Travel Europe | #7 Postcards from France

Travel Europe | #7 Postcards from France

I returned to the US after spending the summer in Poland and posted on a Vietnamese forum about my trip; from this forum, I met two Vietnamese who lived in Paris. After a year resettling in US,  I got antsy again and decided to go back to Europe. My obvious stop was then Paris.

Vietnamese don’t travel much, but if given the option, they likely choose France for the obvious reason that France is the only Western culture which is closest to Vietnam. 100-year colony must have counted for something. Many things which we encounter in our daily lives: food, vocabulary, ritual, etc. are taken from the French.

My grandmother, who had never traveled outside of Vietnam and didn’t care much for world news, unsurprisingly could tell you a thing or two about who else than the French. If you give her fifteen minutes, she would eager tell you about her famous long-lost nephew. And who is that man? He was the late France’s socialist president, Francois Mitterrand.  Her long-lost sister married a French and they had a son with whom my grandmother never met. How she connected a half Vietnamese-French to the French president is beyond me. So you see, before I heard of anyone worldwide famous, before Confucius, Hitler, Stalin, Superman, I’d already knew Mitterrand.

My longing to visit France had nothing to do with finding my missing celebrity cousin nor to examine the secret of ‘why French women don’t get fat’, rather I was following the melodies which had always captivated me since childhood, the French chansons.

Why visit France?

1. Ask 75 millions people who flock to France each year. There must be something about France for it to take the lead in world tourism.
2. You are ready to kiss your single days goodbye and waiting for the right moment to lean over someone, kiss him/her on the cheek and say ‘I love you.’ Though I can vouch for many more romantic, proposal-inspired European spots, most people believe Paris is the one.
3. Maybe you come for the food. France claims to invent the best cuisine in the world. After all, if it weren’t for French food (I don’t mean French fries), Americans would probably still eat out from cans. Let try steak au poivre, poulet frites, pommes duchesse, blanquette de veau, coq au vin, pot au feu cassoulet, boudin blanc, foie gras, waterzooi, ratatouille, moules à la crème normande, madeleine, choux à la crème. I have no idea what I’ve just written but I can swear I’ve already fallen in love without knowing what they are. That’s the thing about French food. You love even the things you might not like just because how the syllables bounce from your tongue.
4. Food and wine, you can’t have one without the other. Again wine experts and amateurs agree the best wine in the world is made in France. I can’t confirm this fact since I’m more or less a beer person. The only way I can pick out the wonderful glass of France wine is if you place it next to a wine box sold in any supermarket. But if the expert says it’s the best, it’s definitely the best.
5. Ladies, do you want to know why French women don’t get fat? Then what are you waiting?

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