Vacations/holidays

French Phrases: Vacations/holidays

Places you go on holiday

OK, this is a personal matter, but here are some places you
might go on holiday:

Getting there...

Here are some expressions for mentioning the mode of transport:

Note that you generally never use aller "on its own": you must always
either mention a place, or else insert the word y.
So to say "we went by car", you would say on y est allé en voiture,
because you're not mentioning the specific place (or you can say on a pris la voiture).

Things to do on holiday

Here are how to say some common holiday activities in French:

Things that go wrong

Here's how to explain some of the things that tend to go wrong with
my holidays. Surely these have never happened to you:

1. Depending on context, this could also mean "we lost our luggage".
2. dégueulasse is a slang, but very common, word meaning "gross", disgusting;
it's sometimes shortened to dègue or dégueu
(e.g. "trop dègue" = "totally gross").
3. bouffer is a slang word meaning "to eat", but it's quite common.
4. The word piquer with this meaning is informal, but again quite common.

Other holiday essentials

Here are some other phrases and vocab that are useful for
talking about holidays: