The hard work of a new country

Sometimes even paradise is just an every day job

Today it was eye-drops. Nothing fancy, just some every-day drops for my dry eyes. I’m guessing that I’ll need to visit an actual pharmacy to get them, as it seems that no supermarket has them.

Yesterday it was the car wash, or more specifically finding a car wash that takes a bank card instead of 8 € in coins. I mean, honestly, who still uses coins?

As we speak I’m facing spending at least three or four days working my way through a pile pf paperwork: for health care, to change addresses on various government things; to prepare for the French variation of a 2021 tax return; and of course all of the related Canadian things that can’t entirely be avoided.

Because of where we’re located shopping means a 20 minute drive, and for a lot of things we still rely on Amazon.fr. Can I wait two days for printer ink to arrive? Or should I drive into Fumel one more time to buy it at E. Leclerc? (And boy, will I be glad when my big Brother colour laser printer arrives in France and we can get rid of the horrid and expensive Epson inkjet that we bought as a stop-gap.) (Although 36,99€ for a pack of four inkjet cartridges in France as opposed to $79.99 Canadian!)

Lately we’ve been spending a lot of time in hotels, and with one lone exception none of them gave us more than one key-card. A big thing? No. Annoying? yes.

Bars of hand soap seem to be a very rare thing, with squirt bottles of liquid replacing them everywhere including on supermarket shelves. I honestly never thought that a bar of soap would be something that I cherish.

And the lunch breaks, when everything shuts down from 12:30 to 2 pm. Yes, I like the idea, and yes, it makes perfect sense… unless you sleep late and realize at 12:15 that you have nothing in the house to eat. Or have run out of cat food. Or have an actual work meeting lined up that will kill the afternoon.

If you’re not in a big city like Bordeaux or even Alençon your choice of restaurants is almost always limited to a brasserie, or a bar, or a pizza joint. The menu choices in small towns are incredibly limited, and generally anything salad is a rare thing.

COVID-19 is a whole other thing. On one hand no-one complains about masks, and no-one ever complains about presenting their Passe Sanitaire, and honestly I doubt very much that COVID will do Emmanuel Macron any serious harm in the upcoming election. Still, the extent to which the Passe is enforced in restaurants really does vary from positively fascist to “don’t even ask for it.”

Somehow this doesn’t worry us, and I can’t entirely understand why. We’re triple vaxxed, and we also suspect that we picked up COVID back before BC started doing vaccination, so we don’t expect to get seriously ill. Still, we always mask up, and we make big circles around the occasional nose-hanging-out jerks at the supermarket.

So why are we so relaxed in restaurants? Is it the reported 90% vaccination rate in France? Or is is that we’ve absorbed a big dose of the laissez faire attitudes of the people around us? I don’t know.

Meanwhile I’m finally signed up again for French lessons at Alliance Francaise in Bordeaux. And of course my on-line class uses a different textbook than my previous Vancouver class. So that’s another unexpected 31,80 € at Amazon.fr.

And because we spent the last two weeks driving all over Normandy looking at houses and towns, I’ve got two weeks of homework to catch up on.

Incidentally, as is the case in Canada, I remain amazed at how utterly bad every single real estate agent web site is. And because we’re in France, and not Canada, there’s no Multiple Listing Service - you need to find and dig through every agent’s site one at a time to see what they have listed. Like many things in France it’s slow, and it’s not efficient.

So yes, some of the romance is gone, and some days feel more like work than fun, but this country is still beautiful, and the people are still lovely, and overall it’s still where I want to be.

And, lest I forget: for some reason it seems as if every French door opens in the opposite direction that I expect. If I push, it wants a pull. If I pull, it needs to be pushed. What drives mad is that I can’t seemed to understand the pattern underlying all of this.