Life in France

I have had holidays in France for most of my life so my ‘holiday French’ was OK. Once we started planning the move out here, I started to learn again. By the time we moved, I had a basic grasp of the language, almost a year later my vocabulary, comprehension and confidence in speaking French are better, but I still have a LONG way to go. As this is another topic I am often asked about, here are some of the ‘tools’ I have used and how they worked for me.

Vocab – clearly it is harder to learn a language in my 50s than it was when I was young. C’est la vie. For me, working my way through Duolingo little by little, each day, a couple of times a day has helped with my vocabulary. It can be mind-numbingly boring and frustrating, but the repetition, the combination of hearing, writing, speaking, and translating to and from has definitely improved my vocabulary. Eventually, a new word will stick, and I can start to use it in day to day life.

Another vocab motivation was the admin for living in France such my car (e.g. impôts d’importation, contrôle technique, carte grise, entretein, remplacement de pare-brise etc.) Similarly when registering with a doctor, having a health check and blood tests, applying for carte de séjour and carte vitale, buying a house, getting services connected, applying for planning permission, buying materials, getting repairs done… all required new vocab. Each time one of these came up, I spent time thinking about the words I would need, looking them up and trying to learn them. I’d have practise conversations with myself (yes, I know!) while I was running or cycling or painting walls etc. Of course, it doesn’t always go smoothly, and I end up doing some Franglaise etc but each time some of it sticks and I get less stressed about the next time.

Understanding written French has seemed to come quite easily for me and is improving with my vocab, I can happily read ‘stuff’ now and fill in the gaps of words I don’t know yet. I believe that is quite common.

For understanding spoken French I’d completely oversimplify it with 3 scenarios: (i) French being spoken for people learning the language using slow and simple phrases. (ii) Listening to French being spoken in clear, straightforward, unhurried language without a strong dialect. (iii) Trying to tune-in / join-in to conversations between ‘locals’ talking at a normal pace using very informal language.

For (i) my favourite resource was the InnerFrench podcasts. There are lots of others out there, but for me this hit exactly the right level and I continue to work my way through them. I also bought their ‘Build a Strong Core’course shortly before we moved out which I found very helpful with stuff like pronouns that I still struggle with today. 

For (ii) I like to tune into FranceInter or RFI radio stations when I am driving, cooking, painting etc and I have found, little by little, I understand more as my brain has ‘tuned in’ to the language and as my vocab has improved. At first, I could get the general gist of some of the news stories, now I can get most of it most of the time. The music stations such as RTL2 and our local Radio4 have a good mix of French and English language music and repeating adverts are good for picking up new words etc.

For (iii) it is a much slower process for me. The more time I have spent talking to people, the more I can pick up, but this is difficult for me. I’m much better at answering the phone and asking people to slow down a little than I was, I can chat to our French clients and the locals who help me by slowing down and using simple language. I really need more immersion to improve in this area.

There are other things I have been doing which help me too like always having French subtitles on the TV, writing shopping lists in French, using French recipes when cooking etc but the thing that has made the BIGGEST difference for me has been ‘conversation exchange’. I speak to a lovely lady in the North of France for an hour week. We met via the TANDEM app. She wants to improve her (already excellent) English and I want to improve my French, so we spend an hour on Skype using both languages, catching up on the week’s news, discussing whatever happens to come to mind on the day etc. Very informal, relaxed, and unstructured but it has been so good for improving my confidence. I did the same with a few other people before we moved out here and they’ve been so helpful.

Some of my encounters in French are still very awkward and I know I still have a mountain to climb. I could be doing a lot more, but I also need to get the balance right when we have been so busy in the house and with the B&B.

À Bientôt !

Picking up the timeline from when we arrived at our first rental property just under a year ago, as well as working through the admin I have been writing about, we also set about the daunting but much more fun task of choosing where we would like to live and looking at potential houses to buy.

We had a short-list of towns / villages that we wanted to check out and we visited 2 or 3 in a day, wandering around the place, getting a feel for ‘vibe’, registering with estate agents, picking up details of potential houses, stopping for lunch or a coffee or a beer and then on to the next location. Back at home later in the day, we would make some notes about our likes and dislikes and potential properties for sale nearby.

After a few weeks we had a much shorter short-list of villages (which was actually very different from what we had in mind before we came to France), and our property selection criteria were pretty clear to us by then. High on our list of villages was Eymet, which we hadn’t previously considered at all. One of the property must-haves, which wasn’t on the list when we set out, was the ability to generate some income and keep us busy.

We looked at 3 properties in Eymet that were or could be set up as a B&B. Either of the 2 great houses we looked at in the centre of the Bastide could have worked for us, but neither had the outdoor space or the flexibility inside that we wanted. The 3^rd which was just outside the Bastide but still only a 5-minute walk away, had both but had other compromises that we had to think long and hard about.

Long story short, our offer on the 3^rd house was accepted in late summer and with the rest of the ‘moving to France’ admin well in hand by then, there wasn’t a lot more we could do other than relax and enjoy living in France with a lot of spare time on our hands 🙂

I did a lot of running (on the not so hot days), Tom had a week back in the UK, we used the bikes for exploring closer to home, played tennis on the municipal courts, did some end-of-season grape picking, had a long weekend in Paris and really enjoyed the warm autumn days starting to plan our Chambres d’Hôtes.

It has been a very wet few days here over the weekend. Such a shame for the wedding events that our guests were attending, but it has been a welcome relief after last weekend’s heatwave, great for the garden and for my weekly longer run which was deliciously cool this week. The sunflowers in the fields are out now and the grapes, figs, walnuts etc are all swelling nicely.

A few people have asked me how we have got on with health care here in France, so here is my experience so far with my understanding of how things work…

To come to France, you should have adequate health insurance. For applying for a residence permit of more than 3 months, your insurance should include comprehensive cover including repatriation. After 3 months of living in France, you can apply to join the public health system – Protection Universelle Maladie (PUMA), but I had read that it can take time to process applications, so we decided to buy private health insurance for a whole year. It was expensive, but it gave us the flexibility we needed and the ability to cancel quarter by quarter.

After arriving in France, I tried to register with a doctor in Eymet, but there were already too many people on their books for the resident doctors, but I was told that if I need an appointment I was to call and they would fit in me when they could, but I couldn’t be assigned a GP.

I made my first appointment because I wanted to run in a local race. In France, for nearly all sporting activities, you need a medical certificate from a doctor saying you are fit to take part. The doctor I saw was very friendly, he asked me questions about my health, measured my weight, height and blood pressure, he examined my body and listened to my breathing. Finally, he gave me a full EKG. Everything was fine so I had the certificate I needed – valid for a year. I’d hoped my expensive private health insurance would pay for the appointment with the doctor (€40) so I scanned the invoice and sent it to them with a claim form. My claim was rejected because I arrived in France less than three months ago 🙁

After living here for 90 days, I filled out the forms to join PUMA with all the necessary documentation (of which there was a lot of course) and popped it all into the letterbox of the CPAM office in Bergerac. Two months later I received my social security number and my Carte Vitale so I happily cancelled my private health insurance. I did, however, take out a ‘mutuelle’ to top-up the public health cover.

A couple of months ago I heard there was a new doctor in town, so I have now registered with him, and I have since used my Carte Vitale + Carte Mutuelle to pay for appointments and prescriptions.

After breaking a pair of glasses, I wanted to buy a new pair, but that was not possible to do here without a prescription from a French ophthalmologist, so I made an appointment with one in Miramont-de-Guyenne. She tested my eyesight and gave me a prescription. I then visited the optician in Eymet to order new glasses. The Carte Vitale + Mutuelle paid for the sight test and significantly reduce the cost of the glasses leaving me to pay the balance.

All in all, the healthcare system seems to me be well set up, easily accessible and affordable once you are ‘in the system’, which like a lot of things here, takes time and paperwork.

Back at the B&B we’ve had a houseful this weekend and we’ve had a heatwave. With temperatures over 40C during the afternoons there were bound to be some uncomfortable nights, but we’ve learnt that by keeping shutters and windows closed during the day the house stays reasonably cool. The swimming pool has been great! We turned two rooms this morning so the washing machines are whirring away now and I’m ready for une sieste.

This weekend we welcomed our 40^th guest (excluding family etc) to Le Portanel since we opened for business at the start of May and the bookings keep coming in which is great. It can ibe hard work, there is no doubt about that, but we have some quieter days and make sure we have our down time too and we certainly have no regrets so far…

This weekend we blocked the guest rooms off for Sunday night and invited some local friends around for a chilled afternoon of eating, drinking and a well-earned break. It was 32 degrees, so perfect for the pool and the BBQ, and it made me think about what a great community we have here. About 25 of us relaxing and enjoying our new home and garden less than a year after moving over here. I have been so lucky to have such brilliant local running group – that must be a topic for another post.

A lot of people have asked me about how I, a UK passport holder, got a visa to live in France post-Brexit. I suppose you could say I cheated a bit because I am married to a citizen of the European Union. With both of Tom’s parents being Irish, he applied for his Irish passport as soon as Brexit started to look like a reality. So, Tom can come and go pretty much as he pleases and being his spouse, I was able to come to France without a long stay visa and then request one within 90 days of arrival.

Once in France I made an appointment for a Carte de Séjour application meeting at the Préfecture de la Dordogne in Périgueux giving myself about a month to get my dossier together which included :

• An application form
• My passport
• My birth certificate and a French government approved translated copy
• Proof of our address in France
• My private health insurance
• Proof of my financial income
• Proof of my date of arrival in France
• Three recent passport photos
• Our marriage certificate and a French government approved translated copy
• Tom’s birth certificate and a French government approved translated copy
• Tom’s passport

… + an extra copy of all of the above

At the appointment in August, the government officer looked through my file, took my fingerprints and asked me a few questions. Then we signed a marriage declaration form and the officer prepared a temporary residence permit (six months) to keep with my passport while I waited for their decision and my Carte de Sèjour which would allow me to stay in France for five years.

In mid-October, I received an email from the préfecture telling me it was ready for collection, so I made an appointment to collect it the following week. This appointment was very short, just two minutes to verify my details and sign for my card. We’d already had an offer accepted on a house by that time, so it was just as well it went smoothly!

Temperatures are back in the 30s again this week and we are pretty full for the next couple of weeks so I think June will be a really good test of how we are doing in our new venture.

We’ve been more or less full for the last couple of weeks and we’re starting to get into routines now for breakfast shopping & prep, breakfast service & clear-up, room refresh for guests staying on, room change overs as guests check-out, laundry, keeping the house clean and tidy, house/pool/garden maintenance and of course welcoming and hosting new guests. I guess that is pretty much my job description now 🙂

Our first home in France was Le Pigeonnier at Razac d’Eymet that we rented for 3 months from Sim and Josie who were lovely hosts and super helpful while I was dealing with all the administration of moving to France. Importing my car was quite a ‘biggy’ so I’ve focussed on that this week.

I had French insurance sorted before I left the U.K. but I only had a month upon arrival in France to submit my application to register my car in France i.e. with a set of French number plates on it. This would normally be done through the gouvernement website A.N.T.S but to open an account there you need a social security number or a tax number which were still months away for me, so I sought the help of a local garage , for a small fee of course. They were very helpful .

Before applying for the registration, I had to take the car through Contrôle Technique – the French equivalent of the UK MOT test. The main potential stumbling block there was that my headlamps and rear fog light are designed for driving on the left, but having had a HUGE quote from AUDI to replace them, I choose instead to find a sympathetic CT Centre who could help me with the beam deflectors to allow the car to pass legally. Again, I found them to be super helpful there.

Another tricky one was the import certificate to prove that import duty has been paid, or in my case, that I was able to import it duty free as it was part of a main residence move. After a couple of false starts at the local customs offices I was eventually directed to an office in Bordeaux that could help. After explaining my situation on the phone, I was able to do it all remotely so after scanning 12 pieces of documentation to email them, about a week later I had the certificate in the post.

Along with the CT and Import Certificate I had to pull together, scan and print out for the garage helping with the registration: car insurance, UK registration certificate, passport, driving licence, proof of address in France, EU certificate of conformity for the car, and the form applying for registration. ~4 weeks later I had French Plates on my car and could declare my car as ‘exported’ to DVLA UK.

My UK driving licence runs out later this year but that is another story.

It was lovely to have some friends and friends of friends staying last week for a few days. I was able to go for a run with one of my Woodbridge Shufflers running buddies. I’ve not been able to get out with our local running group here much since we have opened but I’ll be able to pick that up again when things quieten down again. In the meantime it is just me or me and Tom out there enjoying running through the countryside.