For my story I need a sporting event (or some other sort of big event) that would take a lot of supporters from France to Britain, or from Britain to France, in the second or third week of September 1997. There don't appear to have been any relevant football games (at least in the European League), and it's too early for Rugby so far as I can tell ( Read more... )

Setting: Annecy and Corsica, France, August 2008 ( Read more... )

Gacked from sbisson: Detailed rail maps for a lot of places in Europe, including London's underground, showing the real layout rather than a stylised map ( Read more... )

I have a character who is referring to someone she dislikes, slipping occasionally into French. I rather like the word "blaireau" for tone and sound, but I am not sure how early it was used in its contemporary insulting meaning. The older French-English dictionaries I have found from the late 1800's only give its literal meanings as "badger" or " ( Read more... )

Hi everyone ( Read more... )

Greetings! I have two bizarrely specific questions, but they're actually pretty plot-significant, so.

Where: 18th arrondissement, Paris, France
When: present day (spring of 2013, really, on the off-chance that there've been major changes to the answer in the past year ( Read more... )

As I understand it, 'poulet' (chicken, hen) is slang for police in French ( Read more... )

Here's the situation: I am trying to get my characters from Dover, Kent (of white cliffs fame) across the English Channel to France. Setting is late 19th century, but for various reasons, the ferries/mail packets are not an option. My working assumption is that they can find a fisherman with a boat that can make the crossing if they offer him ( Read more... )

How common or uncommon would it be for someone who lived in Basque country to speak English?  I am not finding anything about that online

The reason I would like to know, is that I want to put a small family in a story where at least the parents neither speak nor understand English. Another character recognizes this because he can tell where they ( Read more... )

So I'm writing a story that takes place in the present day, and in one early scene I mention--just mention--a guy/girl named "Mouru". I figure that's a real surname, and I don't bother looking it up because I'm an idiot.

This Mouru person isn't actually ever supposed to make an appearance. He/she is just filler text, plain and simple, but somehow...

( Read more... )