A 31-year-old woman was recently sentenced to 2 years in prison for impersonating a physician and then an ophthalmologist for years without any medical training.

It all started in 2018, when Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from Meaux, in northern France, decided to try her luck as a physician, without undergoing any medical training. Sonia had a bachelor’s degree in real estate management, but she didn’t let that get in the way of attaining a lucrative job as a general physician. The woman forged a bunch of diplomas from the Faculty of Strasbourg and a false certificate on the board of the Order of Physicians, and not only got the job, but saw patients for three years before anyone noticed she had no business being a doctor.

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For centuries, people have been asking themselves what the source of the underground spring known as Fosse Dionne spring in France’s Burgundy region might be, but they never got to the bottom of it, because they literally couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

The Fosse Dionne is a huge upsurge of water around which the town of Tonnerre was built. For as long as anyone can remember it has been spewing massive amounts of water, with a flow of around 311 liters of water per second on a regular basis, which can increase to 3,000 liters per second in rainy weather conditions. The Romans used it for drinking water, the Celts considered it sacred, and the French used it as a public bathhouse during the 1700s, but no one has ever been able to locate its source. Many have tried, some have died trying, but the source of the Fosse Dionne remains a mystery.

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You know what a good book goes great with? Well, apparently cats, and this new bookstore in Aix-en-Provence, France is all the proof you need.

Mon Chat Pitre opened its doors in June of this year, and it has already become somewhat of a local attraction in Aix-en-Provence, especially among cat lovers. It has a nice selection of books to choose from, but what really sets it apart from other bookstores in the city, or anywhere else in France for that matter, is the “decor”. As you walk around the bookstore looking for your next read, you have the opportunity, nay, the privilege, to stroke six furry felines that love nothing more than to lay on the books on offer and beg visitors’ attention.

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Les Grands Buffet à Narbonne is a unique all-you-can-eat buffet in Narbonne, France, where you can stuff your face with the most decadent dishes of French cuisine, in a luxurious environment, and without breaking the bank.

While the above paragraph may sound like the beginning of a sponsored post, that is most certainly not the case. I only discovered Les Grands Buffet yesterday, while on my daily session of internet surfing for interesting topics to write about, when some photos of what looked like a lobster fountain caught my eye. It turned out to be just one of the many eye-catching arrangements at the Les Grands Buffet in Narbonne, France, a unique all-you-can-eat-buffet that only serves the best dishes of French cuisine, from lobsters to foie gras and cassoulet. It’s the kind of place that, as a gourmand, you simply have to visit at least once in your life.

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This week, the people of Plounéventer, a town in France’s Brittany region, woke up to a very bizarre sight – a white van perched on top of a bus station.

Imagine waking up early in the morning to take the bus to work and finding a car on top of the bus station? It’s still night out, there’s hardly anyone around, and there’s a car in the last place you’d expect to see one. No, it’s not a lost episode of the Twilight Zone, but something that commuters in the French town of Plounéventer experienced on Monday morning. Some clicked a few photos of the white van perched on top of the Place de l’Eglise bus station and posted them on social media, where they quickly went viral.

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A French pensioner has appealed to authorities to help him finally remain in charge of his own taxes and not those of his namesake, whose yearly taxes he has been paying for the last 15 years.

Having a popular name does have some advantages. It’s easy to remember and people never look at you funny when you say it. However, it’s not all good, as the protagonist of today’s story will tell you. Francis Lopez, an 83-year-old man from Montpellier, France shares the same name, the same birth date, the same city, and even most of the digits in his social security number with another man, and for some reason, authorities always send him his namesake’s taxes as well. Lopez has been paying someone else’s taxes for 15 years, but because of a new tax withholding law, he is afraid that it will really start to cost him.

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Convinced that their home is haunted by a ghost, a French couple have been sleeping in a small tent installed on the balcony of their apartment for over a month.

Patricia and David C. and their two children moved into an apartment in the social park of Semcoda, in Replonges, France, last September. Built in 2016 on land that previously accommodated an old hangar, their new home was spacious, well-lit and modern, but the family didn’t get to enjoy it for two long, as bizarre things started happening. Patricia claims that her daughter started seeing strange things around the house soon after they moved in, and after a while the whole family became convinced that paranormal activity was at play inside their apartment. Things got so bad that they had to install a tent on the balcony to get a peaceful night’s sleep, and they have been using it for over a month.

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Xavier Bouget, an 80-year-old pensioner from France’s Brittany region, and Blanchon, a majestic white pigeon, have been best friends for two years, ever since the Frenchman rescued the bird from becoming a cat’s lunch.

Xavier first met his unlikely companion two years ago, while walking to his house in the town of Gommenec’h. He noticed this small, almost featherless pigeon chick fall out of its nest, in a desperate attempt to escape a hungry cat. He didn’t think to help it at first, but when he got home and mentioned it to his wife, Marie-Françoise, she asked him why he didn’t pick it up. So he went back to get the small pigeon chick, which had miraculously managed to escape the purring predator until his return. Xavier came home with the frail bird in his bird, not knowing that it would soon become his best and closest friend.

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Known as La maison dans la Loire (the House in the Loire), the three-storey building looks like the victim of a flood that once swept it away, but appearances can be deceiving…

Walking along the river Loire, near the town of Lavau-sur-Loire, just a stone throw away from Nantes, you’re bound to spot a rather unusual sight – a tilted building located right in the middle of the river. You’d think it was brutally swept away by some catastrophic flood, but it was actually placed there deliberately by a company that specializes in salvaging wrecks, at the request of a French artist. Today, the House in the Loire is one of the highlights of river cruises on the Loire.

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An impressive trompe-l-oeil fresco painted in the coastal city of Boulogne-Sur-Mer was recently crowned France’s most beautiful street artwork for 2020.

Every year, a popular French portal dedicated to urban art hosts a national competition to crown the nation’s most impressive street art. Thousands of votes are cast, and for last year, the title went to an amazing artwork created by Spanish street artist Gonzalo Borondo, on the city’s rue Jules Baudelocque, last summer. From the right angle, it looks like an elaborate metal gate, with detailed bas-reliefs on either side, but a closer look reveals it to be just an optical illusion.

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If you want to make it as a glamour influencer on social media, you have to look the part, and one way to achieve that is by using fake books as decorations.

French Instagram superstar Maddy Burciaga has come under fire for allegedly promoting fake expensive books are the perfect props to decorate one’s home. In an Instagram story, the 27-year-old shows off fake copies of Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent books, adding that the real books are quite expensive in bookshops and boutiques. But if you’re not actually interested in reading the books, but just want to show off to your followers, you can just get these blocks of cardboard that look like books, for just a fraction of the price. Her promotional campaign didn’t go as planned.

Burciaga, who rose to fame after appearing on a number of French television shows, like “The Angels”, or “The Villa of Broken Hearts”, commands a following of over 2.4 million people on Instagram alone, so her Insta story quickly went viral, and garnered generally negative reactions.

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A 58-year-old French woman has been fight to get her life back, after being wrongfully declared dead by a court, during a long-running dispute with a former employee.

Jeanne Pouchain has been trying to prove she is alive and well for three years, ever since a labor court declared her dead, allegedly acting on information provided by one of her former employees, who she was in a legal dispute with. The verdict not only ended a decade-long lawsuit between Pouchain and her ex-employee, it also ruined her life as a citizen. Her name was wiped from official records, she lost her ID card, her driver’s license, medical insurance, bank account, everything. It was like she didn’t exist anymore.

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Sylvain, a heavily tattooed school teacher from Essonne, in France, risks losing his job, because some parents don’t approve of his full-body tattoo, which includes his face.

The 35-year-old teacher, who goes by Freaky Hoody on social media, recently went on French television channel BFM TV to complain about the threat of losing his job strictly based on his appearance. He claims that his superiors have asked him to no longer teach kindergarten children, after receiving complaints from parents regarding his unconventional looks. Apparently, these people don’t even have children in the classes he teaches, but they have an issue with his tattoos, which cover the vast majority of his body, including his face, and even his eyeballs.

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If you find yourself walking thorough the forest of Rambouillet, just west of Paris, and happen to see an animal resembling a kangaroo, know that your eyes aren’t playing trick on you, the French forest has been home to up to 150 wallabies for over 40 years.

The colony of red-necked Bennett’s wallabies living in Rambouillet Forest can be traced back to a small group of animals that were brought into a zoological reserve in the nearby village of Emance, during the 1970s. A few of them escaped through holes in the fencing, and were never retrieved. They’ve been living in the wild for decades and researchers believe that the woods may now be home to around 150 wallabies. The forest provided them with shelter and sustenance, they had no natural predators to fear, and the climate was apparently very similar to that of their native Tasmania. The biggest threat to the wallabies of Rambouillet are passing cars.

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Frederic Desnard, who worked as a manager at a Parisian perfumery until 2015, sued his former employer because his job was so boring that it made him depressed and forced him to quit. He recently won the trial and a $45,000 compensation.

We originally featured this bizarre court case back in 2016, when Frederic Desnard made international news headlines for suing French perfumery Interparfum for $400,000 for making him work a boring job that at one point made him suffer an epileptic fit and left him feeling depressed. He also claimed that the company signed him off work for several months, and later used his prolonged absence as an excuse to fire him in 2014. Last week, after four years of litigation, 48-year-old Desnard won his case, and a compensation of $45,000.

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