Parlez-Vous Français?

This weekend I went to a conference in Toulouse. It was a good trip. I met some new people, and learned some new things. The biggest challenge for me was the constant concentration I had to maintain because the entire conference was in French. Now, I have been studying French for a couple of years now and I feel like I know a lot. However, I don't know it all and I don't pretend to. I can have a conversation with just about anybody, but some conversations are easier than others. Some days the French is flowing pretty good, and other days it does not roll off the tongue as well as I would like. There were a few times when my friend Didier, a native French speaker, would say to me, "you look pretty tired", and I would respond to him, "I have to work a lot harder than you do in order to understand everything that is going on around here." I said that all in French of course which extended my concentration efforts.