Life in France

The cost of (still) living

Being a positive person, I was surprised when I saw the title of a study conducted by Silver Alliance and Retraite.com, both French companies that investigate topics important to senior citizens. They called, what seems to have become their annual survey, “How much does it cost to be old in France?” When we ask friends a question that might not have a definitive answer, the response we typically hear is, “Ça dépend” (That depends) which I think could apply here depending upon your definition of “old”. We’ll look at the details below but for a cut-to-the-chase answer, you’ll need an annual income of 15,000€ to live a comfortable retired life in France.

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Life in France

Medieval bedrooms

Ah, the good ol’ days of life in a European castle in the Middle Ages from the 5th to the 15th centuries. Knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, banquets, roaming troubadours, court jesters. But what about widespread disease like the plague, daily hard labor, war, violence, superstition, fear? Perhaps the one place in your home where you could retreat to escape all of the misery surrounding you would be the bedroom. However, a recently translated book on the subject suggests the opposite, especially if you were a peasant so your “castle” would have been a one-room shelter made from hastily-stacked stones or woven sticks and mud with a straw roof. If you were lucky you might have owned a farm animal that, of course, would have shared your living quarters with you.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Sleeping in a château

My brother and sister-in-law are very generous. Every year they go on a chartered catamaran cruise and always invite us along as their guests. We’ve never taken them up on their offer until this year but it wasn’t on the water. In what you might call a “land cruise” we were being treated to an all-inclusive—accommodation, meals, drinks, and excursions—five days at the 17th century Château Alizés at Le Chaufourg in the Périgord area of southwestern France. Although Bill and I have been lucky enough to have vacationed with friends in three other châteaux around this country and Ireland, on those vacations we all had to do our own cooking, bartending, driving and tour guiding. Now that was all about to change. 

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Life in France

Affordable cities

The newspaper, Le Parisien, frequently publishes rankings and reports on various topics related to lifestyle, travel, and quality of life. I’ve seen headlines that start with “The best…” and continue with “places to live; to buy property; for families or students or retirees; to go on vacation” generally with the focus being on France. The news source The Local France had a story about the paper’s analysis of a government report concerning the most affordable cities around the country based upon your income. There were 3 financial levels and the top 15 locations are below. 

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Monet’s Giverny

One advantage to living in France is that you’re never really all that far from Paris. In about  5 ½ hours we can travel from our downtown train station to one in the nation’s capital and walk from there to a hotel for that evening. With a dozen daily departures we can take our pick to be there for a 12:30 PM lunch, a 3:00 PM hotel check-in, or a 7:00 PM dinner. An overnight sleeper train would arrive in plenty of time for breakfast. That convenience means that it’s possible to make a connection and continue to a further destination such as Brittany, Champagne, or even London or Amsterdam. For today’s adventure we stayed in Paris but made a day trip into Normandy to spend the morning walking in the footsteps of artist Claude Monet in his beloved gardens of Giverny.

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Life in France

Kumquat May

We were in Nice this time last year and took a day trip to the beautiful city of Menton. There in the botanical garden was a kumquat tree in full fruit (featured photo above and in this paragraph) well outside the normal season of November to March when we see them for sale at the market. This particular variety, Fortunella margarita, produces later than other trees, hence the display that we saw at the garden. Normally we try to avoid traveling during this month for a couple of reasons that I’ll highlight below; however, that doesn’t always happen and as they say…come what may!

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Clisson + the Apocalypse Tapestry

Nantes had served as our home base for a couple of day trips to the Atlantic coast and now it was time to explore a bit more inland. Our travels took us to a picturesque town nicknamed “the Tuscan village of France,” and then on to Angers, home to the world’s largest surviving medieval tapestry. These train journeys were even shorter than the others, only about 30 minutes each, but like the previous ones everything we wanted to see was within a short walking distance from the station. 

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