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

Oh it’s wineing time again

This week's wine advertisements
This week’s wine advertisements

Twice a week our mailbox is filled with flyers from lots of businesses; both national chains and local businesses vying for our euros. These are called pubs, short for publicités that you and I might recognize with the English word “advertisements” that we could easily stop, but why spoil all the fun, especially at this time of year. It’s grape harvest time so every catalog that we receive is featuring wine.  In the photo you’ll see just a few of the pubs that arrived today. Looks like we need to go shopping! Continue reading “Oh it’s wineing time again”

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Life in France

If they only knew

The picnicking wall...or so it seems
The picnicking wall…or so it seems

On Sunday Bill and I were walking through the park that runs along the Aude river here in Carcassonne. It’s very popular on weekends for all kinds of sports activities and is a great place to watch the fireworks over the castle on the 14th of July. Since the weather was nice, lots of people were picnicking including the group you see here sitting along a wall behind which runs a mill stream. The two of us had a bit of a chuckle wondering if these outdoor diners realized the original purpose of the wall upon which they were sitting. Continue reading “If they only knew”

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Life in France

Art day

Fly away to the Fine Arts Museum
Fly away to the Museum of Fine Arts

In elementary school, one day a week was devoted to art. Although it was not a subject at which I excelled, I still looked forward to those days because it meant that we could temporarily put aside long division, cursive writing, and vocabulary lists in favor of crayons, colored pencils, and poster paint. Bill and I had our own grown up version of Art Day last week and we didn’t even have to get messy. Continue reading “Art day”

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Life in France

Sunday in the village

The flea market linking the "new" city to the old
The flea market linking the “new” city to the old

When we first started thinking about moving to France, we skipped right over the glittering excitement of Paris and envisioned a quintessential rural village with stone cottages, a mill by the stream, blooming flowers everywhere and the tiny lanes alive with chatter from friendly local residents. While that ideal still exists here, reality stepped in when choosing to live without a car meant that we would need to be within walking distance of all of our daily needs with easy access to public transit for longer journeys. Although we don’t live in a rural location, this past Sunday reminded us that we still found that village life we were seeking.

Continue reading “Sunday in the village”

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Life in France

All change

Sink on tank
Sink on top of the tank

What a difference a day makes. Last week, on the last day of August we bought a new toilet. We paid for it at the front of the store and the salesman sent us around to a side entrance to retrieve it. To our good fortune, the young man who got it out of the stock room opened the box and that’s when we discovered that the tank was broken. He explained that we could wait for a new one to arrive at his location in 3 weeks or if we were willing to pick it up at their store in Narbonne, they had one on the shelf and he would reserve it for us. Visions of a city by the Mediterranean Sea, only 30 minutes away with the item we wanted in stock made the decision for us. That’s when things got lost in translation. Continue reading “All change”

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Life in France

That crashing sound

A wall shelf unit without its shelves or doors
A wall shelf unit without its shelves or doors

Last night after dinner I was sitting here typing something for the blog when a frighteningly-loud crash seemed to be happening right beside my head. Instantly the thoughts of an airplane going down or a car wrecking or a building collapsing filled my brain. Then in the next few seconds I realized that the reason it sounded so close was because the sound had indeed come from an arm’s length away: part of a wall cabinet had come loose and had fallen towards the floor. Luckily a table was directly below and helped to cushion the fall. But what made all the noise? Continue reading “That crashing sound”

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Life in France

Free association

The annual showcase of Associations poster (from the city's website)
The annual showcase of Associations poster (from the city’s website)

When we first moved to the Atlanta area we were kind of isolated in both the physical sense and with social connections. We knew some of the neighbors and we saw people at work but being far out of the city had its disadvantages. The first weekend dinner group that we joined was called Out in the Country to give you an idea of our remote location. It took a few years after that to discover another social group for us that actually had Georgia’s capital city’s name in its title. Luckily, within two weeks of moving to Carcassonne we were part of a discussion group and after this past weekend’s Rendez-vous des Associations, things are looking even brighter. Continue reading “Free association”

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