Hello, ladies and gentlemen, guys and gals, boys and girls, hello everyone. This is the Yerville

Tower podcast. My name is Oliver G. This is a weekly show about Paris, about France, sometimes about the French

language. Sometimes it's a mix of them all, and it kind of is this week, actually. My guest is Valéry,

Nicola. And I met her very recently. She's about to

set off for a very interesting adventure. She's going to be the head honcho, the directress general of the

Alliance Francaise in Australia. If that just sounds like a lot of French words to you, that's all right.

She explains it about halfway through.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of you guys out there are members of the Allianz Francaise, language school all over the world.

So you probably know what you're in for. Now the topic, now it's hard in an episode like this to sort of single it

down to one topic for the headline that you clicked on. But we tried to see the conversation

around the things that you miss as a French person when you go abroad. And Valéé

was very interesting in this case because she's lived in so many different countries and so many different cultures.

And so I was particularly fascinated by the things that she missed.

I'm not going to give it away.

She's going to sort of reel them off as we get into the conversation a little bit.

A note on the episode, we recorded it in the marais, in the sort of upper marais.

In English, you'd call it the square

du Tompler or temple, the square du Tompl, a really beautiful park you should all visit.

And if you close your eyes, you can probably imagine you're sitting on the park bench with us

looking out over the ducks, the pond, the children playing, table tennis players in the background.

You can picture it.

A quick word of thanks to the Patreon supporters.

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