Both Becky and I
have traveled in France, individually and together. We’ve visited many of
the famous landmarks. But now we want to live in France. We
want to get outside of what I call the “tourist bubble,” the transparent
capsule created by the hospitality industry that glides smoothly between the
Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, Chartres, and comfy tourist hotels, under
the direction of English-speaking guides, desk-clerks, and maître-d’s. We
want to spend extended periods in several locales, experience them from the
perspective of daily life, meet our neighbors, patronize small shops and
restaurants, and witness sights and events not to be found in baedekers.
After discussions
about the length of our sojourn, we settled on four to five months.
Commitments would keep us in the US until late July, so our target departure
date became August 1. That should give us three months of fair weather
before the autumn rains. We decided to give ourselves the option of
staying through the holidays, meaning that we will return to America not later
than early January.
La Langue
We both took
French in school, but for decades we’d had few occasions to use the
language. Several years ago I embarked on a self-teaching project to
recover my French, for no apparent reason besides brain calisthenics. I
used books, CDs, movies, podcasts, and classes at the St. Louis chapter of the
Alliance Francaise, a Paris-based organization that promotes French language
and culture in cities around the world; most enjoyably, I became a regular
participant in Thursday brown-bag conversation lunches at the Alliance.
Now I can turn all that work into something more than mental pushups.
With le plan,
Becky also signed up for a couple of refresher classes at the Alliance
Francaise to bring back her college French.
We anticipate
that – initially at least – Becky, who has a good ear, will be better at
understanding what we hear, while I will be less inhibited about
speaking. Hearing this, one male friend said, “Fancy that: A marriage
where the husband mainly talks and the wife mainly listens!”
Les
Preparations
To get to France,
General Eisenhower only had to plan D-Day. With a staff. To get us
to France, Becky, logistics maven, had to get a house ready to sell, engage
realtors, downsize our possessions by 20% or more, arrange for packing and
storage, and supervise multiple workmen making repairs arising from the buyers’
home inspection. Her staff: me. Ike had it easy.
In addition, I
had to close down my law practice, and Becky had to tie up the loose ends of
her job as administrative assistant in a high school counseling office.
We wrote out pages
and pages of to-do lists, which we frequently updated as new tasks
emerged. At times it seemed as if we were climbing Mont Blanc before we
ever saw the French Alps. But when we got a contract on our house after
just 11 days on the market, it was like glimpsing a rainbow before the rain
stops. Months of work still stretched ahead. But le plan was
going to happen.