Hey everybody, it's Elise popping back into your feed because we wanted to share with you another story from our friends at Rough Translation.

We wanted to share this particular episode not only because we genuinely love it, but because it relates to a story that I did in the second season of our show.

That piece was about the very first Russian McDonald's that opened in Moscow in 1990 and how much work it took to teach the Russian employees how to smile at customers

because culturally smiling was a very different thing in Russia at that time than it was in America.

If you want to go hear our story, check out our season 2 episode called The New Norm.

Hana also has an amazing story in there about this bunch of macho oil rig workers who learn how to cry.

But today, Rough Translation takes us to Marseille France where a McDonald's had a completely different meaning for a very specific group of residents.

Here's Rough Translation host Greg Warner.

Though she has a French passport and the most French of names, Marie France.

My name is Marie France Amata.

And though she uses the cointest French expressions when she's upset.

Oh purée. Oh purée, which is like oh fudge. It took Marie France 40 years to feel truly French.

Marie France grew up in this public housing project in Marseille in the south of France.

Mama.

Our reporters in this story, NPR's Paris correspondent Eleanor Beardsley and her own Marianne McEun.

So Marie France, even though she was French and born in France, she says she never really felt French.

People didn't consider her French. They saw her as African or Muslim from this bad neighborhood.

And she said a teacher told her one time,

I bother getting your degree. Why don't you just drop out and make babies?

Oh, and I'll do it.

She spent the next decades bouncing from job to job, battling depression, raising her daughter alone.

And then something changed. She got a new job.

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