Hi all @Nuno60@Rene-and-Zac0@Paul154@Marzena4, I'm going to jump in one more time on this one: They're not traveling to Ireland to be French, right? So why does anyone come to Ireland? Or any place, for that matter? It's somewhere different, for whatever reason! It's the differences that are curiously attractive... otherwise, we'd all just stay home!
And to be fair, you have to cut the French a bit of slack in that there is NO WORD IN THEIR LANGUAGE to express 'liking' something. They don't have the word nor do they have the concept. They only have 'love.' Sure, you can love something/someone more or less, but it's love and only love. This is cultural, and it runs the way they think/breathe/live. Kinda cool, eh?
Every culture has their own 'specialness.' I'm talking about the things you might observe, slightly shocked, and think, "Oh My...." Right? To walk into a host Japanese home without automatically taking off my shoes? Never thought twice about it until I SUDDENLY realized that I'd been hit with an invisible bucket of cold water! Of course, to them, I was a complete idiot/barbarian; quickly forgiven, but probably never truly forgotten (oh, and I lived there for a YEAR as a student--and that was not my only mistake!)
As for the French, my husband has a categorical disdain for 'them'... that war-stuff... whatever... but I lived/worked in the middle of Paris for nearly half a year and had the most amazing experience of my life, with people I still keep in touch with now, 10 years later. Can't think of one bad thing to say about 'them' except to occasionally smile at some of their very peculiar ways... not my ways at all, but I adore them.
Kim