If you’d like to sleep inside a fairy tale, you might want to pay a visit to La Balade des Gnômes, a quiet bed and breakfast where you can live out your fairy tale dreams, including one inside the belly of a wooden bull.
Details and pictures of interiors at io9.
Save the date for the Acadian World Congress 2014! Details: Congrès mondial acadien 2014.
…once upon a time, the ability to speak French properly was considered an absolute essential. In 26 chapters, each focusing on a different colourful Francophile, Fumaroli makes his way across 18th-century Europe. The book is a gallery of Russians, Prussians, Swedes, Poles, Italians and Englishmen; politicians, soldiers, kings and collectors, who all aspired to speak and write the French language beautifully…
Read the rest at The Independent and buy the book at our Amazon store!
Built by the same firm that renovated the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, the Red Star Line Museum will open in Belgium in 2013. All told, the train had transported 2.6 million people through Europe on their way to the United States–Antwerp was typically the last stop before America. Passengers on the line, which ran from 1873 to 1934, included Albert Einstein, Irving Berlin, Golda Meir and Arthur Murray.
Read the rest at Forbes and visit the Red Star Line Museum site.
Thought up by the French cartoonist Plantu, Cartooning for Peace is an initiative born on 16 October 2006 at UN headquarters in New York. A two-day conference organised by Kofi Annan, the then Secretary General of the United Nations, brought together the twelve best-known political cartoonists in the world for “unlearning intolerance”.
Cartooning for Peace is based in Geneva. Don’t miss the current outdoor exhibit in Geneva till July 10: Geneva Lunch.
A high spot in the world of Swiss chocolate is the annual awards ceremony for the next generation of chocolatiers-confisseurs in canton Vaud, designed to promote the three-year apprenticeship programme. [...] The theme of this year’s contest was haute couture, and part of the ceremony was a fashion show with four dresses made from chocolate, including one worn by Miss Suisse Romande, who wore white chocolate.
Read the rest at GenevaLunch. See all the student creations on the official site of the Société Vaudoise et Romande des Patrons Pâtissiers-Confiseurs, Chocolatiers, Glaciers (click Images).
Les Aventures de Tintin, by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) coming to theaters in December! Here’s the official Tintin site. Get your Tintin books in the Francophilia Amazon store!
For more than 10 years, French for the Future has been organizing forums for high school students in numerous cities across Canada. Students from different schools get together to participate in workshops to learn about the benefits of bilingualism in Canada.
Check out this great nonprofit organization working to keep French alive in Canada! Download some free posters from their site or make a donation!
During his 13 years at the helm of the resource-rich African nation, Bokassa forged a reputation for ruthlessness and megalomania. In 1977, he had himself crowned “emperor” in a multimillion-dollar ceremony modeled on the coronation of France’s Napoleon Bonaparte.
Belgium has been threatening to split along linguistic lines for some time now. To understand, watch this amusing little video on the political-linguistic divisions in Belgium, which are “designed to make all simple things catastrophically complicated.”
seen @benoit311080
ParcoDons are the City of Montréal’s retired mechanical parking meters, 70 or so of which have been recycled as standing piggy banks designed to collect donations to help the city’s homeless. … To draw further attention to the effort, its organizers this year asked local Quebec celebrities and organizations to “adopt” and personalize the parking meters with acrylic paint.
via Springwise, video via Itinéraire
We loved this photo and author William Gibson’s lyrical responses in this HuffPo interview: “The most beautifully peculiar of all American dream-spaces. A splendidly alternate mythology. Deep and determinedly unofficial culture. The city they couldn’t Disneyland.”
A little-known treasure in Lausanne, Switzerland: the Collection de l’Art Brut.
This quite unique collection is devoted to what’s been called “outsider art”, the creative output of ordinary people with no artistic training at all – often loners, psychotics or the criminally insane – who for some reason suddenly began making their own art, on many occasions in middle or old age.
Source: isyours.com
Sign our “Petition for the USA to become a member state of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.” There’s a francophile treat waiting for you after you sign!
We explore the current pop music of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, two countries where elements of hip-hop and international pop music have grafted themselves onto local styles to create whole new genres…