Finally, a long entry...
So, you might want to know how things are really going... First of all, if it is not obvious from our lack of blog posts and our non-reponses to your emails (yes, we are reading them! and thank you!), it is more difficult and more expensive than we expected to get internet access. I guess living in Seattle, where free wifi is almost as ubiquitous as Starbucks, has spoiled us. Where we have connected, it is on French-style keyboards, so we are slow at typing. (They are just different enough from ours to be pesky! For example, the m and a are in different places, and you have to shift to get a period.)
The Olympics were a bit of a vacation for us, mainly because they distracted us from all of the tasks which we are still working on in France; mainly, finding a place to live (with a very helpful landlord or property management company who will rent to us even though we have no verifiable income) and buying an RV. Progress is slow, primarily because we are working on everything in a foreign language, and also because we have yet to fully work out our plans around the French schedule (typically 9h-12h and 14h-17h, Monday through Saturday if you're lucky!). We relish the small victories, like getting a French cell phone, setting up the voice mail on the French cell phone, successfully explaining to the rental agency that even though we can't produce the paperwork they want for the agreement, we have money to pay for an apartment, talking someone into letting us stay in a marginally-open campground, soliciting a ride into town to buy tire chains, etc. ...And of course we are learning every day. Mostly about skiing, RVs and apartments. People have been generally helpful and patient.
Daily life includes things like: deciding where to stay, grocery shopping, tiny steps towards the tasks above, driving and navigating. Here are some detailed examples:
Deciding where to stay:
Anyone who has ever rolled into a town after dark tired and hungry and without a place to stay knows that this can be stressful. Now, just for fun, add a foreign language, seasonal closures! Our worst wild goose chase was outside of Chambery, where we spent the twilight hours searching for a campground that turned out to be closed, and then drove for another hour or so up about 100 hairpin turns to what turned out to be a private campground for the Camping Club de France. Luckily the proprietor took pity on us and let us stay when we showed up well after dark.
Tiny steps:
Since the rental agencies all want to see three months rental history, three months salary and various other things that we don't have, our latest thing is to be up front and tell them that we won't be able to get them anything like this. The way we devised to make this understood is to tell them that we're retired! This definitely gets their attention.
Grocery shopping:
I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, but we love Carrefour. Which I'm pretty sure is the Wal-Mart of France. What's not to love though? They have huge parking lots, where we can always find space, even during the "soldes" on Saturday (Craig promises to write about this). They have a really cheap store brand. They have toilets. They have virtually everything we need. Just don't forget to have your produce weighed BEFORE you go to the checkout. And bring your own bag(s). Oh, and don't put off shopping until Sunday afternoon because even the biggest "Hypermarches" are not open then.
Driving and navigating:
Our navigation system works remarkably well. We've been able to navigate relatively easily almost everywhere! What the navigation system doesn't tell us, though, is where you can park a high-clearance vehicle, or if you can get through all of the tunnels. So far, the most fun was Turino. Besides Olympic roadblocks and typical Italian drivers, Turin had the wackiest thoroughfare system I've ever seen. It's four-lane, but the middle two lanes ONLY go straight (even through roundabouts), so if you want to make a LEFT turn, you need to be in the RIGHT lane. Being the right lane got us into trouble though, when it got diverted around the Sunday market. Believe it or not, we found parking in downtown Turin! It was quite stressful though.
-SK
a Les Menuires
The Olympics were a bit of a vacation for us, mainly because they distracted us from all of the tasks which we are still working on in France; mainly, finding a place to live (with a very helpful landlord or property management company who will rent to us even though we have no verifiable income) and buying an RV. Progress is slow, primarily because we are working on everything in a foreign language, and also because we have yet to fully work out our plans around the French schedule (typically 9h-12h and 14h-17h, Monday through Saturday if you're lucky!). We relish the small victories, like getting a French cell phone, setting up the voice mail on the French cell phone, successfully explaining to the rental agency that even though we can't produce the paperwork they want for the agreement, we have money to pay for an apartment, talking someone into letting us stay in a marginally-open campground, soliciting a ride into town to buy tire chains, etc. ...And of course we are learning every day. Mostly about skiing, RVs and apartments. People have been generally helpful and patient.
Daily life includes things like: deciding where to stay, grocery shopping, tiny steps towards the tasks above, driving and navigating. Here are some detailed examples:
Deciding where to stay:
Anyone who has ever rolled into a town after dark tired and hungry and without a place to stay knows that this can be stressful. Now, just for fun, add a foreign language, seasonal closures! Our worst wild goose chase was outside of Chambery, where we spent the twilight hours searching for a campground that turned out to be closed, and then drove for another hour or so up about 100 hairpin turns to what turned out to be a private campground for the Camping Club de France. Luckily the proprietor took pity on us and let us stay when we showed up well after dark.
Tiny steps:
Since the rental agencies all want to see three months rental history, three months salary and various other things that we don't have, our latest thing is to be up front and tell them that we won't be able to get them anything like this. The way we devised to make this understood is to tell them that we're retired! This definitely gets their attention.
Grocery shopping:
I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, but we love Carrefour. Which I'm pretty sure is the Wal-Mart of France. What's not to love though? They have huge parking lots, where we can always find space, even during the "soldes" on Saturday (Craig promises to write about this). They have a really cheap store brand. They have toilets. They have virtually everything we need. Just don't forget to have your produce weighed BEFORE you go to the checkout. And bring your own bag(s). Oh, and don't put off shopping until Sunday afternoon because even the biggest "Hypermarches" are not open then.
Driving and navigating:
Our navigation system works remarkably well. We've been able to navigate relatively easily almost everywhere! What the navigation system doesn't tell us, though, is where you can park a high-clearance vehicle, or if you can get through all of the tunnels. So far, the most fun was Turino. Besides Olympic roadblocks and typical Italian drivers, Turin had the wackiest thoroughfare system I've ever seen. It's four-lane, but the middle two lanes ONLY go straight (even through roundabouts), so if you want to make a LEFT turn, you need to be in the RIGHT lane. Being the right lane got us into trouble though, when it got diverted around the Sunday market. Believe it or not, we found parking in downtown Turin! It was quite stressful though.
-SK
a Les Menuires
posted by Steph and Craig at 6:38 AM
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