French Life-expat France

Chez nous we are just recovering from an excess of children - younger daughter had a sleepover party on sunday night and older daughter on monday night. so we’ve had a house full of young girls for almost 48 hours non stop.
It was strange to see the difference between the two groups. The ‘ten year [...]

As we move closer to the day of actually starting a French business, we’ve been talking to other people in a similar situation about the options. Every conversation ends ina horror story, and the dire warning that whatever we do we shouldn’t start a French enterprise, unless we like paying enormous costs and being buried [...]

After a nice day out yesterday - Mrs B dragged us to Moissac and Lauzerte against our will, but we all had a nice time despite ourselves - I thought I’d take a look at our site statistics to help me get over all the excitement.
The France This Way site has been getting an average [...]

Well, given the excitement in the news about the forthcoming French elections I suppose I had better start passing commenting on the contenders and the general political situation. Since I’m far from being an expert on French politics, the occasional entries will be either brief, or interspersed with irrelevant commentary in an attempt to make [...]

Well, oldest daughter has just completed her first ‘work experience’ week. She didn’t seem too horrified by the big wide world, and reckoned it beat school hands-down.
She worked in a creche (nursery) with children of pre-school age, which she has always had an affinity with, and it seemed to go OK. One of the children [...]

I spend a lot of time looking at pictures of holiday destinations in France, and visiting them or researching them in search of holiday ideas, so like to think I have a reasonable idea about the country as a whole. Of course there are whole swathes of France that I have never visited, and perhaps [...]

This week the ‘grass verge’ cutters have been working on our road, and they have asked if they can park their big machinery in our courtyard for a few days.
Called ‘fauchage’ in French, this isn’t so much a light mow for the grassy verges, as a complete ‘back to earth’ experience for any hedge, tree [...]