The house above the chocolate factory

Pont du Loup, as seen from the village of Gourdon

On July 1, we arrived in France on sabbatical from our jobs as associate professors at Minnesota State University, Mankato. For the next twelve months, we will be living in Pont du Loup, a village in the Cote d'Azur (what Americans call the Riveria) where hubby grew up and where his mom (Belle Mere) still lives.

 Boy1 and Boy2 will be enrolled in the village school that Hubby and his brother (Beau Frere) attended as children. It's a two-room school that groups children by age: Boy1, a rising fifth grader in Minnesota, will be with the equivalent of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. Boy2, a rising first grader, will be with kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd graders. Everyone, including the directeur of the school, insist this will help them learn French more quickly because it's going to be total immersion for them. (We hired a tutor twice each week in the spring semester and Hubby did some workbooks with them, but he struggles to speak French in the U.S. He's completely American now.)

About the apartment

Our apartment above the chocolate shop. 

We are renting a three-bedroom apartment on the top floor of one of the oldest buildings in the village. (That's our terrace and apartment with the green shutters.) Belle Mere's family once owned the building and lived here while they ran a very successful restaurant across the street. Later, when they added a hotel to the restaurant, they moved out and sold the building. Today, it is owned by a successful businessman and real estate magnate who owns the Confiserie Florian, a candy factory that makes chocolates on the ground floor of our building and candies out of fruit and flowers (e.g. rose jam, candied violets) about 50 feet away.

The apartment was rented to us unfurnished (which was fine with us because our kids tend to break things), so we spent the first two weeks cleaning, furnishing, and making minor repairs. A morning at Orange.fr yielded cell phone service, telephone service with free international calls, and promise that cable TV and internet would be turned on within three weeks. (It was actually 10 days.) A daylong trip to the Toulon IKEA (two hours west) was followed by half a day of assembling furniture; we await the delivery of our sofa, bed frames, and kitchen table on August 11. (Your positive thoughts for a timely delivery are welcome!) There are no closets in this apartment because families would have used armoirs, but there is an empty central room with a water heater and nothing else. We turned that into the laundry/storage/family closet. I am now a wholehearted believer that this is the ideal arrangement because my kids rarely put their clothes away on their own.

Most rooms needed a good dusting and mopping. Other areas needed more TLC. The apartment was empty for about 18 months before we moved in, and the previous tenant didn't care for it very well. The kitchen was brand new (er, 18 months old but unused), the handymen who helped us settle in told us that the entire apartment had to be rewired for electricity, and a few rooms needed new ceilings. The third bedroom and its attached sun room had been permanently locked to store files for the confiserie; a window had been left open and the sun room was full of bugs and bat guano...and an old office chair. The yard was completely overgrown, but the gardener simply clear cut everything: grape vines, blackberry bushes, roses, all mowed down to the ground. The bitter orange tree was infested with ants who were noshing on the oranges from last January, nestled in between the tiny green fruit that will be ready this winter.

We attacked the apartment like typical Americans. We located the nearest home improvement store, bought supplies, and began working on one room or project per day. When that store proved woefully inadequate, we found another Lowe's-style store 20 minutes further and filled the car with supplies. We cleaned the sunroom, caulked holes, and hung curtains for privacy. We pruned the orange tree back and are trying to train the muscadine grapes on the terrace above to leave the poor tree alone. We hung a shower rod so that we could take real showers without flooding the bathroom, and here I have to give props to Hubby for handling that percussion drill like a pro.

About our sabbaticals
At our university, faculty can apply for sabbaticals every 7-10 years. Hubby was due for one three years ago, but he delayed his application to coincide with mine. We were required to submit plans for the work we plan to accomplish while we're gone: Hubby will be studying international information security practices and I will be finishing a couple of research articles that I presented at conferences, studying quantitative data analysis to help me teach research methods courses better, and corresponding with faculty in Mankato high schools to determine whether there might be a way to work a technical communication unit into English classes so that students who like to write know that we exist. I am also going to read. (Yes, I put that in my plan!)

We saved as much money as we could during those three years to make up for the lost income (the university pays 80% of our salary, so we needed at least 20% to live comfortably). Over the last year, Hubby took on about a dozen consulting gigs of various sorts to build our nest egg, and Boy2's graduation from daycare to kindergarten allowed me to save up a year's worth of tuition. A colleague is renting our house, which helps us pay the mortgage and ensures that someone is there to notice when the drainpipe is loose and floods the basement and when the kitchen sink backs up (both of which happened this week). We sold both of our cars before we left and bought Beau Frere's six-year-old Nissan Quashqai SUV when we arrived. We scrimp in some places so that we can splurge in others (like our grocery budget and school holiday vacations). Because Hubby and the Boys are French citizens, we have it easier in some ways, like me being the only one who needs to deal with the hassle of a visa.

What's next?
School starts on September 2, so until then we are settling in to the house, shopping for food every couple of days, and spending as much time with family as we can. In future posts, I'll tell you about the village, the trials and tribulations of the Boys' attempts to learn French (and mine, too), the trips we take, and many of the joys and absurdities of living in the south of France.