Today marks my 2nd year of living in Geneva, Switzerland. That's two years of no grocery shopping on Sundays, two years of taking a bus into France just to be able to afford meat, and more particularly, two years of trying to pick up French in a city where everyone knows English but everyone insists on speaking French.

Now don't get me wrong, j'aime bien le français, but les francophones don't make it easy for me. Granted, I am a Texan lawyer working on humanitarian law issues at a heavily French-speaking organization that only hired Swiss employees for the first century or so of its existence, so I am well aware of the cultural disruption I must cause on a daily basis. Even if I was not aware, of course, I am certainly reminded twenty times a day of the fact (that many of my coworkers must incessantly worry that I forget) that I am 1) American, 2) Texan, 3) Anglophone, 4) not French-speaking (the distinction between 3 & 4 I must make on behalf of my beloved Canadian friends who may be anglophone but yet have mastered Napoleon's mother tongue).

As anglophones are very much in the minority (and the ICRC is as wary of Americans as Switzerland is of wars and minarets), I have learned to grin and bare the jokes about my French (and my nationality), but I decided to write this blog in order to take out a little of my frustration. Enjoy...et entrez vous.