ROSE has two meanings in France. A rose is the flower which you will give to your romantic partner if you are vacationing during spring break here in France. Of course, there are thousands of college students in Paris alone who will be roaming France on a road trip during spring break. Many of these college students are foreigners so you will definitely have a jolly good time enjoying with them and giving them roses which tend to bud this season here in France. Now isn’t that romantic? Flowers blossoming in the most romantic region on earth are definitely cool. And top your romantic soiree with rose, France’s most favorite cocktail. It has just a little alcohol content there, not enough to make your partner drunk but more than enough to make her drum up her passion towards you. Those are two of the reasons why France is a must-visit this spring break.

The floras alone in here are spectacular. In the French Riviera resort, you will find figs, vines, mulberrys and olives. Do you know that olive oil – the healthiest cooking oil in the world – comes from olive trees? Yes guys they are abundant in here and because of their abundance, olive oil is very cheap to purchase. The price of maintaining your health here in France is very low. In the French Riviera too, you will find assorted exotic birds to your liking such as egrets, herons and flamingos. Of course, they are all stripped of the dreaded bird flu disease because France has the best quality health care system in the world according to a January 2008 survey responded by both medical professionals and ordinary people alike.

France too is home to Luc Besson, one of the stylish French action directors who have emerged to stardom in the mid-1990s and who still has strong influence over various Hollywood productions today. In the 1995 movie The Fifth Element, Luc Besson teamed up with renowned French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier. Jean Paul Gaultier’s style is typically French who are all atypical and eccentric to a certain stretch. Jean Paul Gaultier’s designs have never been conventional. Part Goth and part femme fatale, Jean Paul’s creations are enchanting. He designed Marilyn Manson’s concert costumes as well as the cone bra that Madonna famously wore in the 1990s. Jean Paul Gaultier was also responsible for the design of the kilts worn by the men in Mel Gibson’s Bravehearts as well as the skimpy ala bandage attire adorning Milla Jovovich’s body in The Fifth Element which loosely based the Oracle’s costume in 300.

BECAUSE we are currently celebrating Chinese New Year of the Earth Rat today, let us take a look at the Chinese community here in France. There are several Chinatowns here in Paris alone but the most prominent of them are in the 13th arrondisement. As with Chinese elsewhere, the Chinese-French have already adopted the culture of the Parisian people. Like the Parisians, a few of them live in very small and congested but elegant flats. Although congested, the condominium suites here in Paris are comfortable to live in because you’ll be having your own air conditioner, heater, cable television with a big LCD monitor as well as a subwoofer sound system. You’ll also be having your own centralized alarm system. Some Parisian condominium suites even feature their own panic rooms.

This is one interesting fact to note. People in the 1950s and 1950s here in Paris and the rest of France are crazy about building bomb shelters in their own basement because they are afraid of a looming nuclear strike. Nowadays, they are crazy to build panic rooms because they are afraid of home invasions. However, don’t be alarmed because it is just actually a state of mind of a few paranoid ones in here. France is actually a safe country and nobody has the gut to become a criminal or a sociopath.

I first went to France last summer and I touched down at Charles de Gaulle International Airport via an Air France flight nonstop from Beijing. I am an international relations student from Peking University and my major is French. Because of this and because I’m the president of the local French studies club of students there in our university in Beijing, I was awarded to go to France as an exchange student at the plush Universite de Paris. It’s really a nice city. The weather is similar like in our place and very cold indeed even during summer. You need layers and layers of clothing to protect you and of course, I don’t wear anything cottony because cotton tends to absorb moisture.

Upon arriving here, it was the start of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States. Nobody thought the crisis will have repercussions elsewhere. But now, I think it is more relevant for people in our country in China to travel to places elsewhere in the world so that they can dump their yuan and help save both the Chinese and the French economies. I guess the closest country to visit where the atmosphere is not intimidating but cordial is France. In the first place, France and China share the same sentiment politically – they cannot be bullied by the United States and they can stand on their own.

Actually, if the Chinese are very resolute individuals, the French are more of the intellectual ones. It is in this character that they know how to immediately react to a situation and not just go with the flow like what everyone else is doing. Take for example the actions of their president Nicholas Sarkozy. Even if he has heard of personal criticisms targeted against him, he remains unfazed.