Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Free for all

There’s been a lot in the news recently about train travel in Europe for this new year. Headlines have included, “Faster trains and cheaper tickets; 5 New European Train Routes; and, Europe’s night trains are making a comeback,” all aiming to show the benefits of new routes, lower costs, faster speeds, and lower emissions. We’ll see the beginning of sleeper services from Paris to Berlin plus Amsterdam to Prague with a direct service from there on to Budapest. Bordeaux will be linked directly to London with no changes required as will Barcelona to Geneva. While lower priced tickets will be good, “free” is even better and that was the topic of an article about travel in Luxembourg.

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Life in France

Ecology: #1 city in France

When we were deciding where in France to settle, I can’t say that being eco-friendly was on our list of criteria for finding a new home. Now that Carcassonne has been recognized as the country’s greenest city according to a magazine’s survey, naturally we’re proud and delighted to be living here. The weekly national news publication, L’Express, examined the 118 urban areas (agglomérations) with a population of more than 100,000 in five major categories. The southern part of the country did well in general with other cities coming in at #2-Pau, #3-Narbonne, #5-Agen, and #7-Nîmes for Ecology. I wanted to find out more when I read in the paper that our mayor had said, “First of all, I must say that I was both surprised and pleased to see these results.”

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Dealing with government, Life in France

Passport renewal

Britain’s King Charles doesn’t need a passport. After all, inscribed inside is a statement from the Secretary of State, acting “in the name of His Majesty” to allow the bearer free passage in a foreign country. Although the Vatican doesn’t have immigration controls, citizens there have passports, including the Pope who holds #1. Even the President of the United States isn’t above the law, either in office or afterwards, as far as the State Department is concerned. To travel outside of the country, all Americans need a passport and except for some emergency circumstances they all expire every 10 years. That was the case for me so we had to find out how to renew your US passport while living in France.

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Life in France

Spontaneity

Bill and I were once accused of not being spontaneous. We were walking in a small French town with some folks who preferred to wander the streets, choosing a restaurant that we might stumble upon rather than going with the one we had already chosen. I’ll reveal the result at the end of this post but just to give you a hint: this was France, in a small town, in the winter, and on a Monday. Blog-reading visitors to Carcassonne, Gayle and Paul, gave us the opportunity (thank you!) to show that we can actually make last-minute decisions when they emailed us asking for dinner recommendations and to invite us for an apéro beforehand. Bill sent them a list and asked when they might be in town. “We’ve just arrived and we’re staying only tonight”, came back the reply. Oh, OK! Happily, only a couple of hours later we were sharing a bottle of rosé with them in a wine garden not far from where they would be eating that evening.

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Dealing with government, Life in France

Vote

When you get a letter that starts out with “It has come to our attention….” it gives you one of those “uh-oh” moments. In this case it was from the Orange County Florida Board of Elections where we are registered to vote. It went on to say that the address we had given them was a business and that in order to vote they would need our residential address. During the first few years that we lived in France, Bill’s sister (thank you, Cheryl) was nice enough to keep track of our postal mail until we could arrange for a mail forwarding service. Once that was in place with our new address we moved our voter registration to Orange County, received our ID cards, and prepared to participate in the next election…until this letter arrived.

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Life in France

The Christmas markets of Berlin

Depending upon where you look on the City of Berlin’s official website, there are “over 60 Christmas markets”, “over 100”, exactly 63, or 73, and on one list we counted 97. I suppose it doesn’t really matter since any one of those figures would be a lot and we had only a week in Germany’s capital. How do you decide which ones to see? Luckily, there are plenty of websites devoted to “the best” and surprisingly there was enough agreement among them to choose a top 10. I’ll put that list below, with a brief description of each market, but then the photos in the gallery will speak for themselves.

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Travel in France & beyond

One week on a hotel canal barge

There’s an episode of the PBS TV show, Rick Steves’ Europe, called “Burgundy, Profoundly French” where the host is gliding down a peaceful canal, sipping red wine, while telling us about how calm and serene life onboard can be. We now live within a few minutes’ walk of the Canal-du-Midi and during the season we typically see small house boats navigating the narrow waterway that, in conjunction with the Garonne River, connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea. If a family has rented the boat, usually one of the parents is at the helm and in our minds, at least, wondering when their next challenge will arrive: the lock that they themselves might have to operate to get to the next higher or lower level of the canal, a task that has always dissuaded us from renting a similar boat. In that PBS video Rick Steves never has a worry and now we know why: he was on a hotel canal barge much like the one we enjoyed for a week.

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