Walking around the island last night we ran into a young woman we hadn’t seen before out walking her dog. I asked her, as I tend to do, where she was from. Judging by the accent, and her looks, I was thinking Martinique.
“Paris,” she said, and I immediately wondered why 90% of the French people one meets in the U.S. hail from Paris. Are Bretons and Alsatians so set in their ways that they can’t conceive of leaving?
At least the dog was original: a Catalan sheep dog. It was a breed we had never seen before, had never even heard of. He was an animated ball of light brown fur.
“They’re very intelligent,” the woman said in French. “They used them to carry messages during the Civil War.”
Edified, we wished the woman a pleasant evening and continued our walk.
