How Did It Come to This?

I took my first French class in a small hot room in April of 1979. The small hot room was in Niamey, Niger, and it was about my second or third day there. I was 25 years old, and I had just joined the Peace Corps to be a surveyor. I could talk about my adventures there, but I won’t in this post. The upshot is that I gained a basic knowledge of French working with the Nigeriens and came back to the states well enough equipped to jump into intermediate level French classes at the University of Utah. While studying for a Master’s degree in International Relations (that never quite got finished), I took several classes from Madame Bardot (French Lady) and Monsieur Barton (American) to try to improve my skills. That was a long time ago!

Between then and now (July 2021), Lisa and I lived in Quebec City for one year in the early 80s, where she got her basic knowledge through several courses at Laval University. I was hardly ever there (travelling to work) so I can’t say my French improved while living there. I didn’t do much more with the language from that point until 2016, when I got hired by a French company (Thales) in southern California to help with their In-Flight Entertainment systems division. Although I was exposed to French and heard it spoken all around me, I could never get any of the French people to speak to me, mostly because they didn’t want to hear me mangle their language when I responded. However, I listened to the Canadian satellite station “Ici Premiere” going to and from work, so that was positive.

During the last couple of years, once Lisa and I had decided we were going to make this move, I took some French classes from Alliance Francaise, five or six sessions from another independent language school near my house, and some private tutoring with another teacher. None of this made me the fluent speaker I’ve always wanted to be.  But, because of all these classes, I did have a foundation good enough to read a few books in French. One was about a guy who was captured by the Nazis and spent time in prison camps. I learned the word for handcuffs in that one.  

In 2020 I discovered “France Culture,” a podcast site where I can listen to French people talk on any number of subjects. I mention a few of those in some of my weekly posts. This has REALLY helped me understand what people are saying. One of the online lessons I took stressed the fact that we don’t learn our mother tongue by sitting in class soaking up grammar rules. No, we learn it by LISTENING, and listening to at least one hour every day of smart people talking for the last year has helped me immensely. I feel like I can even answer the phone now, and not be totally intimidated. Speaking it still needs work, no doubt. And I still need subtitles on the French movies we watch on the Apple App, MHZ.

In addition to all these classes, Lisa and I have travelled to France more than a dozen times since the 1980s, always stopping in Paris for a couple of days, then either taking a train to new region and renting a car, or renting a car in Paris and driving to a new place. We’d stay in a private house via VRBO or AirBnB and spend a week or so driving around looking at castles and churches, practicing our French on waiters and anybody else.  A few years ago, we even rented a 30-foot boat and cruised the “Canal du Rhone a Sete” near the Mediterranean for four days.

So the point is, we didn’t just get this idea of moving to France after two vacations there. We selected the southwest part of France, near the Basque country, because it's on the Atlantic ocean and has surfing waves, it’s easy to get to from Bordeaux, it’s close to Spain, the weather is good, and the real estate is relatively cheap because it hasn’t quite been discovered like Provence.   Our house is in Carresse-Cassaber, a REALLY small village, but it's just five miles from a lovely historic town of about 5,000 souls called Salies de Bearne, so we do have restaurants nearby.

Because we’re both retired, we decided to try living in Europe for three to five years to see if we could make a life there.  It might all be a big bust. But we have a few dollars in the bank and decent level of pension fund/social security income, so we’re going to give it a try. 

As Thoreau said in On Walden Pond, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."