100%. Down and Out in Paris and London is definitely in my top five books of all time.

Skinny (but not super skinny, rather 511 Levi’s) jeans are the superior cut of jeans. My wife convinced me to buy a pair of baggy skater jeans and they’re fine for around the house but I just can’t stand the way they make my legs look lost in them, and I’m not exactly a small guy.

I would say B2, but it really depends, because fluency is not linear. My tested level (as in, I have a DELF certificate) is B2 in French, but because I use the language every day and am fully immersed, my actual level is easily C1, and I can read advanced texts without much trouble, only occasionally needing to refer to a dictionary for vocab I’m not familiar with. However, I still do not find the grammar intuitive at times; it just feels foreign even though I know how it works. In comparison, I’ve been studying German, and although the grammar is much more complex, and my level is nowhere near my level in French, the grammar “feels” right. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s because it’s in the same language family as my mother tongue, I don’t know.

All this to say that, yeah, it depends.

Maudit anglais !

That’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer, as my experience is strictly from working in the trades here. One thing to note is that the mayor’s office has a huge say in all that, and as someone mentioned above, there are often regulations on things like roof colour, so that houses in a given neighborhood all have matching roof tiles. I have friends that built a house nearby that the mayor hated because it wasn’t conformist enough for his tastes (they had incorporated lots of wood, resultant in a house with a more North American-style trim), but he’s totally fine with bland-ass white squares with red roofs, lol.

Actually it’s more about building the houses as cheap as possible, because although French houses are generally much sturdier and better insulated than North American homes, building codes are not really well controlled here. They don’t even do plumbing and electrical inspections in new builds.

This is normally only a problem when conversing with monolinguals. Almost anyone who has expended the immense energy required to learn a second language will understand that language ability and intelligence are completely separate.

That being said, it is a shitty feeling that I have experienced many times.

I really hope Darnold can get the offense rolling. If The Dark Side can keep the game close, I think we have a pretty good chance. Go Hawks!

If you think for one second that corporations don’t run the government in France, then tell that to the gendarmerie, who are as we speak posted all over my area in order to protect the construction of a new highway that nobody wants. Oh, and the highway isn’t free to use, either. After all, how else would the company building it pay to put it there?

While I can’t say that you’re wrong, Age of Empires 2 has a solid and extremely loyal community, and they just released a new expansion that everyone is super happy with (especially compared to the last two.)

Canadian here. We used both “Knicky knocky nine doors” and “ding dong ditch,” but if I remember correctly, the first was more prevalent, and definitely is the first thing that comes to mind for me personally.

Oh, and I’m a middle millennial.

Fair enough. Guess there’s really nothing that is truly universally liked.