Author: Bob

While living in North, Central and South America, in the middle of the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, and now in Europe, my passion has remained the same: travel and meeting new friends.
Life in France

Mistaken identity

When Bill and I speak French it’s clear that we’re not native speakers and it will probably always be like that. Even when we get to the point that the words flow as easily as they do in English there will still be slight nuances that will give us away. We’ve been mistaken for German, Italian, English, Irish, Canadian, and Romanian but never American. I was thrilled with the latest guess, Moroccan, because the people we know who moved from Morocco to Carcassonne sound to us as if they’ve always lived here. That made me wonder where most of the immigrants to France come from and the government’s Office of Statistics had the answer.

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Life in France

To your health

France 3 is technically one television channel yet it’s really made up of stations from each of the country’s 13 mainland regions and even those might be split into two or three parts. It’s kind of like PBS in the US with one nationwide channel that’s enhanced by local stories originating from state or city affiliates. Their mission statement includes, “France 3 reflects the diversity of economic, social and cultural life in the regions and through regional offshoots, including prime time, whose programs can be picked up nationally.” It’s thanks to that “national” reference that we found out about a newly-opened business in the north of France. The program carried the subtitle “A bar in a retirement home to make the residents smile again.”

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Travel in France & beyond

The island of Milos

Soon after we knew that we’d be going to Athens to meet up with my brother and sister-in-law, Bill asked me where else in Greece I wanted to go. With the stunning landscapes from the movie “Mamma Mia” playing in my head, where every quaint village is filled with whitewashed stone houses topped by domed blue roofs, I said, “the islands”. Although Greece has thousands of islands, only about 200 of them are inhabited including names I knew such as Mykonos, Santorini, Crete, and Rhodes but we chose one that’s not been so popular and it was less than 3 hours by ferry from Athens.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Athens in 4 days

Every year my brother and sister-in-law go sailing and always invite us along for the ride. It’s definitely not a rowboat on a pond; these are cruising class yachts with a crew in destinations including the Caribbean, Fiji, and this year Greece. Since they were going to fly into Athens, we all agreed that meeting up for several days in the capital would give us the time to catch up with each other and to explore a new city. With our travel agent hats firmly in place, Bill and I began the planning of how we were going to get to the Hellenic Republic, where we would stay, and what we would see. A future blog post will highlight the journey there while today I wanted to describe our visit and provide some tips to anyone who might want to vacation there as well.

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Life in France

Don’t do that

When I tried to find out how many YouTube channels there are, the only agreement between websites seemed to be on the word “million” following numbers such as 37, 51, 113, or even 373, all of which translates to “a lot”. I (half) joked with Bill that you could learn anything, including brain surgery, from these videos. Spoiler alert: don’t search for that unless you have a strong stomach. We do use this extremely popular online platform for less serious matters that include improving our French and discovering more about the society in which we now live. A topic that I’ve seen at least once on almost every channel I follow has to do with mistakes to avoid as a visitor or new resident in France. The faux pas listed below are the ones that appear most often with our own experiences noted beside each one. 

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Life in France

Working in France vs. the US

While doing some research for one of our previous blog posts, Undercover Boss, where the head of the company was in the spotlight, I discovered some discussions about what it’s like for an American to be an employee in France. Because we were both retired by the time we moved here, neither of us has any first-hand experience of being in the workforce here but friends have shared their knowledge and several bloggers have expressed their opinions too. Combining these sources and looking for any similarities has provided interesting and sometimes amusing examples of what Americans have found when they started working in an office in Paris or elsewhere in the country.

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Unknown's avatarBob6 Comments
Life in France

Welcome aboard

What happens when you put Cary Grant and Sophia Loren on a dilapidated and leaking houseboat moored on the Potomac River somewhere in the countryside outside Washington, DC? If it’s 1958 then you get an Oscar nominated romantic comedy called “Houseboat” with a happy ending. If it’s 2023 and you move the location to France, replacing the Hollywood actors with real boat owners, do you still get romance with a cheerful conclusion? I wrote about our brief consideration of life on the water in Narrow Dog to Carcassonne which explains why we’re on dry land but we still get questions about canal boats. An online article in The Local (France) prompted me to investigate what it means when “a man’s/woman’s home is his/her castle” floating in a river.

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Unknown's avatarBob6 Comments