Hello everyone. You are listening to the Earful Tower podcast. My name's Oliver G. This is a bit of a

different episode today. For one reason, I've been getting a lot of emails from you guys asking me

about daily life in France, daily life in Paris with this coronavirus going around, people asking

whether they should cancel their trips, people asking exactly what's happening in Paris, if it's getting worse. And after I responded to a bunch of the emails, I thought, you know,

it might be better to just do a podcast with someone who's monitoring the situation very closely.

So I invited in Ben McPartland. He's the editor of the local Europe. So they do Europe's news

in English. They've got websites in a lot of the

main European countries and this includes France and Italy, two of the countries especially

affected by this virus. His office is in Paris. I had him in the studio today to ask him about

everything that's happening and whether you should come to France or not.

So here's our chat and if you want to find out more from these guys, they're doing a great job,

the local.fr for the France website and the local.it for the Italian website.

Let's get right into it.

Okay, Ben McPartland, welcome to the studio.

Hi, Ollie.

I wish it was under more fun circumstances that you were in here, but it's not, is it?

No, not at the moment.

It's quite serious in France and around Europe.

So I think what we'll do is just jump straight into this serious topic.

And you, this is something you've been covering.

Is it trumped everything that the news?

Yeah, definitely.

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