We bought a bed today. Actually we bought it about a week ago and it was just delivered, with emphasis on those last two words that I’ll explain below. Since we needed an address in France to apply for a visa to live here, the easiest option was to rent for a year a fully furnished “holiday home” that would normally be used by people on vacation for a week or two and then handed back to the owners to prepare for the next round of guests. In our case, the landlords need only to check their bank account monthly to see that the rent’s been paid and in exchange we get a comfortable home where everything has already been provided. Now that we’ve bought our own house, that came with just the walls and roof, it’s time to fill it up. Continue reading “Bed in a box”

Every day we walk between the rental house that we’re living in for this first year that we’re in France and the home that we bought recently. We don’t have plans for extensive renovations but we’ve been doing lots of cleaning, patching, and painting. This has generated all sorts of trash that we’ve dutifully sorted between our recycle bin and the rubbish bin. Yesterday when we turned the corner on to our new street we both immediately noticed that our recycle bin was sitting in front of our neighbor’s window and there was a bright red tag attached to the handle. Considering that we’re currently a guest in the country, we’ve tried really hard to follow all the rules, written and rumored, subtle and in-your-face obvious, so our stomachs churned at what was obviously some kind of infraction. Continue reading “The red tag (not so) special”

In Atlanta we built a British pub in the basement of our home. We tried to make it as authentic as possible including a pressed copper ceiling, faux tobacco-stained walls, memorabilia from the UK, and a letter from the Queen acknowledging our desire to bring a bit of British culture to America. The furnishings all had a dark Old World feel to them including the Windsor armchairs that even came with roughed up seats and tiny holes in the ribs to simulate years of munching by woodworms. Let me tell you, looking authentic doesn’t come cheap. Continue reading “Real vs. authentic”

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”