Life in France

Feeling at home

We received an email from one of our readers who said that she would be making her first trip to France and that this area of the country was at the top of her possible retirement locations. Christine went on to say, “I really want to get into the culture of the area, do what the locals do, not just what the tourists want to see. Any advice?” Bill responded with quite a few suggestions that could probably apply to any new city although our experience is, of course, with Carcassonne. These general concepts worked for us when we were vacationing here and fantasizing about a permanent move so I thought they might be useful to others.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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