France in a Roundabout Way

I’ve been to France a few times in my life, but never for a long period of time. Usually we arrive and check into a hotel or Airbnb and settle in for a few days. The little market on the corner becomes our daily stop to grab snacks and drinks, the boulangerie around the corner is our favorite stop for bread and pastries and the busy café at the intersection is a great place to people watch and share of bottle of wine. 

That’s all well and good for a vacation, but moving here is a whole other story! Once we arrived at our little maison, we had to figure out how things work, where to get stuff and, believe it or not, what food to buy! I have to be honest and tell you, we struggled a bit to get settled in, partly due to the language and partly due to general unfamiliarity. 

It took a bit of time for me to get used to driving a stick shift. In the first few days I wanted to take the car back and get an automatic. I dreaded going out because I just wasn’t enjoying driving, it was such a chore! I am sooooo glad I stuck with it, because just these few weeks of experience will make the transition to Bijou so much easier!

Once I learned the road rules, and there are some doozies, I felt much more comfortable on the narrow roads in and between villages. For example, there is this thing called “Priority on the Right”, and frankly, I don’t get it. Basically, you can be whizzing down the main road through a village and suddenly the car on the little side street on your right has priority. That means you’ve got to slow down and let them go or risk getting plowed over! But sometimes this is not the case! How do you know? And what do you do when YOU are the car on the right and you have a car to the right of you? I know, right?? It’s all there in the signs, you just have to pay attention!

There are not a lot of traffic lights out in the country where we are, instead, there are roundabouts. In equal measure, these are both helpful and annoying. They slow you down, which is part of their function and they can be difficult to get into and out of if traffic is heavy. But the great thing is if you miss your turn, you can just go around again! If you get blocked in, just keep going around until you find an opening. The worst thing you can do is take the wrong exit because it can be difficult to get turned around. Once, we got spit out onto the toll booth road and had to take a ticket and drive 19 kms before we got turned around. Seriously, do not get off that roundabout unless you know it is where you want to go! Go around as many times as necessary!

The first thing we bought from Amazon when we arrived in France was a Garmin GPS. Because France recently reduced speed limits on many roads, it was out-of-date when it arrived and Steven had to do a massive update. As we drove around the countryside, I kept noticing flashing speed signs that said “One point!” (Actually, it said “un point”, but I translated that for you.) Google informed us that a driver starts out with 12 points on their license and, once all the points have been substracted, the license is suspended. For about a day I freaked out that I was well beyond a dozen and might even have some tickets coming in the post. But we finally figured out it is just a warning and that there are no cameras attached to these warnings. Whew! Helpfully, there are actually signs that let you know when you about to pass a speed camera, but we thought it indicated WiFi ahead. LOL, live and learn.

Roundabouts also used to be Priority on the Right, which meant those entering the circle had the rightaway. Yikes, can you imagine that nightmare?! They changed that, though, except at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, where there are a dozen multi-lane spokes converging on a 10-lane roundabout. It’s chaos. I don’t think I will drive there. In Dublin, there is a massive roundabout near Steven’s parent’s house that is just a big scary free-for-all. Steven says the only right you have on the roads in Dublin is the right to die. Maybe that’s why he’s never driven there, although as we plan our trip there, he seems fine with me doing it. He is so brave.

Steven says that anything with the name “French” in the title sounds naughty, but let me assure you there is nothing naughty or fun about doing laundry in France. In our little maison we are lucky because we have a washer, but the drying is all solar. Or radiator, if there is “pas de soleil”.  I am all for the idea of letting my clothes and linens flap in the wind on a sunny day, but the reality is not like those television commercials with beautiful things flowing gently in the sunny breeze. There is just a tiny little spot to hang clothes off our terrace and I have to pin the living daylights out of everything so it won’t fly off into the stream. Plus, when everything is dry, it is as stiff as cardboard! And winkled! I’ve never used fabric softener in my life, but I guess I’m going to have to start. Kelly Murray suggested I use Tide pods, but there is no such thing here! I mean, there may be somewhere, but I haven’t found them. So I bought a little plastic bag of softener but I have no idea how to use it. Where does it go in the washer? When? How much? There are instructions on the bag in 10 different languages, but not English. 

First world problems, I know. But it’s something we think about as we prepare to move into Bijou. I loved having an on board washer and dryer in Scoopy and I am one of those people who washed all the time. I was never keen on letting it pile up. Anyway, while laundromats as we know them in the states are few and far between here, we do have some options. 

We can head to the local grocery store and throw our clothes in while we go shop for groceries. Or, we can check into a campground that has a washer and, if we’re lucky, maybe even a dryer! But probably a clothesline, which is fine, because we stocked up on plenty of clothespins. One way or the other, we’ll git ‘er done.

I hate to keep bringing up the whole language barrier thing, but sometimes it can be such a huge deal, it just stops us in our tracks. Like that time we went shopping and Steven bought buttermilk instead of regular milk, and we didn’t notice it until he put it in our coffee the next morning. Have you ever had buttermilk in your coffee? I don’t recommend it. He also came home with sour cream instead of regular cream, but that was an okay mistake because we needed some of that anyway. 

The first time we went to the Saturday market in a nearby village, we came home with what we thought were chicken legs. I was going to buy a whole chicken but it still had the head on it, so I passed on that and just got the legs instead. We just threw them in the freezer because we were waiting on delivery of the Instant Pot. When it finally came and we thawed the legs and got a good look at them, we realized there were only two of them and they were gigantic, like some kind of mutant chicken thunder thighs. I seasoned them and put them in the IP and when I removed the lid they looked exactly the same! I thought the IP was defective, but in fact those legs were cooked perfectly, they just never changed shape or color. And the color was super dark, like oxblood dark. This was the darkest dark meat I have ever eaten and it was fabulously tasty. Thing is, I think it might have been turkey, I honestly couldn’t tell. Whatever it was I am sure it was fresh off the farm, and I don’t even want to think about why turkeys and chickens in the U.S. have dark meat that is barely distinguishable from light!

I shared with you about our first trip to the grocery store, which was kind of pathetic, especially because we were jetlagged. Since then we have been to several other markets, but our favorite is Lidl. I went to Lidl when we were in Dublin a couple of years ago, but I wasn’t in charge of cooking then, so I didn’t really take it all in. If you live or travel on the east coast in the U.S. you might have run across one. If not, the most similar would be Aldi. Lidl is the Trader Joe’s of Europe and RVers love it just the same. The wine, though, is much better than Two Buck Chuck, but maybe that’s just because we are in France. 

Lidl is the first store that actually made sense to me. It’s small, so I don’t wander around lost with my eyes glazed over and it has pretty much everything we need. That said, there are still some quirks that I’ve had to learn. Buying fresh bread, for example. It is behind glass with this knob thingy sticking out and I could not for the life of me figure out how to get at it. I slyly watched an elderly gentleman retrieve his and that’s when I learned it’s a bit like those machines with the claw where you try to grab a stuffed animal. You have to grab ahold of that knob and maneuver a long shovel over to the loaf you want, then scoop it up in the little shovel and with a firm jerk and toss it sideways into the chute. Voila, out comes your bread! I mean, it seems easy enough once you learn what you’re supposed to be doing, but you can imagine the attention you draw when you haven’t a clue and you’re just sort of pulling and pushing on the knob, trying to lift the fixed glass door and generally just banging around all for a measly loaf of raisin bread.

Another thing that has been a challenge is bagging groceries. First, you have to remember to take all of your own bags, which we forgot a few times and therefore have bought enough for a small country. Now we don’t forget. We had our own in the states, in fact, I brought SIX Trader Joe’s bags with me, so I don’t know why this was so hard for us. Brain fog, I guess. Second, you have to bag your own stuff. Again, this is not a new concept to us, however, one thing we have not encountered before is the rapid fire cashier and the expectation of the crowd that you will have your stuff bagged by the time payment is requested. As soon as she hands you your receipt, she starts slinging the next guys groceries down the counter and he expects to be there bagging his own stuff. He does not want to wait for you to try to get everything to fit just right. 

I admit I aspire to the bagging genius of the TJs cashiers, but that’s never going to happen. Each trip to the store we make a plan. Steven loads everything onto the conveyor in a certain order, like all frozen and refrigerated stuff together, while I race to the end of the chute and get my bags open and ready. My goal is to try and get things into the proper bags, but the bags usually collapse and I have to start from scratch, only now I’m under pressure. After I neatly place the first two or three items, I realize there are 20 more just rolling around on the conveyor belt and Steven is signing the credit card slip. So I end up just throwing everything into the bags in a completely insane manner. I might be a tad OCD about this stuff, but mostly I find it to be a challenge. 

Update! There’s been progress made on the bagging front! Today I went to Lidl’s by myself as Steven spent the day in Paris and I discovered a little trick. There is a hook on the cart that I can hang my bag on and it will stay open! Holy cow, genius! But, there is only one hook and we usually have two or three bags. So it’s still GAME ON!

UP NEXT: Who knows?!

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