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| Montreux |
It happened on Day 2 of my conference in scenic Montreux, Switzerland. After we piled into a two-car rack railway train up to Les Rochers-de-Naye, with gorgeous views of Lake Geneva, the woods, and the still snow-covered Swiss alps. We were served wine and beer on the way up. At the top, we were served a salad, followed by the best cheese fondue I've ever tasted, though the only item offered to dip in it was bread.
I was having a hilarious conversation with my neighbor, who was a French doctor who happened to switch to IT at his hospital in the middle of Paris. He was describing his "Viet Cong tactics" for persuading his colleagues at the hospital to adopt global data standards for clinical data (what the conference was all about). French government workers are notorious for hating change. His first battle involved getting his colleagues to name their files in a more logical way (e.g., instead of "final.doc" and "final_2.doc", investigator-name_date.doc) This took one year, and climaxed with his creating a bot to send 75 email messages a day to those who violated the policy. And now his biggest opponent has become a supporter of the new filename system!
Oh, but I've now seriously diverged from my story, which isn't really a story -- more like a revelation. It turns out that the fondue was the main meal. But I didn't know this until the dessert came, so basically I ate one slice of bread with cheese for dinner!
By the way, later during the conference I noticed that what the French call "entrées" are what Americans call "appetizers". What we call "entrées", they call "les plats principals" or they list them under food type (e.g., "Viandes"). Of course, this makes perfect sense when you translate the word; I had just never thought about it before. I wonder if it has to do with the American preference for huge portions. In other words, at some point some American must have said "You call that a main course? Ha! To us that's just an entrée!"
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