If one day you came to France,
and wanted to enjoy a wonderful journey, Paris, Marseille, and Lyon would not be your only choices. Set aside the cityscapes gathered around ancient gothic architecture, forget the worldly splendor of bustling crowds,
and there was another, entirely different path you could choose.
Because most young people had flocked toward more developed cities, fewer and fewer remained in remote villages. The extremely low population resulted in painfully slow, or even stagnant, development.
But in return, there was an environment closer to nature and lower housing prices.
Government policies had attracted more outsiders to settle here and open bed-and-breakfasts, breathing life into these pastoral villages and keeping them from slowly fading away.
In southeastern France, in a village near Geneva,
perhaps because it lay along the road to Switzerland, its population of several thousand was neither particularly large nor particularly small.
Many of the little houses with triangular roofs had been painted a bright golden yellow. Flowerpots stood by their doors, with little trace of modernity in sight. The roads were simple and clear, and from the hillside, one could look out over orderly fields and flowerbeds.
After about half an hour, they found the village where they had booked a bed-and-breakfast for the night, complete with a special dinner. Fang Ran jumped out of the Hummer and stretched out his body, stiff after sitting in the car all day.
Amid the fiery splendor of the sunset clouds, he took a deep breath of crisp, pleasant air. Looking at the village before him, warm beneath the setting sun's afterglow, Fang Ran found it beautiful in a way entirely opposite to Paris.
"Hey~~ Gourd, the place you picked is pretty nice."
"Hmph, of course it is."
Slightly surprised, Fang Ran had to admit that his