avoir du gout pour une vie saine

I'm going to join the ranks of Canadian Anglophones who can carry on a conversation in French, a small but proud group comprising about 7.1% of the Anglos outside Quebec. I must do this. If I want a good public service job in Ottawa, and most of the good jobs are with the public service around here, I better be bilingual. I've tried before. I moved to Trois-Rivier for a whole summer and sweated in a restaurant kitchen so that I can now name items from all the food groups, and say rude things. It's a start. There is a strange demographic around my workplace. If you're not francophone, then you must be from Montreal. Hmm.... No, I'm from that other part of Canada, where French is the language of cereal boxes. There was a Belgian girl I knew in grade 7 who could speak French. The French teacher was Italian. They would speak in English about the differences between French and Italian, because I don't think the French teacher could speak French. By the end of two years of French instruction I could chant verbs, a skill that I have not lost. Je suis, tu est, elle est, nous avon, vous avez... This has never come in handy in the real world. That being said, the opportunity to become bilingual has never been better. There are actually people around here who know what French supposed to sound like. I'm hearing it all the time, and it's making sense. I'm thinking outside the cereal box.