I've been in France for 2.5 months and while it has certainly taken time in getting used to it I'm still enjoying the novelty of being in France. Let me say that again...in France...learning a language I barely know...living amongst people that don't know my tongue...and typing on the godawful French clavier.
But being here has plenty to offer and I'm enjoying it all the time. Kamala is great and very understanding. I'm brave enough to go out on my own without bringing my translator along. The madame in the village boulangerie (bakery) enjoys my meek attempts at buying bread and snacks. I've created my own language to get me through the day, it's a mixture of basic french, some english, some frenchified english (LOL) and if all else fails, handsignals. It works, occassionally, and when it doesn't I go home and ask how do I say... try again to not get laughed out the store.
The French gov't love paperwork. Lots of paperwork, be prepared to need all types of documents. Birth certificates, passports, utility bills, IDs, IDs, family books, you name it. And they'll want duplicates, certified translations, notarized triplicates, ad nauseum.
The food is good. Great is an understatement. It really is off the chain. And you'll drink wine and love it for all occassions. Anything from Bourdeaux and red is good with me. I'm still trying to learn which years are good. I'm still pissed at how much I was paying for "good wine" in the states. I can go in the local supermarche and get a good quality wine for under �10.
I can't say the same for the cheese. I like cheese, I really do. But I prefer it to be a certain consistency? Not smell like something died in my fridge and the less "hair" on it the better. I've been good about trying the cheeses, once, but if it's not working for me then I'll remember. I've already developed my list of safe cheeses that I get at any grocery store.
Which brings me to french men. I'm in the doctor's office with Kamala and he is trying to chat her up right in front of me. I may be american, I may not know a lot of french, but I know when another man is trying to hit on my wife. "You went to Miami to find a husband? What's wrong with french men? blah blah blah" Being french, and a flight attendant I'm sure she's used to it...I hope. But it happens and we smile and laugh and drink our cafes.
Now back to that paperwork.
Last week I spoke of the virtues of using Ruby on Rails. If you are in the web development biz it's hard not to like a programming environment that doesn't make your life simple. For me, the closest comparison I can make is Coldfusion. If you've programmed in CF then you know it's closer to scripting then high level coding. Rails is the real deal, plus you get access to all the Ruby libraries to see how things are done.
The book I was refering to was not a ruby book but a book on PHP and MySQL programming. "PHP5 and MySQL from Novice to Professional", but I'm no novice.
As for the house, we've been getting a lot of interest from agents and buyers. I'm trying to renovate the guest bathroom and kitchen. Patch the leaks and rotted stones. And when its all done...and sold I'll be extremely pleased.
My french observation this week: They have a thing for cheese, not any cheese but really stinky cheese. Kamala's papa brought some cheese over and I spent days scrubbing and tearing apart the cabinets in the kitchen trying to find what died in there. It was that strong and that bad. I stick to emmental and italian. Nice and savory for me.
It came like a bolt of lightning. Rails that is. I've been complacent about it for the last coupler of months. Primarily because I didn't have the time to learn "another programming language", but the weather was particularly extra crap lastnight so I thought what the hell, why not. And it was good, real good, so good infact that I stayed up until 5:30 in the morning getting my brain wrapped around. I built a complete CMS (content management system) in one night using some simple logic and afew books scattered around the floor.
YES! I have entered the church of Ruby on Rails, drank from the special goblet and am on my way to being the evengelist. I've written CMSes in C#, PHP, and Perl. None of them was ever this simple and yet so powerful. By the end of this weekend I will be master of Rails and then I'm going to kick some AJAX ass.