Bonjour et bienvenue!

 Bonjour! Welcome to my blog for all things Francophone and Francophile in Lexington, KY. As the organiser of the Lexington Francophones from 2021 to Spring 2025, I discovered lots of things about the effort of being or becoming bilingual, and likewise for the practice of conversation. This blog, which I created for use during my time as organiser of the language group, features topics related to foreign language skills, travel, and life in different cultures and countries. Now that I have resigned from this role,  I am maintaining the blog as an archive of some of the most useful articles I wrote over that period, and I will perhaps continue to add to it from time to time.

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Another Late Book Review

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  Who says twenty years is too long for talking about a new-to-me book? Actually, Almost French,  Australian journalist Sarah Turnbull's 2004 memoir about the unexpected romance that led her to start a new life in France in the mid-1990s, felt right on time to me. Turnbull's vivid experiences trying to relate to her new boyfriend's friends and associates were among the topics of our Sunday conversation a few weeks ago.  A week later, I was loaned a copy which I read with a bit of nostalgia for a dreamy, now-inaccessible Paris, that was also still (work with me here) a future-dream-Paris-before-I-knew-Paris. Which is to say that I didn't make my first trip to Paris until 2008, four years after the memoir was published, and by then, the internet and cell phones were already changing the landscape, although it was well before sites like AirBnB began to drastically alter the way tourists and locals moved.  I was thrilled to read that Turnbull and her boyfriend, Frédéric/...
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