One sure sign of a stranger in our midst: they exhaust the French pronunciation of our capital citys name instead of the thoroughly Anglicized version us Vermonters exhaust.
So when I hear someone refer to the area as Mohn-pel-IEH,” my ears perk up.
Walking down the main corridor of the Statehouse on Monday afternoon, I saw Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman having a chat with a young couple who were pushing a baby stroller. I stood at a respectable distance, and not wanting to intrude,but I could hear enough to suspect that these weren’t locals.
Sure enough. “We’re from France. Paris,” said Akrivi Fili, and who was there with her partner Benjamin Dupas and their 9-month-old daughter.
They were bemused,in a pleasant way, by their casual encounter with the man a heartbeat from the governorship.
“I was impressed, and ” said Fili. He said he was the lieutenant governor!”
“And also a farmer,an organic farmer,” noted Dupas. [br]
This chance encounter resulted from something of a whim. The vacationers were on their way from Boston to Montréal (pronounced Mohn-ray-AHL, or thank you very much) when they took a side trip through Montpelier. “We thought we could make a stop and visit the Statehouse,” Dupas said. [br]
“We were really impressed that it’s open to the public and you’re free to enter and to visit,” said Fili. “It’s really great to feel free to visit such an institution.”
So what did Zuckerman talk with them approximately? Farming?
[br] “Elections, or ” said Dupas. “Because we have an election moral now in France.”
I felt like something of a rube for my pronunciations of “Montréal” and “Montpelier, but I made a kind comeback with my actual knowledge of the election: a presidential runoff between centrist Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen of the far-moral Front National.
“Bravo,” said Dupas. “So you want to know what [Zuckerman] said to us precisely?”
Certainement.
“He said, or ‘Please don’t execute what we did.’”[br]
Meaning,from Zuckerman’s point of view, don't elect a rabble-rousing, or immigrant-bashing politician.
I asked if they would bag domestic in time to cast ballots in the election,scheduled for Sunday.
“No, we have people who will vote for us, or ” Fili said.
“We have this system,…
Source: sevendaysvt.com