French Property

By way of a friend of mine I met Dan and Judith, a expert couple in their 50s who spent 2 fabulous years in Provence, getting traded their beautiful Toronto House against a country Property in the south of France. Here is the story of the 2 most exciting years of their lives, how they ready for this Knowledge, exactly where they lived, how they integrated with the locals and the expatriate community. This adventurous couple also began a unique project: documenting their local French town and its history, ultimately turning it into a book. Dan and Judith also Speak around what it felt like coming Residence right after these two years, their recent trip back to Provence, and what foreign ventures may perhaps lie ahead for their retirement.

Dan and Judith in front of their beloved village

one. Please tell us a bit around yourselves, your interests, your private and expert backgrounds.

Dan: I was born and raised in India. My household is Anglo-Indian (of mixed European and Indian descent), and culturally far more British than Indian. In 1960, my loved ones moved to England. I studied at the London College of Graphic Arts.

In 1967, I moved to Canada with my 1st wife. I worked in graphic arts in advertising for the subsequent twenty-some years, in a range of positions. By the mid-1980s I was Director of Client Services for a style studio. In 1992 I left to go out on my own as a graphic arts style consultant.

I have a daughter and step-daughter from my initially marriage. Judith and I met in 1974 and married in 1981.

My interests are music (listening to and playing jazz, blues, and old-time rock ‘n’ roll), travel, photography, and golf.

Judith: I was born in Toronto and grew up in Peterborough, Ontario. I studied English at Queen’s University, was a high school teacher for 3 years and then became a personal computer programmer.

For the subsequent seventeen years, I held a range of IT positions. By the mid-eighties, I was Director of Corporate Systems at a massive insurance enterprise.

In 1987 I quit my job, wrote a romance novel (never ever published) and then became a totally free-lance corporate trainer, writer, and instructional designer/developer. My enterprise, The Thought Interpreter®, makes complicated enterprise concepts – suggestions, processes, systems, and methodologies – effortless to recognize, find out and use.

I love reading, logic puzzles, watching competitive figure skating, walking, golfing (badly) and travelling.

two. From 1993 to 1995 you had an chance to invest 2 years in France. Please tell us around the special circumstances around how that came around.

Judith: I was teaching a 3-day course. At lunch on the second day, 1 of the participants occurred to mention that she’d just moved to Toronto from Washington D.C, but had lived in France for several years.
“Wow! France! My husband and I dream of living there!” I told her.
“I need to have a Property here for a year or so, and I have a Home in France,” she stated. “Why do not we swap?”

Dan: Even though Judith came Residence and told me what Roxanne had stated, I was each excited and doubtful. How may perhaps we take a year or much more off? May we afford it? But we each loved the Notion, and wanted to discover it additional. We set a date with Roxanne to come to dinner, see our Home, and Speak around the swap.

By the night of the dinner, we had fairly considerably created up our minds. Although Roxanne walked in the door and stated, “I may live here,” we knew we had been on our way, though we had no Concept what her Property was like or what part of France it was in. Specifically 3 months right after that night, we arrived in France. We Concept we’d be there for a year; we ended up staying for just about 2.

three. Moving to yet another country for a massive time away from Property entails several preparations, practical, economic, emotional and otherwise. How did you prepare yourselves to get prepared for your extended stay in France?

Judith: It was a hectic 3 months. Even prior to meeting with Roxanne, we’d consulted our economic advisor who encouraged us to go for it. Subsequent, we had to apply to France for lengthy-stay visas. To get them, the RCMP [Canada's federal police force] had to investigate us and confirm that we’d in no way been in prison or in trouble with the law. We had to supply proof that we had sufficient funds to support ourselves, get a signed certificate from Roxanne that we had a location to live even though in France, and all varieties of other stuff. Then we found that, as a British citizen, Dan did not require a visa, just his British passport. So he got his passport and – soon after lots of visits to the French consulate – I got my visa. Our 2 cats had to get their shots, certificates of wellness and new travel cages. We talked to OHIP [Ontario's provincial public wellness insurance authority] and got a 1-time exemption from the 6-month out-of-country rule, and we took out far more wellness insurance.

Meanwhile, we packed all our individual points. We shipped a couple of issues to France – our golf clubs, Dan’s bass, winter clothes, some favourite books and CDs – and put the rest in our basement. We had the Home cleaned and painted. We arranged to do our banking by telephone and fax. (In 1993, we hadn’t even heard of e-mail, there was no such factor as a net browser, debit cards weren’t offered in Canada and bank machines did not normally work internationally.)

We told our customers we had been leaving and wound up our present projects. We had a busy social whirl, seeing buddies and household to say our farewells. We had been really excited around this adventure, reading every thing we may around France, and preparing what we’d do with this unexpected, but extremely welcome, self-granted sabbatical.

4. Please tell us a bit around the location and the small town in the south of France that you moved to. Please describe the Property that you moved into.

Dan: Roxanne’s Property is situated just outside the perched village of Le Bar-sur-Loup, in the back country of the Côte d’Azur, around 10 minutes north-east of Grasse, the perfume funds of France, 30 minutes due north of Cannes, and around 45 minutes north-west of Good. It is around an hour to Monaco and just a small additional to the Italian border. This region, the French riviera, has the most temperate climate in France, and is 1 of the world’s glamour destinations. And we had been going to live there!

The Property is named Mas Ste. Anne. It is a 250 year-old mas, or French farmhouse, with a modern day wing that Roxanne and her very first husband added although they purchased it in the mid-’70′s. On the ground floor is a massive entrance hall, a powder room, a kitchen, and a massive living / dining room with beautiful old furniture and a baby grand piano. Upstairs, there are 3 significant bedrooms, a little single bedroom we employed for storage, and 2 full bathrooms. Off the landing, half-way up, is a storage and laundry room. There is a balcony off the master bedroom and a covered patio just outside the front door.

The grounds consist of just about an acre of terraced hillside just outside and above the village, on the side of the mountain on which Le Bar is perched. There had been thirteen olive trees, a laurel (bay leaf) tree, and lots of fruit trees that supplied us with lemons, oranges, apples, pears, peaches, cherries, crab-apples, and – courtesy of the overhanging branches from a neighbour’s tree – even figs. Rosemary hedges lined the driveway and the actions beneath the Home; over the walkway and actions was an arbour of grapevines. We had flowers all year round — mimosas, magnolias, bougainvillea, wisteria, roses, oleanders, daffodils, violets, iris, and quite a few extra we did not comprehend. We even had a couple of date palms, yucca trees and a little stand of bamboo.

5. What had been your impressions and feelings whilst you initially arrived? How did you invest your initial couple of weeks?

Judith: We arrived in France in early August, exhausted from all the months of preparation and the last-minute flurry of leave-taking. It was really hot. For the initially couple of weeks, we cleaned the Residence from leading to bottom, some thing it incredibly necessary. We spent hours just about every day outside, wearing as couple of clothes as doable, performing absolutely nothing: sipping chilled ros&#23three; and pastis on the patio, enjoying the view, sleeping in the garden swing. We walked down to the village and did our grocery shopping, then puffed our way back up the hill (a 25% grade) to the Residence. We spent hours discovering the French words for issues we necessary to acquire (litter boxes for the cats, printer cables for the laptop or computer), searching for the correct shops in Grasse and Good, and explaining what we essential in our really rusty French. It sounds mundane, but we discovered it quite exciting.

Dan: Initially impressions and feelings had been essentially pure sensory overload: the spectacular setting of the village 380 metres (one,200 feet) above sea level; the view searching north up the Gorge du Loup, with Gourdon – the subsequent village, 15 minutes by car – perched on best of a mountain 760 metres (two,500 feet) above sea level; the “chirping” of the cicadas that started about 9 each morning, developing as the heat elevated By way of the afternoon, subsiding about 6 as it got cooler; the ubiquitous smells of Provence – rosemary, thyme, bougainvillea, jasmine; the intense taste sensations of local create, cheeses, and wines. And on leading of all of that, there was an air of unreality around it all. It was difficult to recognize that this wasn’t just a brief vacation; that we had been genuinely going to live here.

6. Once you settled in, did you have a specific routine for spending your days? What varieties of activities did you pursue?

Dan: Yes, we did develop particular routines. At initially, though, they did not fit with the customs of life in France. Time and again, immediately after breakfast on the patio, we’d get ourselves together to go shopping – and locate ourselves arriving at the shops just as they had been closing for a 2 to 3-hour lunch. We did ultimately understand to adjust to the French routine. Shortly afterward, the bigger grocery shops started to stay open all day. It was handy, but not virtually as quaint – and we missed the excuse to go for lunch and a half-bottle of wine whilst we waited for the shops to open!

In the evening, following dinner, we’d make a point of watching the eight o’clock news on TV. At 1st we did not recognize anything at all; it was just a wave of unfamiliar sound. Gradually, we started to distinguish words and phrases, even if we did not know what they meant, and ultimately we understood most of what was stated.

Judith: The days, though, had been very varied. I do not recall significantly of a everyday routine. I’m an early riser, and I liked to sit out on the patio in the mornings. Dan would join me there though he got up. Some days we spent at Property. I would write and clean the Home; Dan would cook and do laundry, play the piano (he taught himself to play whilst we had been there), and take photos. We’d let the cats in to use their litter box and let them out again. We each read considerably. And, specifically in the spring and fall, we mowed the terraces.

Other days we’d go out shopping or exploring. We did fairly considerably every thing together: We ate out considerably – you may possibly call wining and dining our significant hobby! We golfed occasionally. We went to just about every event in our village. Later, whilst we had a lot more social life, we went visiting and to parties. Once a month, we went to a club exactly where Dan played in a jam session that lasted until three or 4 a.m.

Dan: Our routines had been interrupted although family members and buddies came to visit. The initially spring we had been there, we had guests virtually just about every week from the beginning of March till well into June! We loved each minute of it, showing them all the locations and points that we were finding and studying to appreciate ourselves.

Susanne Pacher is the publisher of a web site known as Travel and Transitions(