A new life in France
The heading ‘a new life in France’ hardly applies to us because we are positively veterans of the process compared to the many more recent immigrants. But as the gite season is upon us we need to prepare ourselves for the questions that we get asked each year by a large number of the people who stay in our gites.
So I will tackle a couple of them here, in case you don’t have the good fortune to be staying with us this year.
How long have you lived here?
Usually gets asked before people have even got out of their cars. For us the answer is nearly six years.
Can you make a living off gites alone?
Err, tricky one. The answer is yes, but not with just one unless it is a magnificent place. The key is in the marketing, and making sure that people who stay want to recommend your gites to others or come back themselves. If you have nice gites in a good convenient and popular location you should do alright.
This question is sometimes disguised as ‘have you got a lot of bookings this year?’ but it means the same thing.
What do you actually do all day?
Depending what mood I’m in the answer is either ‘sit in the sun all day’ or ‘nothing’ or ‘focus on my web publishing business’ or ‘oh, there’s always a lot needs doing’. The last of these is usually accompanied by a vague gesture with pruning shears to suggest that there really isn’t anything much to do.
In reality I spend all day on the computer (or on my bike), but I like to create the impression that I have left all that office stress behind me.
How long did it take you to speak French fluently?
Umm, another tricky one. I’m not fluent and probably never will be. Neither will 99% of arrivals, unless they have a full time job in a French environment for several years. We’re doing OK though.
How do we lock the doors on the gite – they don’t work!?
They do work, but in France you need to push the door handle up before locking the door – obvious when you know, impossible to guess if you don’t.
These questions out of the way we move on to more mundane issues, like ‘can we park on the grass to avoid carrying a case of wine and 500 bottles of lager thirty metres from the parking area’ or ‘where is the barbecue’. Followed later by ‘do you have some barbecue charcoal we could use, we couldn’t bring ours on the plane’.
Then we get ‘Oh, it’s a lot bigger than it looked in the photos’. Hardly surprising because the photos are only about 15 centimetres wide. “Did you think the photos were life size”, I ask? This rudeness on my part usually puts paid to further chit-chat and people get on and enjoy their holiday.
For all that, I just realised I haven’t said much about a new life in France, just given a couple of slight hints. Perhaps I’ll return to the subject again soon and make a bit more effort, if only I can tear myself away from the pruning.