Hi everyone! As you heard from my colleagues, we arrived in France a few days ago. France is a country where I have been more than ten times, and I am not exaggerating! We used to have a "mobilhome" so we travelled around in France for many holidays. France is a country with a lot of diversities and curiosities, which my colleagues have already did a lot of explanation about. This week, I am going to tell you something more about the economy, politics, tourism etc. in France!
When I hear the word France, I immediately think about wine and cheese. Its wine is excellent and is produced on one of its many wine fields. The champagne France produces is also one of the best products France offers.
Before the euro was introduced, the French paid with the French Franc until 31th of December 1998. Like most of the countries in Europe (except for example in the United Kingdom and Switzerland), the currencies changed into euro’s. When you are travelling in Europe, you do not have to change your money.
You can say that France is one of the most strong countries in the world concerning its economy. It has a gross domestic product of more than 1737 billion. France has the third largest economy in Europe, after Germany and the United Kingdom. There is only 6 percent of people below the poverty line, which is not that much.
France is a beautiful country and has a lot of curiosities and variation, like I mentioned before. France is one of the most popular destinations in the world to go on holiday. Every year, more than a million of tourists come to France, sometimes the number of tourists amounts to 90 million of tourists. You have tourists of all nationalities, but mainly Germans, Belgians, Dutch and English tourists travel in this country.
The most popular city and its attractions is the following; Paris and its Eurodisney, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and Centre Pompidou. Of course, France has more to offer than “just” Paris. Other famous and beautiful cities are Nice, Bordeaux, Monaco, St Tropez (which is an attractive city for the rich “jet set”!) etc. Also, think about the large lavender fields, mountains and seas.
France is a country that has everything. You have beautiful cities that you can visit throughout the year, beautiful nature and so much more. From June until August, you have to book a hotel room or a place on a camping site in time. In winter, there are also a lot of tourists that go skiing, snowboarding, walking etc. Indeed, winter sport is also very popular in the Alps and Pyrenees, I have seen this myself in the winters we went skiing too!
There is one thing you have to know when you are driving on the French highways. Everybody has to pay road tax, it is called “péage” in French. France also has a high-speed train, the TGV (“train à grande vitesse”) that goes from Nord to South and vice versa. It also has a train connection with The United Kingdom, under the Channel. The railway company in France is called SNCF: Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français. There are some large airports in France; Paris, Lyon, Nice and Marseille.
France is a democratic republic and a president. Last year, the French choose president François Hollande to be their president for 5 years. The former president was Nicolas Sarkozy.
So, I hope I have given you enough information and I hope that you are convinced to go on holiday to France.
I will talk to you later, when we are in Germany and the penultimate country of our trip. We have two more weeks to go and our trip is over. I am going to regret this very much because I liked it to travel around and meet all the nice and friendly people and the beautiful countries. Of course, we had some very interesting meetings too!
Liesbeth
Sources:
Three relevant real-life examples:
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