My second winter in France is approaching. We hit 0°C a few nights ago, ice on the roads, a millimeter or 3 of ice on the car.

I still recall the weeks prior to our departure:

The stress of the FDA stamp for the dogs to travel.

Selling all of the cars and driving a rental van.

Countless hours in a cold garage shredding far too many years of archival paperwork.

Lunch with friends I may never see again, dinner at places I will likely never visit again.

And the day we locked the doors on what we thought at one time would be our forever home.

That was all so alien.

We sold the house to a Francophile.
We sold her all the decor and furnishings.
We even left food, cookware, spices, dishes.
Mattresses.

When we shut the door for the last time, we shut it on our home, not on a shell that was once our home, Almost like leaving a B&B we had gotten way too familiar with.

That was April 2023:
577 days ago

We loaded two dogs, a cat, and some suitcases into the van, had a friend of our daughter drive some of us, while a family friend took the dogs and the rest of us in the rental van.

Two hours later we were at LAX.
Three hours later we were checking the dogs in.
Four hours later we were in a plane bound for CDG airport in France.

The next morning we rented two cars and shuttled the whole mess to a suburb of Bergerac where we rented the gite from hell.

Those three+ months were cold, mildewy, mosquito ridden, hot and dirty.

We learned an extremely valuable lesson though. The 300 year old house with the 300 year old charms comes with 300 years of deferred maintenance and a fist full of old house problems like heating, humidity and even cooling.

Shoot-Move-Communicate
That is part of military training, I’m not ex military but it is something I picked up along the way…

I adopted that as a sort of life plan, replacing shoot with being effective.

Being effective means having the ability to spend. You learn early on that when you really need to spend, you can’t.

Why can’t you?
Because you are in situations where you need to. Life is like that, it makes you where you can’t scratch.

Between Paris and Bergerac there is a gas pump won’t take your American credit card because it needs a signature. There is no attendant to take your signature. There are two cars low on fuel, there is a gas pump that wants a French bank card.

No connecting line between the problem and the solution.

We got a bank account as soon as we were able, after much messing around with a few banks, we found one that would take our circumstances and credentials as sufficient evidence of our worthiness.

We purchased a vehicle the second week we were here. We leaned that there are conditions in which you are able to drive off the lot with your car, depending on who you talk to. These conditions are

A) Very often
B) Most often
C) Sometimes
D) Never
E) Always

For us it was like 10 days. We needed insurance. We found insurance.

There. Shoot and Move are out of the way.

Communicate is my wife. She is a native.

My personal hoops.

Get here on a family visa, take civics classes at the prefecture an hour away.
Get my language evaluated, I need 100 hours of instruction.
Take 50 hours and am re-evaluated at A1 (woot).
(I think the tears of frustration led to a positive evaluation on the part of the language school, thus making me someone else’s problem…)

Coming from a non reciprocal state, the minute I stepped foot on French soil, a fuse was lit on my driver’s license. Twelve months, 365 days.

Shenanigans on the part of my driving school saw my paper work delayed. I needed to get into the ANTS system. I wrongly assumed the delay was typical government bureaucratic hell when it fact is was simply the French laissez-faire disposition of the functionaries at the driving school. My ANTS application sat there fermenting for a few months.

I am partially to blame, I should have been yanking their chain on a monthly basis…

I finally passed my code test in Paris a few months back, got my driving lessons in, and was given the permission to be an accompanied driver.
Two weeks ago I passed the driving test.

As an aside, here you MUST take lessons. Your school is present at the theory test and the driving test.

Drive
I am really proud of myself. My wife’s cousin took it 6 times before she passed. My sister in law took it twice.

I scored 37/40 on the code and 29/31 on the driving.
I unlearned California style, learned France style and passed.

And here I am, I am left with Communicate

I went to the hardware store two days ago and bought some electrical cable. I had to interact with the sales person, I did.

Yesterday I needed to do more electrical work and had to interact again…and I did.

I am far from fluent, far from even passable, but I am better.
Every day in every way my French is getting better and better.

Feels

A good friend who has lived here for a time told me that there would come a time when I would say “oh shit, what the fuck have I done?”
I think I had that feeling for a few minutes about a year ago. It passed.

Now my old life is shedding off me, like a lizard shedding its skin.
maybe it is more like a caterpillar metamorphosing into something grander like a butterfly or a moth. Not sure.

Life is now very different

I still feel “floaty,” in between days of French normalcy.

Its like I am between two very different lives sometimes.

I retired from a very successful career in the movie business and R&D. Jobs that are fairly impossible to do this remote, this removed from a big city.

I do some professional writing from time to time, the pay is nice, the mental stimulation is nicer. I need to keep the garden of my mind fertile. Pest control, dishes and mowing are all fine and necessary functions, but not stimulating.

Change
I moved from city life to country life.

And of course I changed countries, customs, cuisines and cultures.
I don’t think I will ever go native. Wearing salmon capris, smoking a vape, drinking wine while dining on duck… Not me.

I do wonder how much I will be assimilated into France. I spend a lot of time around the British here. That is a big enough culture shock. I grew up on British television so I am not a total alien.

Someone makes a Dalek reference, and I shout out “exterminate!” like I somehow grew up in Newcastle but in reality even the Brits feel foreign to me. I don’t have a lot of contact with the French on a day to day basis, but a lot of our friends are mixed French/American or French/Dutch.

The problem with this floaty feeling is that the more I think about it the more I feel it.

Another weird aspect of all this is having my two adult daughters here. The youngest came with and has an apartment in town, the other ended up here as a huge career move that presented itself. She is in Paris, with hubby and bebe.

We planned the move here while not 100% certain our youngest would follow, and my eldest ending up in Paris was beyond imagination. This move was for my wife and I, for us.

Having my kids here is awesome, but it is also a bizarro anchor to my old life, and part of the floaty feeling equation.

Being honest
I was an adrenaline junkie at work. Taking on impossible challenges with insane budgets in remotes location was so cool. The risk of moving here was in a weird way, appealing. Conquering the unknown. A great adventure.

Definitely something to tickle that risk/reward itch.

I am ready to relax now. Ready to get the language going, my one last hurtle beyond citizenship. Ready to settle in.

Busy
Despite being retired, I do feel very busy. When we’re not off to a friends, or entertaining friends, I am at one club or another, teaching photography at photo club, making things at the maker club, or doing stuff at home like fixing, mowing, making or writing.

This post
Funnily I look at this post and there is nothing my my usual snark and lunacy. I realized this is more of a diary entry, a reflection.

My “normal” posts stem from an internal pressure, something inside waiting to gush out.

This post is different, I think I needed this one to, I don’t know, maybe fill the void that all the other “post gushing” left behind.

Today is a mix of calm still and green morning, blustery cloudy, misty mid-day, and very stormy afternoon and evening.

I drank a lot of decaf, sitting at my desk, and looking at all that weather outside.

Here

If you are planning the jump, maybe some of this will tickle your brain and prepare you without robbing you of the adventure.

If you are here now, reading and drinking your own hot beverage on this chilly, maybe you are smiling and relating.