Tag: Move to France

Before leaving the US

The bouquet list

Curtis Island, Camden, ME
Curtis Island, Camden, ME

If you’ve watched the British television comedy Keeping Up Appearances you’ll be familiar with the lead character Hyacinth Bucket who prefers to put a French spin on the pronunciation of her last name. It would seem appropriate, therefore, that we should have a bouquet list of things we wanted to do before leaving the US. Since we won’t have a big oven in our French house, Bill’s been baking all kinds of bread, and besides, we’ll be walking to the boulangerie every morning for our daily baguette and maybe even a pastry or two. From our pantry we’ve already had our fill of tapioca and gelatin (yum?) so it’s time to see what else is on the list. Continue reading “The bouquet list”

Unknown's avatarBob1 Comment
Before leaving the US

Things that go clunk in the night

“Clunk” is not a sound that you ever want to hear coming from your computer yet that’s exactly what happened last week. Bill and I each have two computers (or more, but this is not Truth or Dare) and his large laptop emitted that ominous noise indicating an eminent hard drive crash. He started looking online and several times found what appeared to be exactly what we were looking for except for all of the terrible reviews it received or the fact that it didn’t have a DVD drive, or it wasn’t touchscreen. Continue reading “Things that go clunk in the night”

Unknown's avatarBob
Before leaving the US

Here, you need this

Bill bought me a Fitbit®. Do you think that he was trying to tell me something? Actually we’d been talking about wanting some way to track our activity, or lack of, since we anticipate walking a whole lot more than we do now once we move to Carcassonne. Considering that we won’t have a car it should be a relatively easy goal to achieve of the recommended 10,000 steps a day.

But just how far is that? It’s about 5 miles. I read that a sedentary person takes between 1,000 and 3,000 steps a day so you really do have to make a conscious effort to get up to make it up to the much higher level. If we make daily trips to the bakery, cafe, market, etc., and long walks along the Aude river and the Canal-du-Midi with Heather then we shouldn’t have any problem. Continue reading “Here, you need this”

Unknown's avatarBob
Life in France

But you gotta have friends

There are several expat discussion forums on the Internet that can be a great source of first-hand information from people living in the country to which you are moving. The one I like the best is Expatforum.com because it tends to be full of positive, helpful advice and the moderator keeps everyone on topic and is very knowledgeable about French culture, daily life, government issues, and other challenges we are likely to encounter. Continue reading “But you gotta have friends”

Unknown's avatarBob