It is not often I have time to go discover, let alone read other blogs -- as much as the whole concept of blogging fascinates me.
Not that I don't want to, but just that I never know where to find the time to do it.
The expression "Free time" has always been something that fascinated me. What exactly is it? After all, between keeping up to date with my vast email correspondence list, and finding interesting - and well researched material for my weekly lecture at the UTL in Bergerac, and finding new hitherto-unknown material about my little habitat with which to maintain my reputation for being a font-of-information, and finding an interesting and topical subject for my weekly French conversation class -- including the relevant laroussed vocabulary in which to debate, in true French fashion, that interesting topic, and scratching out from under the ruins and brochures and library dust and village gossip and media-overload those tasty, interesting, topical little titbits, again appropriately backed up with solid facts, which to post on my blog (have you also noticed how no spell check will accept 'blog' or any derivative of the word? Get with it, Spell Checks!!) and keep my lovely loyal readers content and reading all the zillion interesting things one finds along the way, (googling is a demon pastime...ummm......no, killer of time, I tell you!), and doing all of that in the time allotted each day for spending in front of a computer - as opposed to being out there where life is happening, is not an easy task!
So --it is not in any free time that I found a new blog today (that is, new for me). It was whilst I was looking up what events are on in Paris at the moment, as I am planning to go spend a few days there next month, that I chanced a site that, I have to add, I would not have given a second glance if the first had not grabbed my attention. Why no second glance? Because the site is for, by and about expats -- and ............ well, let's agree to keep that story for another time!
Then at least, what did grab my attention with the first glance? Go look for yourself and enjoy what you find! it is a well-balanced, objective, informative, interesting and comprehensive site and the feeling I got when entering the site, was not that this was a place where expats come to draw the wagons in around them and feel at home and get the comfort of being amongst 'their own', but rather that it was for people who, like myself, have chosen to make France their home, and this was a place where you go to share with other like-minded people the wonderful discoveries we make and the adventures, good and bad, we experience daily in our new chosen home.
Whilst wandering around the many varied pages in the site, and being a blogger-with-no-recall, I had to go have a look at the blogs the editor recommended. (There are a couple of fun blogs there and one or two that caught my fancy and which I will report on later.) But there were also a few news articles that caught my attention:
1. Lights out at the Eiffel Tower to help save the planet(You have to love the French's sense of style -- even when it comes to conservational correctness!)
(excerpt from : PARIS, Jan 30, 2007 (AFP)) - The Eiffel Tower's lights will be turned off for five minutes on Thursday as part of a campaign to save energy and draw attention to the plight of the planet.
The agency that manages the Paris landmark said Tuesday that it will be joining a campaign to draw attention to "sustainable development and the preservation of the planet" with the five-minute blackout at 19:55 (1855 GMT).
The campaign called "Five Minutes of Respite for the Planet" is being held as world experts meet in Paris to thrash out a report on global warming.
The Eiffel Tower has recently changed its lighting system to reduce energy consumption by 30 percent, according to the SETE agency that manages it.
First French racism survey released(Heaven forbid they go that way -- before having a good look what is happening in a country like South Africa where affirmative action and quotas, i.e. reverse racism is applied. And then, you have to love the French's sense of political correctness, --- and then they say they are not keeping up with the rest of the world!)
(excerpt from: PARIS, Jan 31, 2007 (AFP)) - More than half of blacks in France say they fall victim to discrimination on a daily basis, according to the results of the first ever survey of French blacks released Wednesday.
The survey commissioned by a black advocacy group, the Representative Council of Black Associations, and conducted by the TNS-Sofres polling firm estimated that 4 percent of France's adult population is black, totalling 1.865 million.
Releasing the survey, the Council called for more data on French minorities, arguing that the state's refusal to collect information on its citizens' racial background was compounding the problem of racism in France.
"For a long time, we were told there wasn't a problem because there weren't any figures," said Patrick Lozes, the president of the Council.
"This survey is a diagnosis," said Lozes, a French-educated pharmacist who was born in Benin. "These statistics show what this society does not want to hear or see."
But calls for affirmative action or quotas for minorities have irked many in France who champion the nation's model of a colour-blind nation that emphasizes integration.
3. And the last fascinating feature that caught my eye: Managing the shock of re-entry
For many global nomads, re-entry shock upon returning home from a foreign assignment is much more significant than their adjustment to the new culture. But a repatriation trainer can ease the transition. Mary Beauregard reports. Coming home is all about the familiar, the comfortable and the secure. Corporate expatriates, much like Dorothy, go to their own 'Oz', a strange, perhaps exotic place with different rules, routines and language.
According to Global Relocation Trends' 2005 survey conducted by GMAC, 81 percent of companies provide pre-departure cross cultural training for their expatriates and 20 percent of these companies make it mandatory.
So, it is most likely the expat and family were at least minimally primed to modify their expectations, adapt to a different life-style and recognise culture shock during their stay in the new country.
But what is the protocol upon their return? Are expats prepared to experience an adjustment which sometimes lasts twice as long as their adjustment to the new culture? Expats and experts both say no. For many of these global, nomads re-entry shock is much more significant than their adjustment to the new culture. They were expecting to be ill at ease in a foreign country, but not at all prepared to feel like a foreigner when they return home...... (read the rest of this article on the expatica site)
Again -- I found this fascinating. Just recently I read an article by a well-known South African expat who had returned 'home' from Australia. Surely the world experts on 'expatriotism' and 're-entry shock' would have to be South Africans -- both black and white. Where in the world has there ever been such a mass exodus -- and re-entry, as in that country over the last thirty+ years? Amongst the people who would be the experts on the subject, are many black friends who went into political exile over the years and went back to a much changed country -- and not necessarily the one had they had yearned for whilst they were gone; white friends who left for political reasons too, "Packed for Perth" - or Canada, or the UK, made huge successes of their lives and jobs, contributed generously and unconditionally -- as is the South African way -- to their newly adopted homes of their time and innovative spirits and expertise and brilliance, then went back because once an African, be it in black or white skin, always an African, once again only to find that their country did not want them any more -- because they were the wrong colour, the wrong gender, the wrong age, the wrong.......; family who went back after years in exile to find that those that had stayed behind had .....stayed behind -- in every sense of the word. Yes -- an interesting article indeed, but if you need guidelines on how to go back to the country of your heart, the country of your birth, the country of your dreams, then talk to a South African expat/exile, and learn from the source of knowledge on this subject.Click on Link:
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