TOP TEN INTERESTING THINGS / FUN FACTS ABOUT FRANCE !!!
It is very common to make fun of France or to be critical of it, when you live there:
(French accent and clichés)
(Demonstrating: a fun activity!)
Snails are a delicacy.
The traditional way to prepare them involves starving them, making them throw up with salt, and boiling them, which really makes you not want to be a snail in France. Luckily, not all snails are eaten: the good ones are called “Bourgogne snails”, and even some of these are a protected species.
For more information about French recipes, make sure to visit this awesome and brand-new website.
“Pardon my French” is a very accurate expression: there are a lot of insults in French. Actually, anything can become an insult as long as you add “espèce de” in front of the word you want to use: “espèce d’ordinateur”, “espèce d’étoile” translate as “you computer” and “you star”, but are phrased like insults because of “espèce de”. If you add an article in front of these two words (“une espèce de”), the phrase means “a sort of”, “a kind of” or even “a species of”.
French is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish, English and Arabic.
Daft Punk, Phoenix and David Guetta are all French.
We also have a lot of other quirky/interesting songs and singers:
French toast is called “pain perdu” (lost bread) in France: it was made from left-over bread that was already too hard to be eaten! On the same line, French fries are actually Belgian (but some people in France think of them as American). Once again, there will be more recipes and food stories very soon on the LLC International Kitchen Blog.
When France won its first and only soccer world cup, it looked like this.
Easy French 101: a stop sign is “un stop”, a hamburger is “un hamburger”, a pizza is “une pizza”, design is “design” and a fashion victim is “une fashion victim”. But “un car” is a bus, “la fac” is college, and “le collège” is middle-school…
In case you move to France and decide to adopt a pig (why not?), you should know that it is forbidden to call your pig “Napoleon”! No one has actually cared enough about that law to take the steps to remove it: it was adopted under Napoleon Ist and has remained the same ever since.