A wedding in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne

In September we drove down to Corrèze for the wedding of Chris and Marinelle. A special day for them and for all of us. We know Marinelle since she was a pretty little girl in South-Africa and now she is a beautiful young woman, living in France. The weather was wonderful, the church was in the picturesque little town, Le Pescher, and the celebrations in a fairytale castle just outside Beaulieu.
The bride looked stunning, the groom looked handsome, the decorations were lovely and the food too good to even try to describe. My photographs are not good enough to really show you how wonderful it was, but this is unfortunately all I can share with you…

Beaulieu is about 500km south of Paris. A nice weekend trip. The children were ready with their technology to make the drive less boring… while I am trying to tell them to look outside and see France! Each McDonalds stop has two purposes: to fill the stomachs and to use the free WiFi to fill the ‘technologies’. : )

ready to go…

 driving on new roads and seeing new road signs…

and the wedding…

the church in Le Pescher…

the proud father next to the bride…
and Leandri, Marinelle’s younger sister and one of the bridesmaids… also a beautiful young woman today…

i do… and then they signed…

the Algeras waiting for the newly weds…

the van Wyk family…

And then we followed them through the pretty little village while the photographer was taking pictures.
let’s go… follow me : )

following…

Château Du Doux… we spent the afternoon in the garden, appreciating the view…

the father of the bride kept the children busy, playing petanque.

now who won?

the lovely couple opened the dance floor…

the day was not over yet, as the sun set we went inside for a wonderful dinner…

leaving, looking back once more…

Please visit Ronelle’s blog (the mother of the bride) to see some beautiful photographs.
http://myfrenchkitchen.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/a-fairytale-french-wedding/

Getting the paperwork done.

To be the ‘foreigners’ in a country involves a lot of paperwork, and this is a yearly thing, which takes a few months to finalize and then you start all over again. Luckily we still have the ladies from VIP Resources to help us with this. Still we have to be there ourselves to hand in forms or collect something and of course this involves waiting in a queue.

Here, each department has a ‘préfecture‘ where all this paperwork is done. The préfecture for Val D’Oise, where we lived initially, was in our town, which made it easier. We came with a one year visa and after one year we received a resident permit for the next year, but… just as that was done, we moved to a different department. Now we are in Yvelines and we have to change our permits again. First you receive temporary permits and then after a few weeks you have to get in the queue again to get the permanent permits. I have to say that when you get to the front of the queue, it goes quickly. The people who work there know what they’re doing.

The préfecture for Yvelines is situated in Versailles, which isn’t bad at all. You look down the road and see the château de Versailles. So, I thought that ‘while I’m there’ I could have a quick visit again.

Etrangers – foreigners – that’s us, but then we are thankful when we see how many people are in the queue asking for asile – asylum!

The prefecture isn’t a very impressive building, but it is just opposite the beautiful Hotel de Ville of Versailles. (That would be the municipality)

Last time we visited Versailles it was in January in the middle of winter and we also couldn’t go into the top floor of the main building. Because it was winter, there were no flowers in the gardens. Those were the reasons that I thought maybe I should pop in again. : )
It is almost the end of the tourist season, but at 10 o’clock in the morning there were so many people! You just walk along with the masses. Everybody is taking photographs and trying to pose in front of something gold or glittery. So, maybe it is not a bad idea at all to go in January in 5 degrees.
But still, it is something to see. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to walk through that building all on your own… and with no camera.

What made this visit worthwhile was an exhibition by Joana Vasconcelos. Interesting is the only way I can describe it. : )

pots and pans…

a lot of needlework and crochet…

and more in gold

marble statues covered in crochet…

and the pink helicopter… these ostrich feathers must be from South Africa. : )

and some for the garden as well

the gardens in September

I think I have seen enough of château de Versailles for now. Too many people and too expensive… but… maybe if someone visits and wants to see it… maybe I’ll join them once more…

The new (or old) becomes the normal

I live in a house that was build in 1840. I have old skew stone walls. The name of the house opposite me is ‘le clos Normand’. On the other side are old stone houses that used to be stables. I leave my house and drive down a little street that could be a puzzle picture. : ) I pass a château when I take the girls to gymnastics… but so soon it is just a normal life. I sit and wonder what I will show family and friends when they come to visit, forgetting that it might be ‘new’ to them again.
Then there is also the fact that I could quickly walk to the station to be in Paris an hour later. Will I go tomorrow… maybe next week. : )

But the strange (or normal) thing is that life is exactly the same. (For the moment we ignore these people’s thing of speaking and writing everything in french : ) ) We still have washing, and bathrooms have to be cleaned. The family have to eat everyday. When you travel to gymnastics you talk about normal things, like what happened in school today and forget to even look to the right to see the château again.

across the road…

So let’s forget about dirty kitchens and bathrooms for a while and see the little ‘pretty, old’  things around the house.

the little men that keep the shutters open…

the wooden ‘nails’ that keep the beams in place…

old stone walls that ‘hopefully’ keep the house standing… : )

ring the bell and I’ll open the door…

The weather is changing fast. Early mornings are cold, but the days are still ok. I want to go to the brocante in Montainville on Sunday and I don’t know if the weather will be good enough to join the South Africans for ‘braai day’. : ) Whatever you do this week-end, have a lovely time.

September.

Everything comes to a standstill in France during August. Everyone is on holiday, even boulangeries and small businesses close for the month. In contrast to that, September seems like everything comes back to life again.  More people on the trains, school children are waiting at bus stops and moms are walking their little ones to school.
In our lives things are back to normal as well. The kids are back in school, gymnastics have started again and tennis and tumbling will start today.  Many things are different to last year in Courdimanche. The children are now in new french public schools. No more special french classes. The schools they were in last year had mostly immigrant children and here all children are french. A different culture…  The girls say that you can now talk to your friends and actually hear each other. No more screaming children around you. : ) The boys were amazed by the fact that nobody talked in class. : ) Last year the children had no respect for teachers and would just keep on talking while the teachers were busy with class.
They all take the bus to school and the bus stop is just down the road, a five minute walk. After last year’s more than an hour travelling by train and bus the boys now enjoy a quick 15 minutes by bus.
So let’s see what the new year brings with Mandi and Franci in Collège François Rabelais in Val de 4 Pignons and Jaco and Pieter in Lycée Viollet le Duc in Villiers Saint Frédéric.

The girls are enjoying gymnastics already, which is now in Maurepas. The new coaches knew about them coming as the friendly coaches in Cergy phoned them to tell them everything about the two South African girls. What level they are on, and what they like and don’t like to do. : )

September started with a huge brocanté here in Beynes. Everyone empty their attics and then somebody else buys it again. : ) But a festive atmosphere with 400 stalls and the whole region looking around for bargains.

As everyone is busy again with work or school, the work on the house has slowed down a bit, but a few small things have been done…

Danie sanded the stairs and gave it a new layer of varnish.

he turned the old kitchen cupboard under the stairs into a pretty blackboard for me…

and the empty pots in the courtyard received a few plants… choice of plants? everything on sale : )

 

Painting rooms.

It is the end of the 2 month summer holiday. The shops, television and ads in the mailbox all tell you that la rentrée is here. Back to school. This year was a bit easier to do the shopping for school, as we know now that you don’t find lined paper. We know what grand carreaux and petits carreaux mean and we are not surprised by all the blocks in the exercise books. The kids are excited for this year. They will be in ‘nicer’ schools and their french is much better now, than a year ago.

The holiday is over, but the work in the house is not done yet. But then, is work in a house ever done? In this family it will anyway change again in a year or two as someone gets a new idea or a child goes into a new ‘phase’.

The kids have worked hard in their bedrooms, but still have some plans. They have their own ideas and plans and colour choices… there are limits! Prices of paint also added some extra limits. Paint in France is really expensive.  Our solution for this was a 25l tin of white paint, on special, and added paint tints for each one.
The boys’ rooms had the most work because their rooms had old wallpaper, which were not the best colours and tearing off in places. The girls could only paint their walls and move in. Our room is still orange, but painting them is low on the priority list.

On day one, this is what we found. Not as bad as the kitchen… The boys’ rooms are on the first floor. The original old rooms of the house. We and the girls are in the new rooms that was created in the attic at some stage. Therefore, I should mention that I have to climb 31 stairs to my bedroom! : ) Enough to keep anyone fit…

Pieter’s room before…

getting rid of wallpaper… with some help… and taking a break…

…and changed into a  gamer’s room…

Jaco’s room before…

… getting rid of old wallpaper…

…to change it into a black and white, drummer’s room.
He still has plans with the empty walls…

Franci’s room before…

…  now colourful…

Mandi’s room before…

…a teenage girl…

our room before…

… and only washed the floor and moved in… : )

There is also a guest room… but that still only has some before photographs. I quickly finished removing the wallpaper when Hartman came to stay over one night : ), but it will be painted before the next guests arrive…

The kitchen… had a wall… and a floor

Maybe I should start the story by showing the nice stone wall in the room behind the kitchen, which is the reason for all this dust and work for a week… and that wasn’t planned at all.

the kitchen on day 1… Danie started on the spiderwebs…

Then we wondered why a wall can be so nice on one side and covered with ‘fake’ wall on the other side, and opened just a small piece to see what’s behind it… and it looked nice and ‘stoney’ : ) and then Danie cut open a big piece and then…

a stone wall covered with cement…

Dust, disappointment, work, why did we do this!.. and no turning back as the thick ‘fake’ wall had no support at the bottom and had to be taken out. That alone took two days. Our first decision was that we will just paint it… but, we are six people and with some fun we (not really me, they) started to ‘chisel’ (if that’s a verb) stone after stone…

…and then mixing white cement and slowly covering the gray cement between the stones… by hand…

This ‘mistake’ will actually be very nice in the end. The work was stopped first to do the rest of the kitchen, but the finished part looks like this now…

The rest of the kitchen…? We found this when the kitchen zink was taken out… : )

Then they started fixing… tiling and filling holes in walls.

The floor has a story too. I think houses can tell a lot of stories about the people living in them. In this house somebody decided to tile this big kitchen/diningroom with nice tiles. Then somebody decided that it is too big and cut a line through the tiles and build a wall in the middle. Then somebody didn’t like the wall and take it out again, but now there is a line of cement in the middle of the tile floor. Then somebody thought it a nice idea to cover the tiles with a thin layer of cement to make it smooth and then stick novilon tiles onto that. Luckily they stopped just before sticking the tiles. Then somebody (which is now us) saw that if you make this cement layer wet and use scrapers and a few people you can get the cement off again. So, that’s what we did.. and many hours of scraping later…

we went from this…

doing this…

to this…

The cement line is still in the kitchen, but just this morning Danie discovered a whole pile of the kitchen tiles in his outside building. Cement line fixed!

In the meantime I’ve painted the walls and all the beams. We could use our loose IKEA kitchen cupboards from Courdimanche, with one difference in this house, that the corners are not 90 degrees. All walls are skew. : ) There are still little things to be done, but for now we are here…

This is Beynes.

After three weeks without internet we feel rich with all this luxury of being able to phone, seeing what friends were up to via facebook, sharing, reading emails… We waited patiently for two weeks and then contacted Free who only then sent a technician. We shouldn’t have been so patient, because he then discovered that France Telecom never connected our line. Then we waited another five days for their technician to come and as it always works: It took him just two minutes to connect the line.
We just can’t live without this technology anymore. We had more than just a few coffees at McDonalds with their free Wifi. That was not even to make contact with the outside world. Everything is done via the internet. Organize electricity, water, gas, change addresses and so much more.

So now I can give an update of what we were up to in this last month.

SOLD… 53 Rue de Maule

On the 10th of July we signed the contract at the notaire to have the house officially on our name. After two hours in the office of Maitre le Grand, we had the keys. We were well informed of how everything works, because by law we had to have an interpreter, who asked 600 euros for his services. : ) Now we know all the detail of the insurance for the house, as that Danie is not allowed to do parachuting, skydiving or motor racing. : ) We also learned that our house is under ‘historical protection’. We are not allowed to change anything on the outside without their permission. This is because Beynes has a castle and all buildings in a five kilometer radius from it, is part of the historical heritage.

le château de Beynes …

Then we could walk into our ‘new’ house and saw how much cleaning needed to be done. There are windows that hasn’t been opened for years, shutters that hasn’t been closed for years and spiderwebs that took some skilled spiders years to form. That is why it actually didn’t matter that we were without internet, we worked non-stop for a month. But by now, all the spiders have been chased away, most walls were painted and almost all the boxes have been unpacked.

Let me start by showing you the pretty village Beynes… and you don’t say baynes (2 syllables, as we thought) It is Ben with a long e sound as in West. The people are friendly. One neighbour brought us all info from the municipality. Another friendly lady surprised me with two pumpkins from their vegetable garden. The friendly Roger shakes his head every time as he greets me and see me walking with bare feet… but I’m from Africa, I tell him. : )

The church behind the castle…

our street…

pretty…

A week of ‘last times’

End of year, end of our time in Cergy-Pontoise, last ballet class, last gymnastics class, last time dropping someone off at Collège le Moulin a Vent, last time… That was what this past week was like. Now, after doing some things for the last time, the year has officially ended and the kids are on holiday till September.

The reason for having ‘last times’ again is that we have bought a house in a small village, called Beynes, and we will start moving next week. The house implies for sure that it will be a working holiday for this family. I will write more about the house and our renovations when we are there next week. For now I can say that the house was build in 1840, it is big enough for a family of six and was cheap enough for us to buy. Big, old and affordable only means one thing: lots of work… But that’s not a problem as we are also six people that can clean and paint. : )

These two photo’s from the estate agents’ website convinced me that we have to visit this house…

from the back…

front entrance…

Before the big move starts next week, lets get back to the ‘last times’ again. Franci had her last ballet lesson and then the dance concert last night. She danced beautiful and I am sure aunty Belinda from Monte Vista’s ballet would have been very proud of her. This year’s danse classique was taught by a friendly lady called Sylvia.

movie legends… Black Swan, Titanic, Marilyn… 

Then the last gymnastics lesson on Friday and Cergy’m Club’s end of year gala today. From the youngest group of 3 year olds to the current France gymnasts, all showing off their skills and entertaining us with fun dances.

This afternoon we remembered again the displays at ACS Gymnastics. With the nice Cape Town weather it was held outside, so they had space to do crazy things like boys doing somersaults over cars… and more. Each club is special in its own way. The best memory of our year in Cergy will be Cergy’m Club. The girls were so happy there and are really sad to leave, but Fred recommended a club close to the new house; ‘where the coaches are just as friendly as them,’ as he said. : )  So, with a very special goodbye card and some tears the group of girls said goodbye… They will keep contact on facebook and see each other again at next year’s competitions.
It feels like a long time ago that Mandi and Franci joined the club, speaking only a few words of  french. The coaches had to ask one of the girls to show them what they have to do as they couldn’t understand. They had good laughs with the girls correcting their pronunciation and they again teaching the french girls some afrikaans words. Even Fred thought the girls could teach him how to convince us in afrikaans not to move. : )

To Fred, Audrey and Elsie, the gym coaches, and a very special group of girls: Thank you for a lovely gymnastics year. Even difficult days for Mandi and Franci weren’t that bad as they could look forward to going to gym that evening.    à bientôt…

7 Reasons to move to France… or not

I received the Versatile blogger award from VinylEraser a while back… and now again from Chaumierelesiris. : ) Thank you to both of them!  The awards are just a friendly gesture among bloggers to encourage and acknowledge each other.
VinylEraser is an art blog. Go and have a look at his lovely art here on his blog. Chaumierelesiris is written by a lady who lives in London and now owns a house in Normandy, where she spends holidays with her family. You can read about their visits to this lovely cottage here on her blog.

For the award you are then asked to tell seven things about yourself and send the reward on to other bloggers. I will send it on later.

As this blog is about our move to France, I will give you seven reasons to move to France… or maybe not to move… : )
(Just a friendly warning: These reasons might not all make sense to you if you don’t live in South-Africa.)

Reason 1: Move here for Nutella crêpes, or don’t move and still enjoy cinnamon pancakes… 

Cheaper Nutella could be a good reason. It’s half the price we payed in Cape Town. With Nutella you have to mention crêpes of course. Crêpes Nutella…
Or maybe don’t come for Nutella… You know that crêpes is just the fancy French word for nice South-African pancakes. Because Nutella is so sweet, I always order the Crêpe Sucre. A pancake with white sugar. It would be so much better if they knew to add a little  cinnamon.

Reason 2: Move here for self-help tills, or don’t move and enjoy the friendly talkative packers at Pick a Pay…

Supermarkets here have tills where you can scan your items yourself… really. This is now if you buy less than ten items. You go to your till, pick up the scanner, beep, beep, insert your card and off you go after the voice told you that you can now remove your items.
Or maybe don’t move for self-help tills, because on the day that you buy a trolley full of groceries, you have to pack it yourself. Normally you are not able to do it fast enough and you have to pay in between and the next client is waiting for you. Then you miss the friendly Pick a Pay woman who used to pack it for you and might also have said: ‘Mevrou, hoekom gaan kry jy nie liewer die 750g boks nie, hulle is op special vandag!’

Reason 3: Move here because France is a beautiful country, or don’t move because you will never see a brown countryside…

That could make a good reason, because it is just so green, even flowers don’t need any encouragement to grow. In the past year I did not have to water the garden once. Everywhere is beautiful with so many trees and green as far as you can see.
Or maybe don’t move here for green, because you might just want to see some brown some day and you won’t! If you come from the drier regions of South Africa, you might just miss the brown…

Reason 4: Move here for the beautiful language, or don’t move for the language… they conjugate, you know…

When we told people we are moving to France and have to learn French, many people reacted with: ‘it’s such a beautiful language’. Well, you can move here to learn to speak French, because you will for sure. The French really only speak French. It’s a small miracle if you come across someone who can speak English. : )
Or maybe don’t move for the language… as I said… they conjugate! Nouns are also either male or female. How is one suppose to remember a table is female and a carpet is male. Do you say le or la, une or un… And conjugation… this means that for each pronoun the verb has a different form!  And just as you know the rules, you hear about all the exceptions. : )

Reason 5: Move here for the cheese, or don’t move for the cheese, you might not find Gouda…

Yes, the French are known for their fromages. Even the packaging is so pretty. I sometimes buy it just for the little wooden box. : ) You can try a new kind every day and can be busy with that for a long time.
Or maybe don’t move here for the cheese…  you might walk up and down the two aisles filled with cheese and you can’t find normal Gouda. In Pick a Pay Gouda had it’s own aisle! You know… we have to make a braaibroodjie sometimes. : )

Reason 6: Move here for the bread, or don’t move for the bread, you might need gewone blokbrood…

A Frenchman with a baquette under his arm… that picture that you sometimes see is really true. French people buy baquettes from their local Boulangerie. And yes, the bread is really nice and they bake all day, so mostly your baquette is still warm. Then you have to add to this the croissants and pain au chocolat, and more. Not a bad idea to move for the bread…
Or maybe don’t move for the bread, because normal sliced bread is not popular at all. The sliced bread you find here can last for a month.  You can work out how much preservatives that takes. Its still the thing of being able to make braaibroodjies… : )

Reason 7: Move here for PARIS… 

Yes, this Paris, not the Freestate one… The one with la Tour Eiffel, la Seine, les Champs-Élysées… So what can one say against this… Let’s not say anything more…

Or maybe if you don’t want to move here, just come visit! : )

This year and next year.

It’s still the confusing thing of ending a year (school) in the middle of the year. We almost can’t believe it, but we are really at the end of our first year in France and the end of the first schoolyear. The boys are on holiday already. A 12 week holiday till they start the next year in September. (Not to forget that there are also 8 more weeks of holiday during the year.)  They did spoil my previous post I must say…  I had all these nice words about them repeating this year, but it is actually good and then they came home with reports saying that they’ve passed! I had to change the post and now it does not read so nice anymore. But, it’s ok   : )

Let me explain a bit about French schools. They don’t write exams. Kids are evaluated through the year with tests; announced and unannounced, and also receive marks for participation in class. The next interesting thing is that parents have a say in whether a child should pass or not. At the end of each term; before you receive the report, you can ask for pass or repeat. The school will respond with what they think and you can accept that or not. At the end of the year if you and the school still don’t agree, you can appeal. What I appreciate about schools here is that they look at the whole picture. The boys chose to do Premier S next year. That will be the direction with maths, science and computers. Because they showed that they are good in maths and science, they were passed to Premier. They had a good mark for their FLS french (Special class for not french speaking children), but no mark for the normal french class. Because they are going in the science direction and will do much less french and history next year, and no biology, they could pass. It makes a lot of sense. They will have to still work hard, but at least with ‘nicer’ subjects. And they could finish school in two years time.

We get the keys to our (very old) new house in three weeks, which is just to say that we are moving. That meant changing schools. (Which everyone was happy to do.) As we are moving to a new department, we got the news that we have to work through the Inspection Academique again. That’s the schools department. The first time we waited six weeks for them, and we had the help of the relocation company, so we were not really excited to hear this.

We don’t give up, so we grabbed all our french and went to see them. Unbelievably with the first visit the lady made an appointment for us at the girls’ new school and we were there last week to register them. All sorted. Then a next visit for the boys and tomorrow we will go to register them at their school. I must say we understand most of what they say now and with a whole lot of grammar mistakes and wrong words, they actually understand us, so we get to organize it all. And people are mostly very appreciative and friendly about our efforts. : )

The girls did really well this year. The negative side of the FLS class is that they are not really taken seriously. They attend some of the normal grade classes, but are told to sit at the back and do their FLS work. They also didn’t get handbooks. But these two girls changed this a bit. : ) Mandi was working hard at home, trying to understand. Doing maths with just the bits she could write down in class, so at the end of the first term I asked the teacher to give her books and let her at least try. The same for Franci. And they surprised the teachers. There were still subjects like history and biology that they did not do it all. They also missed many classes being in the FLS class. But by the third term they were both doing the best in their normal french maths class. Franci enjoyed it so much when monsieur Hanin, the maths teacher told the class (with a smile) that everyone that has less marks than Franci, has detention after school. And there it was the whole class. : ) And he asked Mandi’s class if they are not ashamed that a FLS child is doing better than them. : ) The new school was impressed with their reports and the teachers remarks, and they were also quite excited to have ‘foreign’ children in their school who can speak english. This school does not offer FLS and have only local french children and no immigrants like the previous school. The school here in Cergy consisted mainly of immigrants. Most of the kids speak Arabic at home. Many kids from Turkey and Africa as well.

When they were tested last year, the academique actually moved the girls up one year, compared to where they were in South Africa. I think if we really asked for it, the girls could pass to the next grade, but they both chose to repeat this year. Franci need to improve in reading and writing french. The speaking is going well. Mandi would have gone to highschool which adds some other difficulties, so we were all happy for them to repeat.

Apart from schools we do have summer now. Its just that it happens only every fifth day, or maybe seventh… : ) Ok, we have summer days every now and again.

We could have a nice picnic at the water park here in Cergy…
 

and the poppies are really pretty now…