Jason Weiss:  

Life A couple years after graduating college (U of Calif Berkeley), I went off to Europe in the fall of 1979 to try it out for a year--half in Cadaques, Spain, on the Costa Brava near the French border, half in Paris--and ended up staying the entire decade of the 1980s in Paris, where I worked as a freelance writer and translator and generally lived a near-ideal bohemian life. Most of my friends there were foreigners and I generally avoided Americans, but I did have some French and even American friends. Based on my own experience, I believe every American without the experience of foreign cultures should be required to live abroad for a while (and maybe be given a grant accordingly?), even if it has to be in as lovely a place as Paris (unless they're just going to hang out with other Americans, in which case what's the point?). In the fa...Expand for more