French Life-expat France

Surrounding our house and gites we have about 16 acres of land - meadow, woodland, fields etc. Very pastoral it is too.

We don’t especially want ‘land’ - although I enjoy striding around the fields in a ‘landowner’ kind of way - but it is useful to have it because it stops some errant maire from giving planning permission to his first cousin to build 20 new bungalows five metres from our house.

But it turns out that our borders are less protected than we thought.

One of our borders has a stream running along it, with a field the other side. There are a lot of trees planted alongside the ditch, some on our side of the border and some on the neighbours side. Several of these trees are old dead oak trees - there is some kind of capricorn beetle that kills old oak trees that has attacked many of them.

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A very useful book if you are running a business in France is called L’Encyclopedie Pratique du Gerant de Sarl. Sounds gripping, don’t you think?

Among other things it talks about the legal requirements of operating a company, the paperwork that needs to be kept for 10 years and so on. It also talks about the financial aspects - taxes, social contributions, VAT etc.

Unfortunately each chapter I read sooner or later tends towards the same conclusion - excessive paperwork and / or excessive costs and charges. Gites and holiday rentals currently have quite a privileged tax position in France, but your every day business doesn’t get off so lightly.

Ourselves, we aren’t entitled to ‘new business’ grants or tax incentives and reductions, although we live in a designated development region, because an internet based business doesn’t apparently offer much promise of employment to the local community. Doesn’t seem very progressive to me, but what do I know - it’s only a couple of weeks since I complained about the practice of charging tourists 30 cents a day to visit the area.

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Now that the gite business is reputedly over-crowded (or impractical to enter because no one is buying and selling houses), and only the most wildly optimistic expat would set up as an estate agent, we need to look around for new ways for expats to scratch a living together.

Suggestion 1

One of the most common questions I get asked - both in emails and in comments on old posts in this blog - is about the practicalities of getting married in France.

The story I usually hear is about how difficult it is to find information, to get responses from wedding sites, or generally to find out how to proceed.

Now I don’t know much about weddings - except there is big money involved, and there are loads of castles and manor houses scattered across France that would make great wedding venues.

Even as we plunge into recession people will still want to get married.

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You can’t see it very well in the picture, but this is a meadow field of white, pink and purple flowers leading down to a lake.

Very pretty indeed and it was a pleasure to come across when i was out cycling yesterday.

Mrs B tells me they are called ‘Cosmos’ flowers and quite a few meadows and fields have suddenly appeared filled with these flowers in the region.

It’s even more surprising given that it is now October, and last night we had the first frost of the year.

But this year is a funny one for flowers, and there are still fields of sunflowers waiting to be harvested, and it is less than a fortnight since I actually saw a field of sunflowers in bloom - a good two or three months later than usual!

It seems likely the flowering meadows are due to some kind of ‘local action’ by farmers and local councils but I’m not sure who picks up the bill (if there is one) - but full marks to whoever it is!

1. Had ten steres (cubic metres) of wood delivered this morning, ready chopped and ready split for use in the wood-burning stove this year. We are now ready for a Siberian winter, without being held hostage to oil prices.

Of course my opinion of a Siberian winter might be different to others - someone who stayed in the gite at the end of September made a comment in the guest book about how lovely and hot it had been, although they noted that the locals were all dressed as if it was mid-winter.

2. Had an appointment with the bank. The manager kept us waiting for more than 30 minutes so we announced that we were off and walked out of the door. That at least brought a response - profuse apologies and being chased down the street - and apparently also immediately resolved the important problems that had caused the delays.

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A while ago I grumbled about some of the issues involved in hiring a car, but there was another I wasn’t aware of. This problem emerged as I was on my way to return the car to the rental station, after a week of travelling the roads of Provence.

I had driven around all week with no problems, thanks largely to the GPS/TomTom which Mrs B had insisted we buy - and I have to begrudgingly admit that it makes driving a breeze, especially in town centres. Although it did let me down when I tried to use it to traverse Avignon on foot - instead of letting me walk 500 metres through the pedestrian centre it insisted I walk several kilometres around the ring road.

I forget what made me think that would be a good idea.

I was almost home when the police ‘invited’ me to pull over at the edge of the road. It turned out that my number plate was invalid - the number ’sixes’ were both missing their centres, which apparently isn’t permitted (presumably because it makes it difficult for radar-speed-trap cameras to read them).

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I’ve just got back from my travels around Avignon and the Luberon to find that today is ‘traffic free’ day in our local town. It is the same in quite a few towns across France apparently, with town centres blocked to cars.

This is a great idea I think. I’ve previously written that I like having cars in our town centre, because the local towns that have stopped cars entering tend to be nice in the summer but completely dead in the winter - ie designed for tourists not living in.

But one day a year, so that us gite owners can rush in and take photographs, is very welcome. Indeed our town (Villereal) has even launched a photo competition for the day, to see who can take the best picture of the car-free zone.

But it opens a new potential problem. I’ve taken quite a few photos of the ‘car-free-town’, and very nice some of them are - but is it deceptive if I use them on our gite website? Because strictly speaking visitors won’t see the town as it looks in the photo above, because there will be cars parked all around the medieval market hall.

And curiously, although there were barricades preventing cars entering the centre, the town still felt the need to put big signs up in the town centre explaining the ‘no-cars’ rule - and taking photographs that avoided these big signs was almost as hard as taking pictures without cars in on a normal day.

This posting is brought to you live from the Hotel Mignon, Avignon - great name for a hotel, a lovely (basic!) very typical French hotel in the centre of Avignon and a million miles from financial scandals and troubles.

I’m not one to delve into the murky world of finance very often - after all part of the reason I moved to France was to escape from investment banking. But while I’ve been sunning myself in Provence this week it seems the financial markets have been getting into a bit of a mess.

So I’m going to have a rant that has little to do with France or expats, except it’s going to make us all poorer and more uncertain about our futures and pensions. And because it affects almost everyone in the developed world, which even includes us.

Two years ago HERE I hinted at the problem for banks that pusue profit at the expense of all else  - I paraphrase here: big investment banks pay very high salaries in an effort to attract the best staff…what they actually attract is people who want big salaries, which is not the same…”

If you run an industry based on greed and short-term profits it is likely (read, inevitable) to fall apart sooner or later. Likewise if you gamble on ‘new economics’ you will likely go wrong. Tulip bulbs weren’t worth 100 guilders each in the 16th century, tech stocks weren’t worth 200 times earnings in 2000, and a three bed semi isn’t worth 10 times average salary.

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Please do not adjust your computer screen, this is not an advertisement.

We only have one car, and a pretty ancient one at that, and although the girls are forever pleading with us to buy a new one we never seem to get round to it. Perhaps because I’m an accountant and think of cars in terms of running cost per kilometre rather than their level of comfort or whether they impress the neighbours.

Or perhaps because I am not very rich.

Anyway, we sometimes need to hire a car when one of us is going away. Last week it was Mrs B who needed one, for her grand tour of south-west France, and next week it’s me, for a quick spin around Provence.

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A century ago, France was having difficulty attracting tourists because of competition from Germany and Austria and because, as they recognised, the standards of their tourist facilities were often not very good.

So in 1910 the French Government had an idea. Introduce a tax on tourists - called a taxe de sejour - and spend the money on improving matters. The money raised by a commune could be used by that commune. Hence the taxe de sejour is a charge levied on everyone who visits the commune and stays in hotels, holiday rentals, camping etc, and is charged per person per night.

Now I would have thought that if you are having trouble attracting visitors then the last thing you want to do is start taxing those that do come, but that was the decision they made.

Moving forwards 98 years. I understand that a lot of communes no longer charge the taxe de sejour, but our commune does. In fact they have just doubled the rate we have to pay, from 15 cents per visitor per night to 30 cents per visitor per night. So about 13 euros per week on a holiday rental property sleeping six people.

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Get ready for a long afternoon, you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you.

France this way can’t cover all aspects of France and French life from all angles, so to give you a bit of variety I thought I’d list some other French sites that I like to think complement our own. Their owners will perhaps disagree or be insulted by the comparison but I won’t let that stop me.

Take a look through some of these sites, then if you know of some other good French websites post them below and I’ll add them (as long as they aren’t our direct competition…) - France wide and general interest sites and blogs only for the moment, I’ll perhaps do a list of French expat blogs in a week or two.

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South-west France is to receive the Pope in a week or so, revolving around a visit to Lourdes, the town in the northern Pyrenees.

Lourdes, as we all know, is best known because 150 years ago a local girl, Bernadette Soubirous, spoke several times to an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

Since then Lourdes has attracted millions of believers looking for a miracle cure, and if memory serves, there have so far been 67 confirmed miraculous healings.

The town is now celebrating 150 years of unexpected fame.

As part of the commemoration of the year for the Pyreneean town, the Pope has decreed that indulgences will be granted to Catholics visiting the town during the year. Catholic indulgences, if you weren’t aware, entitle people to spend less time in purgatory in the afterlife.

If you are visiting an interesting bit of trivia - there are more hotels in Lourdes than in any other French city except Paris.

Anyway, a warm welcome to the Pope and best wishes to all that are travelling to Lourdes this week.

For the indulgences to apply you need to visit before December 8th.

At some point in the last three years, the goal of this website changed. It started as a ‘let’s make a site about our favourite places in France’ website, to an ‘OK let’s make the best possible site about France’ website. How and when it changed is a bit of a mystery, but I am an obsessive kind of person so I guess that’s part of it.

This is quite a big shift in goal and now has grown to involve us both travelling around exploring quite often (Mrs B is off to Biarritz shortly, and I’m heading east shortly after - tough work, huh). It also means that when we do have a holiday or weekend away we inevitably stay in France!

Family responsibilities and poverty mean we can’t actually spend our entire lives playing at being Jack Kerouac, so here’s the deal - if you know about somewhere in France (or even better lots of places) in France we will pay you to write about it for us.

Now don’t get over-excited, see that mention of poverty above, well that tells you that you aren’t about to become enormously rich. Sorry.

However if you have a spare hour or two and think your local area (or places you have visited and know reasonably well) should be brought to the public attention, please see writing for france this way for more information.

You will also get that happy warm feeling of knowing that hundreds of people might visit (or not) the place because of what you have written (the site currently gets over 4 million page views a year so some of them are sure to be visiting the place you know).

So, pens to the ready, and we look forward to hearing from you…

I’ve written about our experiences with schools in France several times - and can repeat that our experiences are mostly favourable. It is sometimes suggested that personal development is stifled in French schools, and the teaching is too rigid and old-fashioned, but this hasn’t been our personal experience.

Expat children will often have different school experiences than French children in the same school for various reasons, including language and integration problems, and problems with the higher levels of discipline imposed. These issues will be greater for older (say, 10 years old or more) children arriving in a French school. Different nationalities also have different expectations of what a school should try to achieve.

Of the English families that we know here in south-west France, most have had favourable experiences, with children going on to lycées, universities, even grandes écoles (possibly the highest level of university education in France, depending on your viewpoint). Others have had less success, and moved back to the UK as a result of their problems.

Quite a few people have left responses on previous ’school’ type posts, but these comments tend to go unnoticed because they are often on older blog posts - and it is interesting to see that different people have such different experiences of schools in France. So I thought I’d bring a few of them together here to try and summarise opinion:

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Finding the best (cheapest!) prices for travel is not easy, to say the least, and is often very time-consuming and confusing. Usually the search ends because the time and hassle involved all becomes too much and the customer settles for the best they’ve seen so far.

For cheap car hire in France I’m pretty convinced that we can track down the best prices to offer site visitors through a system that more or less searches all the major brokers - try it out with the search box at our car hire page - it’s amazing to watch, as the best offers from each supplier come whizzing up on your screen. Don’t worry, you can test it without actually booking a car.

Flights from France to the UK are proving to be a trickier beast. Strange as it seems, I don’t think there is a single, central site that successfully checks all the budget airline flights and prices and gives you the choices available. Until yesterday I thought there was, but now learn that what many of the ‘flight checker’ companies do is actually to mark-up the original price by quite a margin. So a Ryanair flight for £10 becomes a Ryanair flight for £30, without the customer realising that the ‘original price’ has been inflated.

That’s not really playing the game - at least, unless it is made clear to the customer that they are paying more than they need, so we have withdrawn our flight price comparison search. Shame, it looked to be very good!

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