My Portuguese friend the Lamprey Queen called Friday evening to ask if I had time to go for coffee. She wanted to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that had brought democracy to her country. LQ had tried to explain about the revolution to her colleagues but they didn't really pay attention. Normally she doesn't talk about ( Read more... )

I didn't realise this until my Portuguese friend the Lamprey Queen told me, but there are around a million Portuguese people living in France, most of them in the Parisian region. This makes them the largest foreign community in the country. Most of them aren't recent arrivals either, the biggest surge in immigration was during the dictatorship ( Read more... )