Top 10 Cultural Differences Between France and the USA

Hello les francophiles ! Aussi loin que je me souvienne, j’ai toujours adoré voyager, pouvoir visiter des nouveaux pays, et surtout découvrir d’autres cultures, c’est très enrichissant. S’informer sur la culture et les habitudes d’un pays, c’est bien, mais s’immerger et vivre dans sa culture, c’est encore mieux. Cela fait un peu plus de trois mois maintenant que je vis aux États-Unis, à Chicago; et je peux vous dire que passer d’un village de 350 habitants en pleine campagne à la troisième plus grande ville des US avec 3 millions d’habitants, eh ben ça change la vie !

French Revolution Collection at the Newberry Library – and a Chance to Hone your Translation Skills!

Did you know that a piece of French history sits just steps from the Alliance? Since the early 1960’s, our neighbor, The Newberry Library, has been home to a massive collection of over 38,000 pamphlets published during the French Revolution era. That amounts to over half a million pages! The collection contains everything from issues of well-known Parisian periodicals to more provincial publications, and even court proceedings and music.

Indulge in some French comfort food

Comfort food is an almost universally known concept. You have a hard day, you come home and you eat a gallon of mac and cheese and maybe you just feel a little bit better. Or maybe you had something a little more interesting to sate your hunger. If you identify with this, maybe it’s time you learned a little bit more about French comfort food!

Dolphins become bilingual in their sleep. What does that mean for us humans?

At the Planète Sauvage in Port-Saint-Père, France in 2011 it was observed that captive dolphins were talking in their sleep. While sleep-talking in general can be rather alarming, what made this even stranger was that they weren’t speaking the same dolphin language they speak during their waking hours. Instead they the sounds were closer to a whale language!

Read our interview with Sophie Loubière!

[caption id=“attachment3110” align=“alignleft” width=“231”] _Sophie Loubière[/caption] Sophie Loubière is a French journalist and writer who already published more than ten novels. She is urrently working on a new one, B__loody Coffee and this one will be set in Chicago! Before listening to her next week, come read about her in our exclusive interview;

Fun facts about Tales of Hoffmann

Jaques Offenbach composed the opera The Tales of Hoffmann in the late 1870s. Before dying he apparently had a premonition that he would not survive to see his opera performed… He ended up being right as he died only four months before the opera was performed for the first time! As a result, many different editions of his original score have been altered and this means that there are many different editions in existence. Recently there have been efforts to reinstate the opera to a close approximation of the original.