I've been invited to Tetouan, Morocco by the organizers of the second incarnation of the Journees Logiciels Libres. Tomorrow I'll have the pleasure of presenting about Free Software projects related to GSM, including OpenBSC and OsmocomBB.
The organizers have done a great job in caring about the foreign speakers (who include Richard Stallman and myself).
I've been listening to various talks by RMS RMS over the last 16 years or so... but right now I'm listening the first time to him giving a French presentation.
Overall, this trip has done more to improving my understanding French than anything else in a long time. I once had 4 years of French from 1st to 4th grade in school, but never really continued with it. However, what I remember, combined with my knowledge of Portuguese (and even English) is sufficient to e.g. understand all of the French language slides that have been presented at this conference. However, most spoken French is too hard to understand for me.
One striking observation is the apparently much higher percentage of women taking a communications or computer engineering degree here than what I'm used to in Germany or the so-called western world. It reminds me of India where you have the feeling that almost 50% of the IT related students are female. It would still be interesting to see some scientific research why the supposedly open and anti-discriminating, women-rights-embracing 'western world' is seeing less women taking up engineering studies...