Paris
Wednesday, November 14 Larry does not like cities but he makes an exception for Paris. I'm a city girl at heart, so I feel reasonably at home here -- with the exception of the language barrier, of course. I am learning some new vocabulary which I can understand when it is written down, but I am totally unable to understand anything that is spoken -- even when I hear it and see it at the same time. My ear is not tuned to the cadence of French, and the French do not speak distinctly. They slur their words together as if an entire sentence were one word. Someone that I was talking with recently (in English) said that just about anyone under the age of, say, 40 has learned English in school as it is becoming the lingua franca of the European Union. (Isn't that ironic since England is leaving the EU.) Americans and Brits (and Canadians, and Australians, etc, etc) will in future decades have less trouble when they come here to France. However, since French is not widely spok