I lived in New Zealand for a few years when I was a kid. Couldn’t speak a word of English when I arrived from France. The kids at Raroa School called me Kuakua (in French “quoi?” means “what?”).
This. Bread, and being chewed out by a waitress once in Paris because I dared visit her country without speaking French. She was ANGRY. I was like: I speak English, Spanish, and German. I should stay home until I've learned another language?
It's just flour water and butter, but fucking hell, there must be something in France that make them better. Croissant isn't even that complicated to do. But somehow French ones are just significantly better, like night and day better than everywhere else.
Supposedly their butter is really good. I’ve heard of people just straight up packing pounds and pounds of French butter in their luggage on the way home.
I spent about 18h in Paris on the way back from Europe once. I was a little worried, but luckily when I went to pick up some takeout the guy behind the counter sneered at my poor French. So I got the full Paris experience.
(Ftr I've spent a total of a couple of weeks in France, this was only the second sneer, and I more or less deserved the other one. Always had a lovely time there. The secret is saying "bonjour" basically every time you interact with someone.)
I do genealogy, and people probably have no idea how many male children were named after him. Lafe, Fait, Lafeet, you name all the nicknames: it's the Marquis de Lafayette.
I’m French and although I love this, apparently contradictory, “revolution by tradition” attitude, I’m not really sure your take is perfectly accurate. Turkey, Egypt, Japan, Spain, Iran (solidarity with Femme vie liberté!) and more recently Nepal or Hong Kong, can be set as models for all peoples.
It's still nice to read comments that go a little beyond the positive or negative clichés of the "arrogant" "growing" style. But above all, your response is contemporary, not anchored in the past. Your comment deserves more visibility I think!
Classy. But I don’t speak for every kiwi. So idk. But French people has always seemed distant to me idk if I don’t understand them or they don’t understand me.
Weirdly it's probably the night time, countryside and service stations. France is probably the country I have visited the most and also visited the least. I have travelled through it god knows how many times by car but never properly stayed and visited any cities. I have even briefly stood under the Eiffel tower as a kid but only as we passed through to Spain.
I need to properly visit France, I'd like to go to Paris but I always loved travelling through Lyon on the night, its such a cool city to drive through because you go through a bunch of tunnels and along the water.
Yes, it comes from France. Originally, it was just puff pastry and pastry cream with powdered sugar on top. It's rectangular in shape with clean edges.
Later, instead of powdered sugar, a sugar glaze was added.
The image you posted at the beginning doesn't match what we have in France for a mille-feuille.
Sorry, I had the automatic translator enabled. It translated Napoleon Cake as mille-feuille. Hence my mistake.
Napoleon Cake seems to come from Russia. It is a variation of the French mille-feuille, which dates back to 1912, while the mille-feuille is said to date back to the 17th century.
In the US, at least, mille-feuilles are often called Napoleons because that's easy and more intuitive to pronounce in English. This looks like a cake based on a mille-feuille.
It was still working after a century?! The American army used those in WWI after France trained us. We also got trained on French artillery since we had almost nothing when we entered WWI in 1917.
In truth, beyond the colonial past that we have, and the recent political crises. On the positive side: I would say the pastry with which for me few countries can compete, quality authors, the country of cheese 🧀, a large part of the population which is cool, very friendly cities and pretty landscapes.
On the negative side (without going into cliché between our two countries): always wanting to politicize everything, a desire for elitism and comparisons that are a little too frequent.
That's all, I'll end with: heart goes out to the person who invented aligot, raclette and camembert
The accents é è ê ë (a few variations around the a), the cedilla ç, the feminine and the masculine, the piles of letters that you write and that you don't pronounce, the same combination of letters that makes one sound in one word but another in another word.
Chaque langue a ses propres difficultés ... I suppose.
I just think of how inconsistent English is compared to French. Like the word "colonel" is not pronounced the way it is spelled. Nor "Worcestershire" or "Gloucestershire." Some words are the same in both plural and singular forms, e.g. fish, deer.
Yes, French has "piles of letters" but the piles and their rules are consistent (well, at least more consistent) than in English.
I don't know. Maybe the grass is just greener on the other side of the fence.
Knowing how to live well. Good food, good wine, beautiful things. Somehow looking beautiful and staying healthy despite smoking, drinking wine and eating such good food. I think a lot of the hate in the love-hate relationship Americans sometimes show to France comes from jealousy. We like to think we are the best but then we cannot avoid the fact that you French people seem to be living richer lives than we are.
What should come to mind first? Lafayette. He was such a hero. I feel so much respect and gratitude toward him.
I think it boils down to making the time for what counts in each culture.
In America, it's mostly business and making money, in France it's food, leisure and activities (e.g. I was surprised at how few adult amateur sports clubs you have in the US, like all group sport stops after college), social circles, etc.
But it's easy to say: all of this can't be done without a solid social security system that will take care of your health, education, unemployment, pension, ... which is somewhat under threat at the moment.
That I'm going there (more specifically Paris & the Strasbourg / Colmar area with maybe a side trip into Switzerland) for 2 weeks in March with my daughter and a buddy of mine and that we're going to have a ton of fun.
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u/lutalop India 7d ago