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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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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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Car-free travel

We had the people who live on either side of us over for dinner on Friday night and part of the evening’s discussion centered on our quartier and the parking—or lack thereof—for the residents. Our street isn’t very wide so any of the legal spots that become available are highly coveted. It was during this conversation that one of our guests said with a grin, “You two are the ideal neighbors” that I was then hoping to hear words like “quiet, respectful, and orderly”. But no; the real reason that we are popular is because we don’t have a car so we don’t compete with every other house on the block. That prompted a question about how we travel both locally and long distance using only public transport which coincided perfectly with an article I had just read about visiting France car-free.

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Unknown's avatarBob11 Comments
Life in France

Daily life in Carcassonne…1586

And I thought that we  had it tough with inflation, global warming, floods, drought, strikes, and Covid. A popular prayer 440 years ago was “From hunger, war and plague, deliver us Lord” that gives an indication of some of what the citizens here were facing. According to the archives from the city’s Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) there were daily incidents of “massacres, pillage, ransom, ravages, burnings and other infinite evils”. There were also witches!

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Life in France

Change the channel

We’ve had fiber optic cable for the Internet, TV, and telephone at our house since the spring of 2020. Having it installed during the first of the 3 lockdowns for Covid was a challenge but we’ve been happy with it ever since. Well, that is until we received an email from our service provider, the largest one in France, that they were going to increase the monthly charge. Back in the US we were used to pitting one provider against the other at least once a year to obtain a better deal when the contract was up for renewal. Those “games” that we were playing on the other side of the Atlantic seem to have different rules over here.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Villages: most wanted

When an article pops up in the news a dozen times in one day it tends to get your attention. We read various online sources to see what’s going on around the world and we’re always on the lookout for new travel destinations, especially in France. That’s why when the headline, “Here are the French villages the most searched for in 2023 on the Internet” kept appearing one morning, we wanted to see which ones were included (photo gallery at the bottom). Although the website that had compiled the statistics was unknown to us, the popular French travel guide publisher, Routard, said that “Likibu is the Number 1 holiday rental comparison site (in France)” so we felt confident in their results.

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