Une nouvelle langue est une nouvelle vie.
(A new language is a new life.)

Are we crazy to move to a country where we have to struggle to carry on a simple conversation, ask for directions, or even call for help? Probably. But we did it anyway. We’ve traveled enough to know how to get food ordered, ask where the bathrooms are, or how much something costs, in several languages. We are confident that we’ll be able to manage with our rudimentary French for a long while and happily will continue stumbling over our words and embarrassing ourselves with reckless abandon.

However, care must be taken when jumping into a new language. I recently told a friend what I thought said that I was excited for our French adventure, “Nous sommes très excités pour notre aventure française!” Well, she kindly pointed out that I had basically just told her we were sexually aroused about our French adventure. Oops. We have sooooo much to learn.

Fortunately, most of our language-testing experiences have gone smoother. I managed to communicate with the lady at the flower shop that we live here full-time now, that we bought a house not far from her shop, and that we are renting a house nearby in the short-term. Just that little exchange with her was an effort, but I got through it and left the shop smiling. Success!

We’ve enjoyed a few dinners at the local bar/restaurant and the proprietress, who speaks English quite well, now makes us place our orders in French. She’s very patient with us and so far we’ve managed to get our meals ordered without too much trauma.

And last night we ordered dinner from the mobile pizza oven that shows up on Thursdays. After placing our order, I sputtered out a couple of basic sentences in French to the man. I told him we were from California. He thought for a minute, and said, “Californie…est-ce dans les états-unis?” (Is that in the United States?) It was a good reminder that the world is an awfully big place, and the USA isn’t the center of it all.

By the way, I know you are probably eager to see photos of our house under renovation. Me too. But our builder is on vacation and won’t be able to get started until mid-May. So stay tuned — you can be sure I will be posting lots of photos once things start happening.

Moving to a new place is always stressful. How about moving to a country where you don’t yet speak the language, know the simplest of customs, and need help with the most basic tasks, like opening a bank account? Overwhelming, yes, but we’re managing it OK, so far. However, we knew there were going to be some bumps in the road, probably more like potholes, ahead.

Case in point: several days ago we went to the Orange store in Loches, the nearest big town. Orange is the largest provider of internet, TV, and cellular service in this part of France. We needed everything: new cell phone numbers and data plans, TV programming packages, and the virtual oxygen for my life, wifi. Simple, right? Nope.

We had previously learned that the golden ticket to getting anything set up in France is your electric bill, which, back in California, was PG&E. (We even had to show two California PG&E bills to open our French bank accounts.) Here in France, the electric company is called EDF. With the help of our trusty local friend, before we arrived, we had already established an EDF account in our names for our rental house. So we trotted into Orange and produced our EDF statement showing we had an account established. No, no, no, we were told (non, non, non in French), that wasn’t enough. We have to show them an actual bill for electricity, which, of course, we won’t receive until we’ve lived here for a month. (At this point I’m trying not to hyperventilate.)

Fortunately for us, the nice young woman at Orange spoke excellent English so we were able to plead our pitiful case without the shame of translation. But even a common language didn’t help. We got nowhere as far as getting cell service, until she came up with the option of a temporary SIM card on a pay-as-you-go data plan. Once we have that elusive EDF bill sometime next month, we will come back and get permanent French cell numbers. OK, not ideal, but workable.

Next we started the process to get a connection for wifi, home phones and TV, and were told we would have to wait several days — actually they said it could take up to 2 weeks — to get our account established. But, voila, this morning we suddenly have a wifi signal. Yay! Bob spent an hour connecting this to that, and now we’re now fully functional with all our computers, TV, and devices. The only thing left is to get a UK satellite receiver (even though they can be found here in France, we’re told the best UK receivers are actually from the UK so a friend of a friend is bringing one over for us.) We know we’ll be craving some English language TV shows before long, and who doesn’t love anything from BBC? We can also get some Netflix stuff on our new smart TV, but none of our favorite shows from the US. (Happily, however, we did just watch last week’s Survivor on an iPad.)

French village life:

• We have to go see the village doctor for health certificates that allow us to join the local randonée (hiking) group — they are quite serious about that.
• We will stop by the office of the Maire (Mayor) in Abilly, the next town over, to pay the small fee (about $150 for the year) to be able to use the town gym. In these small towns, the Maire’s office is where many things are handled, so maybe we’ll become familiar faces in ours. And here’s another interesting tidbit: our Maire is actually a roofer, and he will be installing our new roof when the time comes.
• We need to apply online for a card that gets us access to the “decheterie” in our village. This is where we take our excess cardboard, batteries, etc. You need a card for access to your town’s decheterie, which allows you to visit 20 times per year, and to get that card you need, guess what, an EDF bill. So one more thing we can’t do until we have received an electric bill.

Seven months after we made our offer and signed the “compromis de vente,” a commitment to buy, the old house is finally ours. A couple days ago we had our final signing, called the “acte de vente,” at the notaire’s office. A notaire is a French official authorized to oversee real estate transactions.

It was quite the occasion. Crowded into the notaire’s small office were eight of the eleven siblings who owned the house, plus the two of us, and Connie, our friend and tireless translator.

At the end of the meeting, the notaire announced that the house was now ours, and the sellers stood up, one-by-one, and handed us all their keys. It was a tender moment and I could feel tears welling up, but I managed to keep it together.

Eleven children lived with their parents in the 2 bedroom, 1 bath house for 50 years. Most of them are retired now, and all but two still live in this village of 900 people. Sitting there in that room across from these lovely, kind people, I wished I could have asked them about their childhood growing up there. I could see their emotions in passing ownership of their childhood home to us. We asked Connie to tell them thank you for selling to us, and that we would invite them to see the house when we are done with the renovations.

As is the custom here, we bought them all drinks in the local bar/restaurant after the signing. Connie was kept busy with translations in both directions as we chatted and toasted to the future. At the end of the evening, we left there knowing we had a few more new friends in our village.

We did it. Almost one year to the day after our visit to this little village in the Loire Valley, when the wheels first started turning with ideas of moving to France, we are actually here.

It wasn’t so easy. We had help. Oh sure, we did lots of research on our own, taking advantage of the many forums online full of stories (good and not so good) from people who have taken this leap before us, but sometimes you just have to go for it. Research can only do so much. We talked and talked about our plans with family and friends, and anybody else who would listen, and I’m sure we bored the heck out of some people with our talk of moving here. I’m sure some thought we wouldn’t actually go through with it.

But we had a group of people, on both sides of this equation, who believed we would really do it and were behind us 100%, stepping up to help put all things in place to make it possible to move our lives halfway around the world. We had a whole lot of things to do. Big things. Like sell our house at the right moment, and find buyers who were open to us renting back our house until we were ready to move. Our realtor, Abby Tanem with Coldwell Banker, was confident that we could sell our house quickly, and boy, was she right. She knew exactly how to put out the word that our house was available, without listing it on MLS. We had buyers before we expected it, and it all fell into place seamlessly.

We had buyers for our cars right away too. My brother bought mine, and our friends bought Bob’s car, and they were even kind enough to wait until the morning we were leaving for France to take possession of it.

In France, things started happening in preparation for our arrival. Our dear friend Connie has been our agent on the ground, stepping in as our proxy in signing the initial papers for our house purchase and helping us wade through the process of getting our French bank accounts opened and buying a car. Last week she arranged for our electricity, water and other necessary services to be started for us. We worked with our new local banker by email — and Google Translate — to get money wired into our new accounts and ready for house and car purchases. Insurance here is often obtained from your banker so he did that for us too. Our new landlords, Jim and Pauline, got busy preparing their house for us to rent for a year while ours is undergoing renovations (fingers crossed it won’t take more than a year).

We arrived two nights ago and were met on the train platform by Connie, full of hugs. Our rental house, “Les Balcons,” was made warm and welcoming and even stocked with a few groceries. Jim and Pauline greeted us and proudly showed us how much space they had cleared for some of our things to be stored when our shipment arrives.

We’ve already been invited to several social events and our calendar is filling up. Life in France has begun for us. Our new chapter has started and we can’t wait to see how it unfolds.