Living the French Lifestyle

A small grocery store in Place des Arcades, Valbonne

When we began talking about moving to France for a year, the plan was (like so many other plans of ours) really just something to talk about. We also talked about moving to Washington, D.C. and using some of our professional contacts to find work. We briefly considered moving to Louisiana--all those oilfield companies must need tech writers and information security consultants, right?--until we remembered what August is like. But we kept returning to the idea of France. As I told many of my friends and students, we wanted Boy1 and Boy2 to become the little French Boys that we know are buried deep, DEEP inside of them.

Even after we finally committed to going to France, we had to decide where to go. To the south to be near Belle Mere and Sophia Antipolis, the "French Silicon Valley"? To the east to be near Beau Frere, Switzerland, and the many, many United Nations agencies and NGOs? To Paris, to be...well, in Paris?

The south won. This is where Hubby spent much of his childhood, and part of being little French Boys is learning about their French Family and family history. We spent a couple of months looking at real estate ads and asking for recommendations for real estate agents before Belle Mere mentioned that the apartment in the building next door was available. It was not furnished, she warned, but it was a large apartment. In fact, we had often said that apartment would be the perfect spot, just next door so that Belle Mere could pop in whenever she wanted. We were not dissuaded by the lack of furniture because we were certain that our Boys would leave any furnishings much worse for the wear. Besides, we reasoned, it's just one year. We could be minimalists for a year, right?

The spoils of our trip to IKEA

On our second day in the village, we drove two hours to IKEA Toulon. Although Belle Mere was able to lend us a lot of kitchen items, patio furniture that we use in the house, a "klik-klak" futon, a loft bed, and a desk, there were still many things we needed even to live minimally. At the top of the list: mattresses. A family friend was generous in offering us the use of two air mattresses, but one night is more than enough on those. Five hours and $2000 later, we exited IKEA with the ingredients for a home.

One catch: The couch, bedframes, and table top were all too large to fit into our car, so they would have to be delivered. But we live in the outer ring of IKEA Toulon's delivery zone, and for some reason there were no more deliveries available for our region.

Lesson 1: Be nice to the sales staff. The French have a reputation for being rude, particularly the salespeople, but we have seldom found that to be the case. We suspect that American travelers fail to (a) greet the saleperson first with a warm, yet humble, "Bonjour Monsieur/Madame" and (b) attempt to speak French, no matter how poor it may sound. The social contract in France demands that one greet salespeople and shop owners when entering a store and offer a "Merci Monsieur/Madame" when leaving. Many Americans simply get to the point with a request or question, which is considered quite rude over here. In fact, we have been guilty of this ourselves. At MediaMark, an electronics store in Geneva, we searched in vain for a European power cord for Boy1's gaming device. After 15 minutes, Hubby finally walked up to a salesperson and asked if they sold them. The man turned toward us and said loudly and pointedly, "BONJOUR, Monsieur." And the he helped us find what we needed. But at IKEA, Hubby's patience and politeness were rewarded when the associate sweet talked the delivery people into finding (or creating?) an opening on their schedule. 

Corollary to Lesson 1: Do not expect the salespeople to seek you out and ask if you need assistance. While they have always been quite helpful when asked for assistance, they rarely stop what they are doing to check on customers. That's actually fine with me because I'm usually just browsing. Hubby suspects the reason may be that the labor laws here have caused stores to use the smallest number of employees possible, which makes the few who are on shift even busier.    

Lesson 2: Don't expect anything to happen quickly in France. After much finagling, the IKEA agent was able to arrange a delivery, but it was six weeks away. Conversations with locals indicated that was quite normal. When Hubby went to the sous prefecture to file the sales paperwork for the car, it took an hour...and the paperwork was already filled out! Then he was told that he would have to return in two weeks to pick up his new license plate, and then he would have to arrange to have the plate permanently bolted on to the car at an auto repair shop. More than an hour at Orange, the telecom company, yielded two operational cell phones and a promise that the cable TV and Internet would be functional three weeks later.   

The daybed, covered by a curtain in a Provencal print,
and the requisite IKEA chairs.

Back home from IKEA, we unrolled our mattresses in the living room, and for the next six weeks we stacked the mattresses into a "daybed" during the day and unstacked them to sleep on the floor at night. We "built" a large table from scrap lumber that was left behind by the previous tenant and sawhorses from Belle Mere's shed. We pruned a bitter orange tree and tried to train a muscat grape vine to leave it alone. We cleaned and caulked and patched holes and installed a shower rod from the 9 foot ceiling using a percussion drill. (For the record, I had nothing to do with the latter. Props to Hubby for mastering that drill and not hitting water pipes or electricity.)

But most of all, we tried to settle into the French lifestyle. The nearest village market is on Monday mornings in Pre du Lac, about 15 minutes (but only 7 km/4 miles) away. We're early risers, so we're usually among the first ones there. We buy fruits and vegetables, bread, saucisson, cheese, olives and almonds. On our way out, we buy a rotisserie chicken, roasted potatoes, a couple of tomates provençale, and a bit of jus. Today, we were delighted to realize that the traiteur has begun to recognize us. We drive to another village five minutes beyond staples and anything else that wasn't available at the market, and then we return home for our weekly feast. Mondays are officially our favorite day of the week.

Lesson 3: Be prepared to go shopping for food frequently. My American habit of shopping once for the entire week (or two) just doesn't work here. Except for onions, garlic, and potatoes, all of the produce we buy seems to last only a day or two. I have read that the French markets sell their produce "at the peak of freshness," and I have come to realize that means it's all downhill once you get back to the car. I do plan a few weekly meals, buy baguette from the tabac next door, and go to the weekly farmer's market, but so far we have still been going to the grocery an average of three times per week. 

Ready to eat our Monday Feast. 

Corollary to Lesson 3: Food is really cheap compared to the U.S. This is another truism that I read about in travel books, but until we were here full-time I did not quite appreciate it. A baguette costs 90 centimes (about $1) here but about $3 in Mankato. A liter of bottled water is also about one euro. Our roast chicken is 7 euros, which is about the same, but the tomates provençale are only 50 centimes. Store-brand canned corn is 75 centimes. A bottle of organic Cote du Rhone wine was 2.50 euros, and a box of organic rosé wine is 11 euros. Organic versions of most items are available and are priced within a few cents of the non-organic versions.

We do our errands in the morning, both to avoid the heat of the day and to have the best chance of getting a good parking spot when we return. Although the old pattern of opening at 10 am, closing for lunch at noon, opening again at 2 pm, and closing at 7 pm still holds for smaller shops, the big chains are open early and all day. We have embraced the siesta as a way of surviving the worst of the heat, although I'm usually the only one who actually falls asleep. Then we rise and head down to the river.

On most evenings, either Belle Mere or I will cook and we all eat together around 6:30 pm on our terrasse overlooking the street. (We know this is ridiculously early by French standards, but we're early birds through and through.) Here in the gorge, the sun drops behind the western ridge around 6:00 pm, but the sky is still bright until the sun truly sets around 9:00 pm.

Playing boules in St. Vallier de Thiey

TV and computer games are limited (if you can call it that) to before 9:00 am and after 4:00 pm, otherwise the Boys wouldn't notice that they are in France at all. Family movie night is on Tuesday, when Belle Mere stays home to recuperate after an afternoon of being a multilingual tour guide at a 15th century church in Bar sur Loup.  We get out of the apartment whenever we can come up with an excuse. We played boules with the family in St. Vallier de Thiey, visited markets in St. Vallier and Grasse to compare them to our own, and spent an evening in the Jardin Princess Pauline overlooking the city of Grasse and the Mediterranean coast. We took an easy hike in the Col de Vence to a site that is supposed to have seen extra terrestrial activity. We toured La Grotte de Baume Obscure, a cave carved by a river that still runs within one of the nearby mountains. (At this point, the Boys wanted to know why we kept showing them creepy rocks.) The sand beach at Mandelieu La Napole (just west of Cannes) was nice but I far preferred the less crowded rock beach at Cagnes sur Mer, which is only 30 minutes from home (and 5 minutes from the shopping mall--bonus!). We're planning a day trip to Italy soon since the border is only one hour away.

Belle Mere warned that the weather would change on August 15, and while that seemed like an oddly specific prediction, she was right: the night temperatures are cool enough to leave the windows open (the big wooden volets are closed, though) and we have had several rainy days after an exceptionally hot and dry July. The car and pedestrian traffic in the village is noticeably changing. Our village is feeling more like a village, and that pleases us. As the saying goes, the days are long but the years are short. We often feel like we're struggling to fill our time, but by the end of the day we cannot truly account for most of it and we were startled to realize that we have lived here for nearly two months.

La rentrée is next Tuesday, the day upon which all school children all over France go back to school. We suspect that a lot of families are getting ready to head back to school. We have already purchased our school supplies (which cost about twice as much as they do in the U.S., so everything balances out, it seems), but that's the easy part. On September 2, the Boys experience what "immersion" really means as they experience their first day in the French primary school just up the street.