Last year, I wrote a vacation column about my trip to the strange planet of San Diego. This year, I was lucky enough to spend a week on the beautiful island of Guadeloupe!

If you are like most people, you may not be sure where or what Guadeloupe is. I didn’t know, until I learned it from the guy sitting next to me in the airport van, that Guadeloupe, an island in the southern part of the Caribbean, is actually part of France.

I only knew I wanted to go there because my all-time favorite show, “Death in Paradise,” is filmed there.

Guadeloupe is a little hard to get to from New England, but there is a direct flight from Montreal, and six flights a day from Paris. Our friends – also fans of “Death in Paradise” – had been to Guadeloupe before, and had told us that pretty much all the other tourists who come to the island are from France, and that most people do not speak much English.

This did not bother me one bit. I speak about 10 words of French, which is really all you need: “please,” “thank you,” “excuse me” and “I am sorry but I do not speak French.” It was nice to not be able to understand other people’s conversations for a whole week. It was equally nice not to have to make a small talk at the buffet or the pool. French people, particularly people from Paris, are not into small talk, anyway. Are they kind and polite? Very. Do they want to meet you or be friends? Not at all!

We did, of course, meet the approximately six other Americans staying at Club Med that week. Within minutes, we all knew where we all from, how old everyone’s kids and grandkids were, who had just had knee surgery and who watches “Severance.”

The Club Med where we stayed catered to families with small children, with children under 4 free. After a week of being surrounded by hundreds of French families, most with babies and toddlers, I have to say – French people are seriously doing something right with parenting.

Not only did the adorable French children in their little linen outfits eat actual food, such as shellfish and zucchini, without complaint, we did not witness a single tantrum by a child or a parent the entire week.

I was astonished to see one mom waltz by, a newborn on her shoulder, a toddler in tow, wearing heels and an elegant sundress, heading nonchalantly for the cheese bar (there was a cheese bar!), like she did this every night of her life. It was 10 o’clock at night.

I tried to imagine making my children sit through a late-night French buffet when they were toddlers; I think we would have lasted about twenty minutes. I have no idea how these parents pulled this off! When the little French children at Club Med got tired, they just put their heads down on the table and slept.

I was even more shocked to see some parents wake their kids up from the table, not to take them to bed, but to send them off to the nightly Club Med dance party. I could not even wrap my head around this. When my kids were tiny, our lives revolved around chicken nuggets, “Teletubbies” and a 7 p.m. bedtime. That is the essence of French parenting: the universe does not revolve around the kids. Hats off to you, French parents!

As for the food, it was pretty fabulous. I watched in awe as French preschoolers approached the cheese bar and told the cheese-slicing guy, with great authority, exactly what they wanted. All I could do was point and smile. The cheese bar guy rolled his eyes like “Les Americans.”

I only had one bad experience at Club Med, which was entirely my fault. I took a small pot of something that I thought was cheese spread, only to find out the hard way it was liver pate. I am not, sadly, a person who appreciates liver pate. In fact, if I had a choice between eating liver pate and making a sandwich out of the tumor-infested iguana that lived next to the pool, I would bludgeon that iguana and reach for the mayonnaise.

(Just kidding – no iguanas were harmed in the writing of this column. The medical people in our group actually had a conversation about this iguana and whether it would be possible to perform a quick tumor-ectomy on it. They decided this was a bad idea. Anyway, the iguana seemed perfectly happy.)

As I hurriedly put down my pot of liver pate, I noticed a French mother spooning liver pate into her toddler’s mouth. I swear, that French toddler was looking at me like, “Sigh … les Americans. What can you do?”