Yes, that's right: táim Éireannach.
Tabhair póg dom, táim Éireannach!
(Kiss me, I'm Irish!)
Happy St. Paddy's Day to you all, to be sure to be sure.
Jaysus, Irish people don't actually say that last bit.
In other news, related to today, I took part in a coffee-tasting survey. It actually sounds better than it was. I was wandering around Le Quatre Temps in La Défense on my lunch break, looking for something appetising to eat (I'm a bit over the Brioche Dorée), when a woman with a clipboard approached me and started talking to me before I had a chance to escape. Anyway, she asked for just 5 minutes of my time because she was conducting a coffee-related questionaire, so I gave in and took part, because I had nothing better to do, and felt like speaking French. Initially she just asked me questions about my coffee-drinking habits, specifically related to drinking coffee from automatic coffee-dispensing machines (they're quite common in companies around Paris/France). I occasionally do take coffee from these machines, mostly when I need a quick caffeine boost as the stuff that comes out of them rarely tastes like coffee, and the tea that these machines produce is like the cup of "tea" made by the Nutrimatic in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*. After we finished the questions on the survey, she led me to a small room in a storage area of the shopping centre where I was asked to drink to espressos from different machines and to rate their taste, appearance, smell etc and then comment on which one I preferred. I got the impression that they wanted me to say that the second coffee was better because of the way it was presented, but it was irrelevant as it was by far the better tasting anyway (it actually resembled coffee in some ways).
I was asked to rate things like the quality of the froth on top, the smell, texture, acidity, taste, and something else that I didn't understand. I asked for an explanation and still didn't understand when one of the people running the thing poorly explained it to me, so I just selected the option that the unidentified aspect neither pleased nor displeased me.
It was an interesting process, so I didn't begrudge them wasting my time, even though the "5 minutes" turned out to take about 30 minutes.
The downside of taking part in this process was that I then didn't have time to get anything to eat for lunch, and went to my next lesson hungry and buzzing (after two fairly strong espressos).
*a concoction that tastes "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea".
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