Errands and jet lag...

Two days of running errands...somewhat successfully...neither of us could sleep Sunday night. I think I finally fell asleep at about 3am...so...

Monday...slept through our alarm and woke up at 10am! Oops. Met with the owner of our apartment, Natacha, at noon to pay our rent. Then we successfully opened a french bank account so that we could then get SIM cards for our cell phones. Everything seemed to go very smoothly! We then bought bus passes and stocked our kitchen from the Monoprix. Thankfully there is a grocery store just about two blocks from our apartment.

Tuesday...the market! Bought some yummy fresh fruit and veggies and olive oil! C'est delicieux!

Then we headed off in the direction of the school where I will take french class. The school is just past an italian part of town and I promised Josie that we could get italian food for lunch...we didn't get pasta, but she did find tiramisu! I had an omelette fromage au nature avec pommes frites et salade. Josie ordered a cheese plate, but discovered that one of the cheeses was camembert and one was blue...not what she expected, but the tiramisu was a hit and served in a bowl shaped like Mt. St. Helens.

We finally found my school, the IEFEE (very confusing to find!), and Marie was very happy to see me and that I'd made it to Aix and found them. My exam will be on Friday to determine which level class I will be in and she explained where I needed to go to pay the rest of my school fees at the accounting office at the University. The directions looked very straightfoward on the map...but oh dear...and as with everything else, my french is good enough to ask questions, but not good enough to understand the answer. We finally found the building and the account office and actually paying took only 2 minutes, but the whole process took more than 2 hours!

Next...my cell phone would not allow me to send text messages. I can call out, receive calls and receive texts, but not send texts. So, back to the cell phone store where I managed to baffle the two tech support guys and the salesman. Finally we agreed that I should come back when they weren't so busy. They were hopeful that the problem would fix itself before I cam back. (Ha! we'll see...).

Tomorrow...an outing to buy school supplies for Josie and meet her school headmaster...and hopefully sleep tonight and awake earlier!

Soldes! Soldes! Soldes!

It's the winter sales in Aix and many of the shops were open specially on Sunday. The crowds were much quieter today and people strolled more calmly down the not quite so busy streets. We wandered aimlessly visiting stores that looked intriguing...noting which ones we want to go back to.

One such intriguing store was a candy shop! The displays were spectacular...beautiful! Free samples abound and we had fun translating the labels...

The streets are very narrow and most are pedestrian only. Cars are allowed on the road that forms a ring around Aix. We don't know where we were, but when we hit a road with cars, we found a new street to work our way back to the center.

Josie couldn't wait to have a crepe in France. The wall of Nutella drew her like a magnet...

After just two bites she said blissfully "Mom, your crepes are terrible". Thanks Josie! But, I'm okay with being terrible compared to the real thing. Nutella oozed out of every gap in the crepe and eventually a big blob landed on her coat. We decided that was a sign to wander back to our apartment, eat the crepe with a fork and knife and clean up her coat.

I had read that the doors of Aix were special...and I have been noticing some beautiful doors...ours included. In addition to the doors, there are interesting sites nearly everywhere you look...I won't get bored walking around here!

For dinner we decided to stay home and enjoy our little apartment. It was getting cold, dark, and cloudy out. Caroline had left us a frozen quiche (tarte 3 fromages), so I embarked on figuring out the oven and translating the cooking instructions from the box! A new challenge! The oven... Three knobs, no words, just pictures....can't be too difficult? wow...who knew you could have so many choices for how to turn on your oven? You can set it to cook a chicken, a roast, a pot, a cake, etc....but none of the little pictures looked like a quiche! Finally I chose what looked like a convection symbol and voila! In the cupboard I found the instructions for the oven...in English! Now, to read the box...hmmm...very small print and dim lighting...must use headlamp! French words I don't understand....how about Google translate. Picture this...Gigi in a chair with laptop in her lap wearing a headlamp and studying the box of a frozen food product...ha!

Dinner was a great success....

Notre premiere diner dans notre petit appartement

Alas...dinner was followed by an attack of time zone change and I couldn't sleep until 3am! Must get myself on French time!

Good Morning Provence!

Apparently the traffic into Aix is notoriously horrible. It took us about 1-1/2 hours to get from the village of Luynes (where Josie will go to school) to Aix...a distance of just a few kilometers! Traffic was completely stopped. Caroline said it's normal to be slow, but this was particularly bad. Once we arrived in Aix, there was the round and round to find a legal parking space. We got a nice tour of the neighborhood until we nabbed a spot close enough given that we had FIVE suitcases to wheel down the street. Our street is pedestrian only, so we couldn't drive up to our door to drop our stuff off.

Then came the stairs! Oh, first two automated locked doors to open the front two doors, then three long flights of stairs. Old building = high ceilings, so each flight is equivalent of two normal US flights. Then we get to our apartment door, which has no doorknob. The lights at the top of the main stairs are out, so it's pitch dark. Thankfully, Caroline brought a flashlight.

Once inside our door, we are faced with a flight of spiral stairs...not long, but tiny...miniscule. Our biggest suitcase nearly wouldn't fit. I had to bump it up ahead of me with each step.

Not sure what we would have done without Caroline! She visited the apartment the day before we arrived and stocked the fridge and pantry with some basics and a bottle a wine. Also, she made our bed, brought an extra blanket, and left dish soap, sponges, shower gel, etc.!

Our apartment is from the 18th century and the original tiles have been uncovered....beautiful, quaint, cozy, and tiny, but perfect for Josie and I. The location is perfect! Right in the middle of the shopping district off of the tree-lined Cours Mirabeau. We can't stand up in the bedroom...our little hobbit hole.

The next morning...Saturday...dawned clear and bright. Sunlight streaming in our kitchen window...

The Saturday market is just outside our window...

We spent the day Saturday just trying to get our bearings, finding internet, being challenged by French keyboards (!!), trying to get cell phones, and arguing with each other...part of the adjustment process! :) Josie fixed the internet in our apartment, so we are online now.

Dinner with Caroline and her family...we learned a wonderful new tradition for eating king cake that we have decided to adopt. The youngest person gets under the table and determines who gets each piece of cake, so the person under the table doesn't know who's getting the piece with the baby...just in case the baby pokes its head out while the cake is being cut.

Snafus, suitcases, and safe travels

Months of planning and one hour before we are supposed to leave I realized that our stuff won't fit in the suitcases we have planned to use. I panicked. Josie remained calm and later confessed that she had to restrain herself from laughing out loud at me. Not one of my better moments! I decided to throw all of the extra stuff into an extra suitcase resulting in absolutely chaotic packing. In my efforts to reduce our load to fit in two suitcases, I had extracted random things to leave behind at my mom's house. Now, I have no idea what I left and what I brought. I guess I'll find out in a few hours when we arrive at our apartment in Aix.

I must clarify...Josie was perfectly organized, packed and ready to leave with one check-in bag weighing in under 50 pounds and her two carry-ons. The problem was all mine!

The night before, I had tried to check-in for our flights on-line, but the website wouldn't allow me to check-in. On the drive to the airport Gary joked that maybe we didn't really have tickets. Oh dear...if I only knew how close he was to the truth! When we arrived at DIA, the gate agent at British Airways couldn't check us in either and couldn't figure out what the problem was. Eventually, several phone calls later, they discerned that our ticket had never been ticketed...it was booked and we had seats, but they had never charged my credit card!! We stood at the ticket counter for nearly an hour before they finally got it sorted out. The cause was that the time for our return flight was changed (by only 5 minutes) just after I booked the reservation, and the computer system got stuck. Because I didn't authorize the change, it never ticketed our ticket, but thankfully the system retained our booking and seats and the orginal price.

The wonderful result was that they were very apologetic and didn't charge me for the extra suitcase! A silver lining to our ticket snafu.

Having successfully flown across the Atlantic and transferred from Heathrow to Gatwick airports in London, we are safely on our way to Marseille!

Nous ne sommes pas pretes

But we will be ready soon! We leave in less than three weeks. Amazingly everything is coming together and ready or not we'll be jetting across the Atlantic on January 12th.

The fall semester became "the semester during which I spend all of my spare time planning our sabbatical in France". Talk about not living in the present! I hope that once we arrive in France, we can shift gears and enjoy the moment and not spend our time there planning for when we come home. Oh, certainly not, that would be tragic.

I just need to look back for a moment and retrace our path in getting to the point of departure. When we commenced the sabbatical planning effort, we were headed to New Zealand. But, a major earthquake (oh, poor Christchurch!), the loss of my original book project, and a crazy search for an IB school for Josie lead us around the world (virtually) in our quest for a destination through NZ, to Bali, the Seychelles, England, Scotland and finally France.

By September, our sights had settled on Aix-en-Provence where Josie could attend the International Bilingual School of Provence, I could take a french class, and we could enjoy sunshine, fresh food, and only 30 miles away...the Mediterranean Sea. Then commenced the next adventures...registering her in school, collecting the massive packet of information necessary to acquire a long-stay french visa, finding an apartment in Aix, renting our house, finding dog and cat sitters, and moving through the changing seasons with the recognition that we wouldn't be here to see the spring in Grand Junction. Translation...someone else will have to re-construct my complex system of hoses and sprinklers to get our irrigation system going!! Josie rolled her eyes as I took pictures and video-taped my highly engineered conflagration of timers, splitters and hoses.

Thanksgiving was a trip to Los Angeles to present ourselves at the French Consulate to apply for our visas. Many evenings and weekends were spend in front of the computer searching for apartments and translating french emails about apartments. Who knew that a canape clic-clac is a fold-out sofa?!

A huge thank you to my new friend Caroline in Aix who saved us from renting an apartment that had the toilet in a little phone booth in the bedroom! Caroline visited two apartments for us and answered my many many questions about french etiquette and what to expect. And, thanks to her we will have a cozy apartment just two short blocks from the Cours Mirabeau.

Okay...now to packing...

The French Blog begins!

We're less than two months away from our sabbatical 1/2 year in France. Well...hopefully! Next Friday we will present ourselves at the French Consulate in LA to apply for our long-stay visas. I've been working for a couple of months now to gather all of the information that we need to acquire our visas. However, here we are now, less than two weeks away and not surprisingly...we have acquired some glitches. The three major missing pieces...a rental agreement, verification of adequate health insurance and the answer to what kind of visa I need!

And, not surprisingly, you can't just call the consulate with questions. Well, you can call, but you won't get to talk to anyone, nor can you leave a message. I've called, faxed and emailed. No answer yet, but I haven't panicked yet. Stay posted....the week's not over yet!

Homecoming October 2010