Hi everyone. And welcome back to 酒馆, welcome back to your favorite segment, Global Village, 《小酒馆·大世界》, and we have a new guest speaker in the studio today. Aladin is from France and he is a fellow podcaster, a content producer. Together we're going to do a few episodes on different aspects of French culture and lifestyle. Exciting! Exciting!
Welcome to the show Aladin.
Hello Lulu, bonjour à tous et merci de m'avoir invité dans votre programme. So hi guys and thank you for inviting me on your show.
First things first, can you give us a little bit of introduction? I know you are right now working in Beijing and you have been in Beijing for a few years. So what do you do apart from creating your own podcast?
Sure so my name is really Aladin, I'm from France. I can do the French accent if you want but I will avoid it. No joke aside. I've been living in China for 7 years. I've always been working in film and TV, mainly documentaries and podcast. I've worked in Paris then I went to Nanjing to study Chinese, then I worked in private company public Chinese media, and since 2 years I started my own company. Basically a freelancer in podcast and documentary I do a bit of film translation. I actually did like a few translation for Wandering Earth II. There was like a ... see, a few lines were in French so thank you for supporting the movie I guess. And I'm currently based in Beijing.
So basically I thought there are so many topics that we can talk about, but let's start with a lighthearted topic. I'm sure you get asked this a lot living in China. It's when people hear you're from France, they would say French people, very romantic. So I thought we talk about are French people really romantic?
That's a good question. What's really funny is that each time I meet a new friend and everyone is like法国人，那你一定很浪漫. And I think it's so funny because it's basically the first thing that most people who don't know me say, like I feel it's kind of a way for them to make a bridge and talk to me. What's pretty funny, tiny anecdotes, like a few weeks ago, I was in France, I bought a book about a French artist who used to come to China a lot between the 80s all the way to 2010, really interesting book, and what's so funny is that in the 80s when he was saying he was French, like people were saying you are like from a French, you are from a romantic and revolutionary country.
So it's really funny that the mindset of how Chinese see French’s maybe changed a little bit, like people don't see us as revolutionary as before. They sure see us as being really romantic.
Yeah, but like seriously, I don't even think this is just what Chinese people think. For example, I met people from other countries, when they have the stereotype or notion of French people, they would also use the word romantic. So the whole idea that France is a romantic nation or French people are romantic, as a French person yourself, how much truth do you think this notion actually holds?
Yeah, it's true like everyone, I think would have like some kind of a cliche vision of France like no matter where they're from in the world. What's really funny is that for us, French people, we would think that when we think about romantic country, the first thing we think about is Italy. We think that people from Italy are more romantic than us. When they say your French are so romantic, I'm just like, didn't you guys get the memo or something? So I think that's pretty funny.
But it's true that France is actually, I mean, France is the most visited country in the world like and so many people go there on their honeymoon. Who, where and how this whole trend started? I can't quite say who did that, but I think this guy in charge of Paris marketing was pretty good. Because now like I have so many people who said like with my girlfriend with my boyfriend, Paris was like our first destination for our honeymoon or for like abroad trip together, things like that. Paris is seen as a romantic city for sure