This is a picture of me, my sister, and my mom. Don’t we all look alike? Let’s take a leap back in time about 14 years to 1998, and that was the first time that I lived in Béziers. I had just gotten married (three times, all to the same man), and we were living […]
As many readers will know from my previous posts, I’m a high school French teacher. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and teaching is my calling. I love it. I work at an awesome high school where all of the students are amazingly motivated and the parents are supportive, my colleagues are my friends. […]
I’m so ready for spring to get here. Yesterday it was snowing up a storm, so we may have to wait a little while before seeing some nice weather. With the arrival of spring, the countdown to summer gets shorter and shorter every day. I figured out that we only have about seven more full […]
After seven months of pursuing our dream of selling our house then moving to France, today it has officially happened. We closed on the sale of our house in St. Louis! Neither of us was quite ready to believe it until all of the closing papers had been signed. Until the last minute, we were […]
It’s kind of hard to believe that this is really going to happen for us. All of last year we were getting our house on the market, thinking all the while that we would be moving to France during the summer (after the successful sale of our home, of course!). By now we would have […]
Pour mes amis francophones: En ce moment j’essaie de prendre une décision importante. Le moment du départ arrivant, je ne sais pas si on doit acheter des billets aller-simple ou des billets aller-retour (deux fois le prix). Si on achète l’ aller-simple (très tentant), on risque de ne pas vendre la maison avant de partir […]
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. -Ernest Hemingway
Many people have been asking me why we want to move to France. There are many reasons, and none of them are because we don’t like living in the United States. For our family, it just seems right. For one thing, we have the easy option of living in France legally. My husband is French, so nationality for the kids and me isn’t a problem.
When moving to France is a real possibility, you tend to think about it more seriously. For the last 14 years, we’ve been spending every summer there, all the time wondering if we could make it work for us.
Here are my TOP TEN reasons for wanting to relocate to France:
Reason # 1
Quality of life
Reason # 2
Work to live, not live to work. Taking time to enjoy life, spending time with family, longer lunches and dinners. Slower pace of living. Sundays are what they used to be in the United States forty years ago.
Reason # 3
Healthier lifestyle, pedestrian friendly cities, beaches, mountains, walks in vineyards.
Reason # 4
High-quality health care system, affordable to all, low cost prescription drugs.
Reason # 5
French gastronomy, locally grown fresh produce markets, bread, cheese, olive oil, Mediterranean diet.
Reason # 6
Easy travel to diverse locations (other European countries); children grow up (with the possibility of) being exposed to more foreign cultures. And no matter where you live in France, Paris is just a quick train ride away.
Reason # 7
Some of the best, and most affordable wine regions in the world. Summer wine festivals in the Languedoc are fabulous.
Reason # 8
Mediterranean climate: The weather may not be so fantastic in every part of France year round, but in the Languedoc, it really is quite pleasant most of the time.
Reason # 9
Manners are still important in France, and the vast majority of children are raised to show respect. This is very important to me.
Reason # 10
Comparatively low violent crime rate. We are not planning to live in a big city, but even in Paris I feel safe walking alone at night.
Our house still hasn’t sold. 42 days or so on the market and two weeks since we’ve had a showing, but I’m still curiously optimistic. I don’t know how I’ll deal psychologically if this doesn’t work out. Let’s just not think about that Here’s what our container will look like. Doesn’t look that big, […]
Step 1 The first thing we had to do back in the fall of ’11 was to really decide once and for all that this is what we want to do, and that this is the best decision for our family. My husband and I have just hit the big 4-0, and we have two […]
