If you are living in France, and are more comfortable communicating in English, here is a good news for you. www.Kigoobe.com, a Paris based bilingual web development firm has just introduced the first ever online directory of the English speaking community of France.

So what’s the idea? Well, depending on how long have we been here, all of us have different levels of French fluency. But irrespective of that, we can’t deny the charm of speaking in a language that we love to speak is not the same as that that we have to speak. After a hectic day of our professional life where we don’t always get the best of the people we would have loved to meet, it’s always nicer to pass the evening with whom we share something in common, who likes to speak the same language as we do.

Apart from people with whom we like to socialize, there are other people in our life as well with whom we need to meet. A physician or a dentist for example. Or an attorney, or some other professional service providers. And here also, the golden rule remains the same; when the person in front is fluent communicating in English, life becomes different when he tries with his half English and I try with my half French.

Imagine if we had the choice, the choice of finding an English speaking service provider near my apartment in one mouse click. Or the choice of finding a person to pass the evening with in the same way. Problem is not that these people do not exist. Real problem lies in finding them out. Even the person who sits near me in the metro or the young couple murmuring sitting at the opposite table of my most favorite restaurant, unless do they speak loud enough for me to listen or take out an English novel to read, in the case of my co-passenger, we can never guess which planet of this galaxy they have come from. Life would have been easier, no doubt, had everybody around us were putting a T-shirt on them telling ‘I speak English’ or something similar in the Jews alphabet, but unfortunately, that’s not the case.

Things are even more frustrating as every one of us carry our own address book with full of different contacts. And everybody of us keeps it secret in our own secured bank locker. Otherwise, the nice guy whom I see often at the bus stop could be an English speaking one, and is known to somebody who’s a friend’s friend of someone I know through my second cousin. And who knows, we could nurture a real good friendship between us, especially in a country where most people around speak in a completely alien language that I am trying to master so hard since I have been here.

Here comes the new directory www.FranceParis.org handy. Not only that we can register ourselves there, or look for other English speaking people around us through their magnificent search tool, we can also spread the word to our friends through this website, contributing towards forming the first ever human chain of English speaking people living in this nation.
Finding somebody around us, a professional service provider whom we need to meet, or somebody whom we like to meet for socializing, now, isn’t really a problem anymore. And I know how many people in my building or in my street speaks English, and I know who is my closest English speaking physician, in case I need to.

We, as human beings can’t land in Mars physically yet, simply because we don’t have the tool. Till now, we were not having the tool to get a list of English speaking people who are residing near me. But now I have it. The ball is in my court now – and I can’t complain anymore.