France and Me.
We didn't know this beforehand. Martinique is owned by France and is like any other province on the mainland: 100% French. Between Ana and I we're very bilingual, but no one spoke neither Spanish nor English, it was incredible. At our hotel, the whole staff spoke only French (except the front desk who spoke halting English) and all the other guests of course were only French. Once we got onto the boat, it was more of the same - with only the captain of the boat speaking any English at all and every other couple only speaking French. All the announcements were in French. The movies were in French. Everything. Two weeks of solid French... which would be fine, but even after buying a phrasebook, Ana and I were lost. The low-point came when the captain knocked on our door one morning: "Pardon. But everyone is waiting for you on the bus." Bus? What bus? Where ARE we? We had no idea.
Yes, it's true for both Martinique and Guadeloupe: their economy is very dependent on tourism but they're not very friendly to foreigners. I haven't been to Martinique but Guadeloupe is marvelous. You just have to learn the language ! I've had the same feeling in China (I once embarked a bus not knowing where it was going) and in Tamil Nadu (we were lost in the countryside and the people we met were, rare thing in India, only speaking Tamil)
Recently Nouvelles Frontieres closed one of its hotels in Guadeloupe. I've read it in Liberation but you need to pay for their archive and this resonant news does not seem to have reached the web :-)
That brings us to present day... It now seems that once again French is making an appearance in my life. In the past few days I've learned that there's a large contingent of French people in the Java.blog group! Erik and Cedric are from France and living in the U.S. and Patrick is French and living back in Paris after several years in Silicon Valley! Wow... all these guys amongst us! Anyone else?!? (The thing about these guys is they've all work or worked for big name tech companies like Apple, Sun and BEA. It's very interesting. I wonder what that means?)
Maybe that France has a good educational system ?
Or that the french traditional cartesianism gives us good preparation to deal with machines. Maybe this will change when machines grow more evolved: after machines pass the Turing test, maybe you'll need more artistic capabilities than cartesianism to get something out of machines (you can already experience this with perl though, since it's the first postmodern language :-)
And finally At my current job, all the web servers are in Lyon and I've already been booked and cancelled twice to go up there and check them out. Very soon I'll be in France again... yet again without any sort of knowledge of the French language. Ugh!
Lyon is the capital of french gastronomy. I highly recommend you to go !
Don't forget to taste the hot saucisson, with a beaujolais red wine.
Anyways, it looks like it might be the right time to take some lessons in French. Now that my monoglot mind is warmed up to the idea of speaking another language, maybe learning a third wouldn't be that bad. (That's what they say at least) Well, learning how to count and order a drink at the bare minimum wouldn't be bad since I'm obviously going to be experiencing French throughout my life...
...
[Russell Beattie Notebook]
As Bogart tells the french cop in Casablanca "This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship." :-)
10:51:40 PM 
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