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

Where does the tax money go?

We don’t get a lot of emails from the French government so when something comes through with a return address that includes “gouv.fr” it catches your attention. When that is preceded by “Direction Générale des Finances Publiques” it’s especially noticeable since that’s the office responsible for les impôts otherwise known as taxes. We’ve never had a problem, even with our first filing, and now with everything online and generally already filled in for you based on the previous year’s amounts, it’s just a matter of updating the figures and attaching your electronic signature. This email was indeed looking for something from us, but not money.

Continue reading “Where does the tax money go?”
Unknown's avatarBob6 Comments
Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port

Last year while we were staying in France’s Basque country we made a day trip to the Atlantic coastal town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and enjoyed it so much that we recently returned there to spend some more time. Having said that, in addition to revisiting many of the places we had seen on that first trip we also used it as a base for a trip into the Pyrenees mountains. We knew the name of this “other” Saint-Jean destination because walkers on the Camino pass through Carcassonne on their way there and now we were going to visit it ourselves.

Continue reading “Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port”
Unknown's avatarBob4 Comments
Life in France

Christopher, plumber

We had a leak. Based on the water that was slowly advancing across our living room floor we anticipated that it was coming from the outdoor faucet that perhaps had frozen in some unusually cold winter weather and was only now making itself known. By chance a plumber who had been here before was working just two doors up from us so he stopped in but couldn’t determine the source. A call to someone else whom a neighbor had recommended brought a plumber equipped with sound detection gear that he used to trace the pipe from the point in the living room (photo to the left) where we were seeing the water all the way back to the bathroom tub where the leak actually originated…inside the wall, of course.

Continue reading “Christopher, plumber”
Unknown's avatarBob19 Comments
Life in France

The green worm

Learning French is easy—they said. After all, 60% of the words in English have their origin in France. If you can pronounce ver as in “very” you’re well on your way. Just take a look at this sentence: Le ver vert va vers le verre vert that might be translated as “The green worm goes towards the green glass” and with one simple sound you’ve made a really useful comment. The language learning experts at Berlitz put French at position 7 on their list of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn, just after Italian and right before Swedish. Visitors to Carcassonne, Ed and Cherri, said that they had been using Duolingo for about 2 years so when I saw an article about a study on this program’s effectiveness, I wanted to see the results.

Continue reading “The green worm”
Unknown's avatarBob8 Comments
Travel in France & beyond

Swiss express trains

Poet T. S. Eliot said, “The journey not the arrival matters” and we would tend to agree. Naturally when we’re planning a vacation it’s typically the destination that first catches our eye. There are two TV travel programs that we watch weekly to get ideas of where we might want to visit and our process is always the same: when an attractive location appears on the screen, Bill pauses the video, with the image hopefully displaying the spelling of the city and then we see if it has a train station. With that confirmed it goes on our “Want to See” list for further investigation. On occasion, however, it will be a particularly interesting train that’s featured and that was definitely the case with Switzerland, where it ended up being three different trains.

Continue reading “Swiss express trains”
Unknown's avatarBob15 Comments
Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Matterhorn view

It didn’t take more than a glance at a photo similar to the one across the top of today’s blog post to convince me that we had to return to Switzerland. We had been there for a week last July, mostly in Geneva, but this time we were going to be on the opposite end of the lake and beyond, enjoying spectacular views while riding luxurious trains through mountain passes and across aqueducts in the Alps. Those details I’ll save for next week while today we’ll concentrate on our 4 stopover cities that definitely have name recognition: St. Moritz, Zermatt, Interlaken, and Montreux.

Continue reading “Matterhorn view”
Unknown's avatarBob7 Comments
Life in France

Undercover boss

Get your handkerchiefs ready—we’re going to talk about Undercover Boss. If you’ve never seen the American version of this reality TV show, the concept is that the head of a huge corporation is disguised to pass as a trainee in various positions throughout the company in hopes of learning what is or is not working for the employees and the firm. To explain the presence of the TV cameras, a video production team is supposedly charged with documenting the experiences of this “newbie”. The participants are then summoned to headquarters where they believe that they will provide an evaluation of this worker’s performance and potential as a new-hire. In reality they meet the boss, out of disguise, and hear how she or he felt the employee did. There are at least a dozen countries that have their own adaptation of this program, including France, so we wanted to see how our local one compares with the US.

Continue reading “Undercover boss”
Unknown's avatarBob2 Comments