Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Poitiers as home base

Whenever we vacation in a new part of the country, we always book accommodations in a central location in the area that we’re going to explore. That way it’s easy to make day trips to the surrounding destinations and still be back “home” in time for an apéro and dinner. Staying near the train station has at least 2 advantages: you don’t have far to go to catch your train for your day out and the station is often close to or in downtown near the sites you want to see in your base city. A third advantage in Poitiers, at least, is that the station is multimodal; that is, you can catch a train, a long distance bus, or the city bus, all in the same location. For this trip that was important because 2 of the towns we were going to visit are served only by motorcoach. More on those starting next week but first we wanted to discover the “City of a Hundred Steeples”.

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Life in France

French-by-number

Do you remember paint-by-number kits growing up? It was always a fun gift to receive because year to year you would get a few more colors and a more complex “work of art” to create. You might begin with 7 mini-pots of paint for a simple rainbow, move on to a dozen colors for a landscape or birds in flight, graduating to twice that many choices for a spring garden scene. Now I see that you can even design, print, and paint your own canvas with 60 colors. While those were fun, creative activities, the end result always seemed to be the same: it looked like a paint-by-number masterpiece; that is, you achieved your goal but it remained unpolished. What if you applied a similar principle to learning French?

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Life in France

Contemporary art in Carcassonne

All this time I’d been thinking that Bill and I didn’t like modern art. It took the opening of the Centre d’Art Contemporain (Contemporary Art Center) here in Carcassonne for us to realize that some of our favorite painters from 150 years ago fall into the “modern” category. We’re especially fond of impressionism with artists such as Monet, Renoir, and Pissaro all having exhibited their works in Paris at the Impressionist Exhibitions from 1874 to 1886. Modern art, encompassing a break with tradition, emphasizing individuality and innovation, lasted from the 1860s to the 1960s. With this latest addition to the growing list of city-sponsored art exhibit spaces in town, we were about to learn some more history and culture.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Roman ruins in Orange

When I was preparing for my French citizenship interview, one of the sources that I studied was the Livret du Citoyen, the government’s official publication for those who wish to become naturalized citizens. It highlights the country’s principles, values, language, culture, and history. In that last category, under “Antiquity”, the booklet mentions the arrival of the Romans around 50 BC and shows a photo of the theater in Orange that’s still standing—and in use—after 2,000 years, today’s featured photo across the top above. We’d visited other cities like Nîmes and Lyon that have substantial Roman ruins but since Orange was included in this authoritative text as an essential piece of history, we quickly added that to our “must see” list.

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Dealing with government, Life in France

Voting for the first time—twice

When you become a naturalized French citizen, there are some opportunities open to you that were not available before, even as a long-term resident. There’s access to civil service jobs, freedom to move to and work in any other member country of the European Union, and no need to renew a residency card. You also get to vote in city, departmental, regional, and national elections plus for the European parliament. It was a year ago when I earned the status of being français and later today I’ll be exercising that very important right of voting for the first time—except technically it will be for the second time.

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Life in France

Not too far from Paris

A few months ago we wrote about an organization that helps people who currently live in a city but think that they want to move to the countryside. Rural homeowners welcome overnight guests, introduce them to other residents, and show first-hand what life can be like closer to nature. This association, Mes Nouveaux Voisins, sometimes joins up with the Paris-based group “Paris, je te quitte” (Paris, I’m leaving you) to participate in events that might interest potential movers. I counted 5 magazines that deal with this general subject—including country house decorating, gardening, etc.—with one occasional issue from news source L’Express that could translate to “Leaving Paris: the keys to success”. So, what if you don’t want to live in the capital city but you still don’t want to be far away?

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Good value travel

Earlier we wrote a post about the cost of visiting different countries that ranged from 7€ a day in Laos up to 300€ and more in the Caribbean. Western European vacations fell somewhere in the middle and blog reader Rich took on the challenge when he saw that in France the price would be 178€ for food and a place to sleep. His enthusiasm inspired today’s subject that revolves around finding a good deal or making them ourselves. Because all of our US to France vacations always started and ended with nights in Paris, that’s where we got our introduction to the words “good value”. 

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