France is the world's biggest tourist destination with some 72 million people visiting the country last year. Many choose to come to Paris in the summer when most Parisians are not there! 

This year, thanks to the recession, more Parisians are going to be staying at home... and finding out what they've been missing. Our correspondent John Laurenson sent us this postcard from Paris in the summertime.


I'm writing this inside a Left Bank café called the Rouquet, a place that hasn't changed since the 1950s.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  John Laurenson sent his "Postcard from Europe" from Paris

Motorists honk unhappily along the Boulevard Saint Germain, but the plane trees form a green roof over the street, filtering the sun and giving the place a relaxing air. A sparrow hops in, grabs an abandoned chip off the floor and flies towards the door, lop-sided because of the weight of the thing.

The Patronne sidles up and tells me she's been here for 55 years. She remembers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir coming here every morning. They'd hide away in the little room at the back. Get a bit of peace and quiet before exposing themselves to the rubber-necking crowds at the swankier cafés - the Flore and the Deux Magots down the road.

Every year, tens of thousands of German secondary school graduates descend by the busload on the beaches of Southern Europe to party, now that they are done with their finals: both a bonanza and a poisoned chalice for the towns hosting these binging teens. A report from the Spanish Costa Brava.

The night sky over Lloret de Mar is hung with myriad red and blue neon signs, but in the morning when the lights of Magic Park, Hollywood and the other bars and clubs go out, the town turns as grey as concrete. As the scavenger squads emerge to clear the pavement of last night's excesses with road sweepers and humongous hoses, the graduates plunk down onto their hotel beds. Olli, the holiday host, won't be revving up his programme again till two in the afternoon: get-together at Dr. Döner, where the barrels will be waiting for the sangria party. But anyone who gets up before then can have a beer or Vodka lemon at the hotel bar. There are virtually no holds barred in Lloret: that's why they've come here.

These past few weeks, the students heard their teachers and headmasters say what all teachers and headmasters say when they send their students off into life with somewhat too much élan: you are the elite, you will be the cream of your country. The graduating class contingent taking off for Lloret de Mar on Spain's Mediterranean coast put all that elite business on ice for the time being, and before leaving they make sure to book the booze at the hotel in advance, which is cheaper than paying each drink as they go. Some 35,000 school-leavers from all over Germany board the buses bound for the Costa Brava right after their final exams: the nation's future engineers, dentists, federal police.

Thirty years ago, Nicaragua's Sandinistas announced the start of the revolution. Dutch volunteers rushed en masse to the Central American country to help. But how do the 'Dutch brigades' look back on that period? Has the magic spell worn off or was it all worth it?

It was the end of the 1970s: the United States, the great capitalist superpower, had been defeated in Vietnam, South Africa's apartheid regime was subject to a massive boycott and Nicaragua's Sandinista revolutionaries toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza after 45 years of oppressive rule.

The Sandinistas' communist ideals were viewed with suspicion and revulsion in the US but the exotic, socialist revolution worked like a magnet on left-wingers in the Netherlands. Dutch doctors, agricultural experts and sociologists rushed to join the revolution and create a better world.