Ma Vie in France

French news has been full of politically incorrect topics lately, from antisemitism from the comic Dieudonné, to rumors of teaching ‘gender theory’ in French primary schools. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen something in France that truly shocked me. Well last week, I found something. It was while I was walking through the subway station and read the following advertisement in passing : I stopped in front of the poster for a minute, contemplating the term extra-conjugale and then said to myself ‘no, that can’t be right. This can’t be an advertisement for an extra-marital dating site’. Alas, it is. I checked with a French person to make sure I hadn’t misinterpreted the poster. No, and what’s more, these kind of sites are apparently à la mode right now, people are ‘owning up to’ infidelity. Before discussing this further, I’d like to delve deeper into the text of the poster itself. It uses the cheeky imagery of a bitten apple, and the text at the top...

Having just returned from a trip to Paris, I’ve been thinking a lot about the French capital city.  One of the first things I realized when reflecting on Paris is how many memories I have of the city, particularly from my very first trip there. So to take this in a more narrative direction, I’m going to write in this post about my very first encounter with Paris and my memories that touch all five senses. My first trip to Paris was in January 2001 for about 10 days with a small group of students from my high school and our two high school French teachers. At the time I only had 1 semester of French under my belt, and although I could string together sentences, I still hadn’t yet learned past tense, and didn’t know the word for chicken. I remember feelings, like waking up exhausted in the morning from jetlag to get our early morning hotel breakfast (croissants, bread and hot chocolate). The sun comes up later in France, and so it was still dark in the morning until abou...