One down, eleven months to go on our one-year visa! We’ve learned so much in this first month, and yet we feel that we have so much more to learn to determine where we might want to stay a while. We had a strategy when we got here and it’s still the strategy, but being on the ground in France has shown us how much more nuance there needs to be in strategy making for something as important as where to stay longer term in a new country.
An interesting thing we’ve come to understand is that many people move to another country to become different people or have a new and different life. That’s not us. We like ourselves and our life, and are here because France is aligned with our values, is a cost effective place to live, and we can explore new adventures here. And the bakeries, cheeses, and wines are amazing! As introverts and homebodies though, living the AirBnB life is a little sterile and we’re missing the coziness of a home.
(Photo above of the Maison de Jeanne d’Arc, rebuilt on the site of the home where Joan of Arc stayed in as she liberated the town of Orléans from the English in 1429.)
We’ve learned that Orléans is just not our city and we’re ready to move on. While it is lovely and old and has a really good transit system, it’s lacking in enough cultural and community identity to satisfy us. It’s too large to want to live in the city and is too small for the towns surrounding it to have a village experience, such as walking to the bakery and market without it being in a strip mall. Plus, there’s not enough English spoken here to attract an English-speaking expat community to find some travel peers while learning French, which would be nice. We’ve only spoken, and only briefly at that, with two native English speakers (college students from the US) since we arrived a month ago!
We’ve taken a number of day trips, to Chartres twice because it’s so pretty, Tours, Paris, Beaugency, Blois, and Chateaudun. We’ll take another this week to Limoges, which we’ve added to our list for consideration. We’ll head to Angers next Saturday, and are excited to be someplace new with hopefully more comfortable accommodations than the two places we’ve stayed in here with their 6-in thick foam mattresses on wooden slat frames and flat, square pillows. As people who don’t sleep well and really miss our comfy bed, this has been rough!
As a whole though, we’re still really happy to be here and are looking forward to a lovely summer exploring western France!