June 08, 2005

Haut Fonctionnaires de France...
One thing that I love about my job is the wide range of people that I get to meet, and the different tours that I get to give. Yesterday I gave two tours (normally we give 3 a day, and 4-5 a day in the summer). My first one was an English public tour, with people on it from many different countries, states, and provinces.
In the evening, I gave a tour to about 20 "haut fonctionnaires" from France, which are basically high-ranking civil-servants. The arrived late after dinner, which is why I only gave 2 tours yesterday. They were the heads of social development from various regions in France, and were here on an educational tour to learn about social and fiscal development and issues in Canada. They were all very polite, and very French. It`s interesting how you can pick out various groups from European countries. For example, there was a group of 100 visitors from Spain, and we could tell while they were still a long ways away that it was them, simply based on the way they were dressed.
Once I had a tour of Québécois seniors, which was a lot of fun. However, they were in a rush to get to the Casino in Hull (Lac Leamy), so they wanted me to shorten all of the stops. Another one of the guides had a Québécois seniors group who had 4 members missing because they had just won $1000 in the casino, and refused to leave their lucky machines!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

how could you tell the Spanish people??

Stephen said...

The way they dressed had a lot to do with it. I can`t really describe it, but there`s a certain way that Southern Europeans dress, which is different from the Brits, from the Germans, from the Northern Europeans...
In any case, they didn`t look North American!

Anonymous said...

What were some of the questions the civil servants asked of you? Did you tell them about your experiences in Lille?

Anonymous said...

have you tried the casinos?

Stephen said...

I haven`t been to the casino yet, but I`m planning to go at some point over the summer. It`s relatively difficult to get to via public transport.
I only told the French ppl that I had worked as an Assistant d'Anglais. They asked more detailed questions about the legislative process, etc. Nothing odd or weird.