the Premier Inn on the airport and then fly FlyBe direct to NTE on Wednesday. 

Bénédicte and Xavier at Le Voyage à Nantes have been very patient after my first research visit was postponed, and they have stepped in to help us to find venues and attractions for our students of French.  For example, they have found this wine bar to host our WSET training afternoon (Wine & Spirit Education Trust): La Comédie des Vins.  I am looking forward to reporting back from there on this blog: Travel Writers Online





Our French lesson for this post is taken from our lunchtime series of teaching quality talks at the university today, since it fits perfectly for a sight-seeing expedition to the city of Nantes with its Island of Machines: 

Tu as eu l’occasion de voir tout ce que tu voulais ?

Did you have chance to see all you wanted to? 

Or ‘all that you were wanting to see’ since that last verb, vouloir, is in the imperfect tense.  The sentence gives a useful example of the use of the imperfect where the desire the see the sights was in the past but lasted for some time while the opportunity to see them was gone.


For more on the WSET Qualifications, please see their web-site






 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you. Please do a SHARE too...

Follow by Email

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

AI Detector

I've been looking at AI Detectors that are now stable and easy to use. The first one to write about is from a company based in Montreal, and so, as you would expect from that bilingual city, it works on English and French texts. It's called Winston AI. The AI detector tells you if written copy is generated by a human or an Artificial Intelligence text generator robot. It uses a graphic sliding scale. The software also detects plagiarism and presents a thorough list of any copied content it has found. As a user of Winston AI you just paste text into the quick scan option. You can upload bigger documents in the following formats: .docx, .pdf, .png and .jpg for the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system to convert to electronic text from scanned documents or pictures. This also works on handwriting like Google Lens and the other handwritten text readers and convertors do. The Winston AI Detector works in projects, this lets you label or title pieces you are examining for plagi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference Paris

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference - Paris 19-21 June 2024 Aims of the Conference The conference aims to explore the links between tourism and fiction, and more precisely to consider tourism and tourists as fictions. It is part of a series of conferences organized since 2011 by researchers from the Universities of Geneva, Panthéon-Sorbonne and Berkeley to explore the links between tourism and the imaginary. The first four meetings had evoked how tourism mobilized imaginaries specific to destination countries, their landscapes, their cultures and their inhabitants. The fifth conference will focus on the imaginary that applies to tourists themselves. Imaginary tourists We will examine how the various actors of tourism, as well as the places and practices of tourism, appear in works of fiction. Literature, cinema, theater, song, advertising, etc., stage tourist configurations, which are sometimes at the very heart of these fictions.  Fictional tourists include those invent...
24 comments
Read more

Brežice, a place of mystery

Brežice, a place of mystery           Photo: Water tower in Brežice, Bine Leben, 20.1.2024     Travel writing from the University of Maribor, Faculty of Tourism. Masters Programme: English in Tourism – Higher Level 2    Author: Teja Leben     Mentor: Dr. Jasna Potočnik Topler     Brežice, a place of mystery     Already from afar, after the highway exit for Krško from the direction of Ljubljana, I notice the silhouette of Brežice, highlighted by the Water Tower and the bell tower of the Church of St. Lovrenc, which I read about before the trip. Both rise above the houses and grove of the old town. Otherwise, you can also see a few taller high-rise buildings next to them, but very few, so even from a distance it can be concluded that Brežice is a small town. I am on the right track, as I would like to discover something more about Brežice and share it with the world.     ...
4 comments
Read more