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3 Things You Only See in France
As far as I'm aware
Books and beer bottles at bus stops
I saw this scene on the way to work this morning and felt obliged to snap it. What caught my eye wasn’t so much the empty Heineken bottle — a common enough sight pretty much anywhere — but the books left right next to it. Whether all three items belonged to the same person we can only speculate. But the fact that someone had left books at a bus stop does speak volumes, at least in my mind.
France has always struck me as a very literary country. Aside from the country’s long list of writers and the incredible number of bookstores in the capital, France is one of the only countries I’ve visited where you often see people reading in public. You can often spot people reading novels in public parks, and it’s not uncommon to find people carrying novels on the metro. Even beggars sitting on city streets can often be found passing the time thumbing through a novel, making them possibly the most well-educated beggars in the world. Whereas reading may be seen as a nerdy pursuit in some countries, it seems to be viewed much more positively in France.
When I was on exchange at the Sorbonne, I rented a bedroom in an apartment in the rather bourgeois 16th arrondissement. My landlords, with whom I lived, had an incredibly large library…
