How well do you know France
You’ll be pleased to see we’ve reached the final instalment of our is anyone suitable to live in France series. Normal service will be resumed in a couple of days. .
The last question was ‘How well do you know the place in France where you intend to live?’…and does it matter?
It’s quite easy to have a romantic notion of living in France, often based on holiday experiences. Sitting in front of a cafe enjoying the sunshine, going to the bakers for fresh bread in the morning, even going to the supermarket is fun when you are on holiday and the sun is shining.
But the sun doesn’t always shine, and shopping still needs to be done. Living five miles up a rough track can take the edge off the pleasure pretty fast. The cafes might close for six months of the year.
It’s quite important to see the part of France where you want to live outside of the summer months. Here’s a clue - the more beautiful the town, and the more popular it is with tourists in the summer, the more likely it is that the same town will be completely dead in the winter.
So you need to live somewhere without tourists, perhaps. But it won’t be a very attractive place, and your gites won’t rent out so well…
The choice between living somewhere rural, or in a village or town, is also important - moving from a town into the heart of rural France will be quite a culture shock, and there are large parts of France that you will find to be very remote indeed. Often again the most beautiful, unfortunately.
Living in the mountains or the deep countryside can be very beautiful and your friends, visiting in summer, will be very impressed with the view from your front door. But will you be impressed when you can’t get out of the house because of the snowdrift across the doorway?
Anyway, I don’t need to go on, you can see where I’m coming from. When you are looking at a region or property remember it’s real life you will be living there, not a short holiday in the sunshine.
So the question should not have been ‘how well do you know France?’ but rather ‘have you considered what it would be like, day-in, day-out, to actually live in your favourite part of France?’. Answer that and you’re pretty much sorted.
