Our Family’s (2nd) Year in the South of France

So I am still sick.  Just to be clear, I am NOT faking it because I’m scared of meeting some French people. I know JM bought that thermometer out of love for me and not because he wanted some numeric proof that I really could be this laid up this long.

I have been pretty much inside the house for the past few days while JM has taken care of registering the girls for school and buying food and figuring out a ton of other admin stuff – which I very much appreciate.

But a couple of observations about France, as seen from the inside of a house at the edge of a tiny medieval village in Provence.

1. It is really beautiful!

Here’s the view from the kitchen window.  Pas mal as they say here!  (Not bad)

Stunning view from the kitchen window.

2. Garbage cans are tiny

Europe in general is much more “green”.  Drinks in bottles are EXPENSIVE, you must buy bags at the store if you don’t bring your own, and so on.  So I don’t know if this is part of that trend or what, but the garbage cans are really, really small compared to California. Will be interesting to see if this changes our garbage behavior, or if we just create more but smaller bags of garbage.

3. Towel Warmers!  Yes!

Why don’t they have these miraculous inventions everywhere in Canada or places it gets so cold.  There is nothing like a toasty towel after stepping out of the shower.

O.K.  Going back to bed now.  Luckily the girls are sleeping through the night, so we should be all set for first day of school tomorrow.

We are here.  Spent way too much time at Heathrow airport on the way (the whole terminal reeks of perfume, unbearable) and the hotel that was “5 minutes from the Lyon airport” was not, but all in all not a bad trip.

Everybody is still jetlagged, and I have a brutal chills-and-fever type of flu, but we’re starting to get settled.

The famous Provence Mistral is blowing.  Just like a snow storm in Saskatchewan but without the snow.  Same whistling, hard to catch your breath wind though.

JM went to buy food, so I did some email including sending our new phone number to friends and family.  The phone rang 15 minutes later so I answered it thinking it might be someone I actually wanted to talk to.  Of course it wasn’t and I had my first entirely French conversation this trip. I think I handled it o.k.  Of course not sure exactly what she said so maybe it was a disaster.

Took the girls outside today and they decided to walk down the road.  It’s narrow and turns and doesn’t have a sidewalk, but they were doing good at staying on the side like they’re supposed to even though there were no cars.  Of course, at the exact moment that Z runs out in the middle of the road a car comes around the corner. It’s a small village. I may have just earned the reputation of the American Mom who lets her kids run on the road.

Adventures are not as much fun when you’re sick.

JM and I have been dreaming of taking a year off and traveling for as long as we’ve been together.

Before we met, I had never been outside of Canada except to drive through the US on the way to other parts of Canada. But JM had  backpacked through South East Asia for a couple of months as an undergrad, where he met a very cool couple from Guelph. They had quit their jobs and were backpacking around the world which made quite on impression on JM when he met them in Bangkok. We decided we were going to do that too – in 2 or 3 years, because we were both working on graduate degrees part-time and working full-time and it wasn’t the right time to go.

A few years later we moved to Silicon Valley. (We’re still there, 14 years into our “2-year stay”.) We decided to see America while we were here and did a bunch of back-country hiking trips in various National Parks. Every time the backpacks came out we’d talk about our plans to travel around the world. We still planned to do it – in 2 or 3 years, because it was the dotcom bubble and both of our careers were on fire and it wasn’t the right time to go.

We got married and bought a house. We did our first big international trip together as a couple – the Galapagos, which was AMAZING. It was three weeks of the most incredible scenery and animals and fascinating people and it got us excited again about the idea of taking a year off and traveling.  We were still definitely going to do it – in 2 or 3 years, because the dotcom bubble had burst and there were layoffs everywhere and it just wasn’t the right time to go.

Iguanas sunbathing in the Galapagos Islands

Then we had our two beautiful but very high-maintenance babies, and it was ABSOLUTELY NOT the right time to go.

Now it’s 2010.  The kids are five and six and do best with structure in their day. JM has an early-stage start-up that needs constant care and feeding.  The business I’ve spent the last five years growing has gained a lot of momentum and being gone for a year will definitely disrupt that. Our parents are starting to have health issues – and so are we.  The economy generally sucks. And the sprinklers seem to break every week. So now is not the right time to go either.

But this time we’re going anyway.

Two more days…

It is five days to departure and we have spreadsheets, piles and little notes everywhere. I’m getting a little stressed about all the last minute stuff, but making lists always makes me feel as if I have my act together. Let’s see if this one helps.

Done:

• Place to live in France – This was probably the biggest thing, and the visa and school depended on it.
• House-sitter in California – We were originally planning to rent the house, but it was an enormous pain. The time frame for a rental made it really hard to find somebody. We did look at sabbaticalhomes.com, but that was all listing for grad students who wanted to be house sitters not actual families on sabbatical. Plus as the time got closer and we got busier the thought of packing everything up, finding and paying for storage, and changing our address for the year just got to be overwhelming.  All those house sitter ads got us thinking, and we found a wonderful gal who is a great friend of the family to stay in the house.  She’ll pay us some which will offset our expenses a bit, and she’ll keep an eye out on the mail to catch any bills that I didn’t remember to move online.
• School in France – This one was easy.  When we get there we’ll need to visit the town hall.  We need to bring birth certificates, immunization records and – this one made me laugh – our marriage certificate!
• New laptops – Both JM and I have had Vista disasters for the past two years that are slow and getting flaky.  Don’t want to deal with a system meltdown on the road, so we upgraded before leaving.  Loving the new laptop, except that the “a” key squeaks.
• Order contacts – I almost missed this one.  You need to have visited an optometrist within the past year to order new contacts, and I haven’t seen one since early 2009.  Begging helped.
• Checkups for everybody – Immunization updates for the kids.  General health stuff for grownups. The doctor gave us fluoride pills for the girls while we’re gone.  Not something I would have thought about.
• Travel health insurance – After the nightmare that is buying private health insurance in the US, this was absolutely delightful thanks to the fabulous Becky from Seven Corners.
• Visas – That was a big one.
• Flights – This was a challenge.
• Buy converters/adapters – How did we end up with so much electrical crap?  It used to be just us, but now the girls have their stuff too.  But here’s an important tip – adapters are NOT converters and just because a plug is big doesn’t mean it has an adapter built in. (As I discovered one time in Amsterdam after plugging in a router  and causing a 2-hour blackout in the entire wing of the hotel.)  Our laptops have adapters, but turns out the DVD player doesn’t.  JM’s electrical engineering degree coming in quite handy for deciphering plugs.
• Start blogging and tweeting – And very importantly get my Mom and Dad subscribed. (Hi Mom and Dad!)

To do this Week:

• Prep house for sitter
• Scan all documents – passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, health insurance, etc….
• Car storage/relocation
• Pack
• Finish setting up online bill pay
• Book hotel and car in Lyon for arrival
• Re-pack
• Cancel stuff we don’t need while we’re gone
• Buy a few winter clothes for L.
• Extend cell-phone coverage plan to include Europe
• Fight with JM about amount of stuff we’re packing, then repack again
• Refinance the mortgage – I know it’s CRAZY, but the rates just got WAY better.  The worst part is  scanning the  tax returns.  UGH.

To Do in France:

Of course, we’re procrastinating on everything we can.  After all, in France we’ll be “on vacation” with lots of time for this admin stuff, right?  But we need to remember:

• Figure out car – buy, long term rental, other
• Bank account
• School supplies
• Everything else we forgot about



Last night we had a combo birthday/farewell party at our place, and the amazing artists from Adventure Balloons were here. They could do anything – motorcycles, giraffes, fish, even a totally cute flower ring.  So JM asked for an Eiffel Tower.

Balloon Eiffel Tower

I know it’s RIDICULOUS, but one of the big decisions to make for this trip to France was whether or not to buy a Nintendo DS for each of the girls.

(What is the plural of DS?  DSes? DSs? Many DS? DI?)

Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t get a toy like that for my kids until they were a bit older. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with video games for 5 and 6 year olds, but I wasn’t itching for the daily battle about “screen time” to expand any sooner than it had to. We have reached a pretty good place with our “TV-turning-off” skills, so having obtained “screen-peace” for at least a while, I wanted to savor that.

But we will be doing a LOT of traveling over the next year, and the DS does have a rather remarkable battery life, and it is more interactive than the DVD player (justify, justify, justify…)  so I decided to go ahead.

Z Playing Super Mario Brothers on the Flight to Saskatoon

It’s turned out pretty much exactly as I expected – with one notable exception. The kids spend hours happily playing with them on a plane or in the back of the car.  It’s a good thing.  Plane rides are hard on little people. And on the flip side when we’re not traveling, we do fight about how much they can play.  I’m sure we’ll figure that out with time, but right now it’s driving me crazy.

The Exception: I didn’t realize that *I* would have to learn the games so that I could teach them how to play.  And I really didn’t expect that I would get hooked on Super Mario Brothers. This is frankly embarrassing for a woman who is turning 40 to say, but that is a really GREAT game. I missed it 25 years ago when most of my generation went through that phase, but I’m definitely a fan now.  Thankfully 25 years later we have the internet with “guides” and “cheats”. I didn’t even know what a cheat was two weeks ago.

Now my problem is waiting for L to go to bed so I can get my turn playing, or convincing them that they need Mommy’s help to get more “fire guys” during their allotted playing times. And I must figure out how to get the kids to sleep on the plane so I can get past the second world before we get to France.

It’s three weeks until we take off for France.  We are in Canada visiting my family. Yes, that seems like a crazy idea, but there is reason behind the madness. My Mom has health issues so we won’t see them for at least a year, my family had a big reunion, and we don’t have childcare in August so this coming week my parents are babysitting while I get some work done.

So here we are. We’ve done a LOT of driving around Saskatchewan the last week, which has given me pause to reflect on some of the differences between my home province in Canada and my current home in California. Here’s just a few:

Wondering how the south of France will compare. Departure is getting close…

I went to pick our our final approved visa’s at the San Francisco consulate today. Very easy. The security lady remembered me, which was kind of nice. The guy who stamped the passports knew my last name without cross-referencing the number on my receipt, which was kind of unnerving. I’d never spoken to him before. The paranoia began immediately – what was it about our application that was memorable? Maybe all that time JM spent writing his letter of motivation actually made an impact.

The Blue Chair/Brown Chair system was still in use.  There were only two people waiting – both sitting smack-dab up against each other in the line of blue chairs in an otherwise empty room. Both gentlemen were rather, um, large, and you could feel them straining to give each other their personal space. I was very happy to get a brown chair with lots and lots of elbow room.

The kids are old enough to sort-of understand what it means to go to France for a year, but not completely get it. We’ve had a lot of lead time on the trip, so we are trying to prep them bit by bit. One part they really aren’t getting is the “helping Mommy with French” part. (They are both fluent in French, and I’m not.)

Last summer we vacationed in Quebec.  It was an amazing trip. The province is very beautiful – especially in August when the blueberries are ripe and the mosquitoes are mostly dead. I was at the beach with L and Z playing a game where I was picking them up and throwing them in the water when a little girl came up and spoke to me in French.  I was pretty sure that she was asking me to toss her in the water too, but it’s the kind of thing you want to be COMPLETELY sure about. So I asked L to help me understand what the little girl wanted. She turned to the girl and said “Ma maman ne parle pas français”  (My mom doesn’t speak french.)  NOT HELPFUL!!!

L and Z at the beach in Quebec last year

After that experience, I figured I needed to prep them so they might be more useful in a similar situation when we are in France. But it’s backfiring.  Instead they have become convinced that I’ll never speak French and are saying things that are downright discouraging:

• Z:  “Mommy, you’re going to struggle in France because you don’t speak French.”
• L:  “How will you talk to anybody in France. You won’t be able to buy food without Daddy’s help.”
• And Z’s latest helpful idea:  “Maybe you can teach the people in France to speak English”.

The children have no faith in me.  Sigh.

This was a BIG day for our trip.  We carefully booked the appointment so that it would fall after we got Z’s new passport but before we left for our Canadian vacation.  The Consulate web site has a very detailed page outlining what you have to bring.  The obvious stuff like passports, green cards, but also:

• Where you will stay – in our case the rental agreement
• Proof of health insurance
• Motivation letter
• Bank statements showing that you have the required amount per person per month of your stay
• Passport-size photos

Yelp has reviews of the visa process, and the consensus is that if you have all your stuff together, everything is straightforward. So we spent the days leading up to the appointment filling out forms, making copies, and trying to guess what else they might ask for.  They changed the list between the time we applied and the time we went, so I cross-referenced the lists and prepared a  superset of everything plus a whole bunch of extra stuff – just in case.

I was ready, and I was STRESSED.  My first experience head-to-head with the famous french bureaucracy. Here we come.

BOTTOM LINE:  It was fine.

The process was pretty painless and took just over an hour. Our agent was a delightful woman with a charming British accent who was extremely helpful with a few issues we had.

The consulate uses a “blue chair/brown chair” system. There is a row of blue chairs against the wall.  Visa applicants  are seated in the first open blue chair, and as people are called up from the chair at the end, everybody shifts down one spot. Only applicants get blue chairs.  If  you are there with a friend, they have to sit in a brown chair to wait.

In the middle of the room are 3 rows of brown chairs. People who are picking up visas sit anywhere in the brown chairs.  When an agent is free, they go through all the brown chair people first, and then call the next blue chair person.

Not sophisticated but pretty efficient.  The kids did get to sit wherever they wanted.

A Few Tips:

1. Don’t be even a tiny bit obnoxious: The lady who was in line behind us was not exactly rude, but she made a couple of comments to the room about how strange the system was. I think she meant to by funny, but I suspect it was not a coincidence that she was sent down the street to get a photocopy she hadn’t brought, while our agent quietly photocopied our marriage certificate for us.
2. Stuff to bring not on the list: Marriage certificate and photocopy. Plane tickets and photocopy.  Bring a book – no cell phones or laptops allowed.
3. Stuff we didn’t need to bring: The kids.  They did not have to be there and were quite bored with the whole process.
4. Renew passports: The web site says “passport valid for one year”.  Turns out the rule is really “valid for 3 months after planned return  date”.  It’s a good rule of thumb anyway as I discovered a year ago when I was pulled off a flight to Tel Aviv because my passport expired in five months. Plus, it’s such a complete pain to get a passport renewed while traveling that it’s better to just reset the five years months before you’re thinking of departing. (Yes, we are making an emergency trip to the Saskatoon passport office while we’re in Canada next month.)
5. Make multiple appointments at the same time: The web site is clear – one appointment per passport.   So I scheduled my appointment at 10, L’s at 10:30, Z’s at 11:00 and JM’s at 11:30.  But turns out they actually have 5 appointments per slot, and they deal with people as they come into the office (the appointment gets you through the door, not talking to somebody).  So I could have made all 4 appointments for 10:00.
6. Be prepared to be without your passport for 2 weeks: I didn’t find that written anywhere, but they wanted to keep our passports until the visas were ready.  Turns out we were lucky that JM’s passport needed renewal, so we got all the passports back until his is ready.  I always hate being without my passport (never know when you have an emergency) but this would have meant rescheduling the trip to Canada and missing the family reunion.

UPDATE (July 22, 5:30 PM):  The French Consulate just called to say our visas are ready.  We just have to take our passports in to pick them up.  That was FAST.  So much for a two week wait.