Back in France and collecting our cat!

Bonjour a tous,
Well, we’re  finally here.  We arrived via Heathrow and then coach to Stansted which allowed us to catch a Ryanair flight into Carcassonne, which is only 45 mins from our house  We have hired a Renault Clio for a month (FYI best deals can be found at Le Clerc supermarket!) in which time we plan to find a cheap second hand car to buy.

We had a couple of days to get over jet lag but on the Sunday (we arrived on the Wednesday) had a rendezvous in Barcelona to pick up our cat, Kitty.  At the time of booking we thought Barcelona would be fine but had no idea of the demonstrations and road closures that would cause such chaos to the region.

Our preferred route alone the A9 motorway was blocked by protestors so we had to take the path over the Pyrenees.  Don't do it unless the mountains are your intended destination or you fancy something in Andorra. It's a pain in the backside,  particulary with a manual car as its constant gear changing and very winding.  Plus the tolls are exorbitant!!!

Anyway the cat was arriving on EK185 from Dubai at around 1:20 pm so we arrived good and early to get all the paperwork sorted.  Once we had found the WFS cargo building near Terminal 2, we had her pet papers processed, paid the duty (around 90 euros for a cat) and was told we had to go to the customs area in terminal 2 to get the papers stamped. We could then return and pick up the cat.

skeleton staff on the weekend!


So we traipsed over to Terminal 2 and found the Customs Office.  After 10 mins a lady came to see us. She told us that before the cat could be released a vet had to sign off.  So to retrieve your  pet you need three different people from three different departments to give three different stamps who reside in three different buildings!   This is where the problem started as no vet was on site at the airport on a Sunday!   They knew our cat was arriving but no-one seemed to take responsibility for making sure the vet would be there.   A vet had to be called. She  didn’t turn up until 5pm.  Eventually at 6:15pm the poor car was released to us.  Oh, and then the vet came back saying she couldn't be released as we didn't have the original health certificate.  I turned out to be glued in a sleeve on top of her cage, but had it not it really would have been the final straw!!    It's a common old rescue cat for f@#s sake  (excuse my French) not a bloody endangered Bengal tiger!

It was now dark so it meant we would have to drive the four hours back to France in the dark. On the plus side the motorway was now open, but on the negative side is quite badly lit for a 130kph route, especially with a complaining back seat passenger. Poor Kitty had been trapped in her cage now for probably 12 plus hours and was complaining loudly in no uncertain terms about her treatment the entire trip back stopping her meowing every now and then to break wind with a stench that could strip wallpaper! Fair enough, I would probably have done similar or worse under the same circumstances.

Ok, now it gets real!

As those who have been reading our infrequent posts we bought a little house in the Ariège, and for the past few years have been staying there during the summer and gradually bringing it back to life.

Each time we went back to Perth if felt like we were leaving a part of us behind.  We locked the place up, put the shutters up and went back to our drone like existence in Perth.  Well, I suppose there is a time when you simply need to take the plunge. We have therefore made the decision to pack up and move to France and see where the pieces fall!  As a brief aside I suppose we have a bit of form for this, having done exactly the same in 2010 when we moved to Australia.  Well its been nearly 10 years living and working in Perth so I'm not sure we can be called 'flighty' just yet. We will finally have our French xmas and get the log fire going as the appropriate time of the year!

So its goodbye to loading planes!

Michelle’s French is excellent whilst mine is more rabbit in headlights panic as soon as someone speaks to me.  I've been flitting around like a verbal bee between various French apps attempting to improve.  I think though that the only way I'm going to get any real progress is to throw myself wholeheartedly into the mix.  For this reason I have told Michelle I will do the hard yards and spend a minimum of 4 hours each day in a selection of local bars listening and engaging with the locals.  Now this may involve me having the odd glass of beer or wine but I'm prepared to put the hours in for the greater good.

All is basically now packed up. The hardest decision we had to make was what to do with our cat. It would have cost $2500 to bring her back with us.  The sensible approach would be to give her to a friend and we had a kind lady all lined up  (thanks Rachel) but because we are both pathetic we relented and now have her arriving a few days after us in Barcelona.

Painting

Yup, it's a three pronged attack on the house.  Taking no prisoners. This time we are leaving the house complete!  One of the things that wasn't completed last year was the painting.  We got one side of the house done with two coats and it looks great.  Around the side was a bit of a different matter, as the painter ran out of paint so it only had one coat and the top part was not done at all.

We managed to get in touch with the Dutch company that made the original paint and were able to order the exact same colour.  I suggested to Michelle that the side bit wouldn't matter so much, but from the look she gave me it obviously does.

Sometimes we forget the sorry appearance the house had when we first bought it....what were we thinking!!!

...there was no way I was going up there!

Electrics!

When we planned for Michelle to go back to France for a month in April we thought it would be a simple job of doing a bit of plastering in the kitchen and fixing a couple of sockets.  Enough time for her to check on our house, see her parents and maybe get an internet connection sorted.

Well on the plus side we did get all the internet sorted, but it did come with quite an effort of drilling through stone walls and rewiring the inside.  Old houses again.

For the past 12 months we had been waiting for our builder to reconnect one side of our downstairs electrics, install a new light and switch  and fix a hole in the wall that he had previously created in trying to install said new light switch. As we were only visiting once a year it wasn't a big deal but it was quite a pain not having one side of the downstairs having power, especially with a small kitchen.

Finally able to use the old sockets again!

Eventually we realised we would have to engage a professional electrician to do the work.
Michelle asked around and found a reliable electrician who was available.  He was able to reconnect the non functioning plugs downstairs, create a new switch for a hall light and put in some new electric sockets upstairs.  He was even able to fill in the hole in the wall downstairs.

When we bought the house in 2015 we were told it had all been rewired. I suppose in the fine print it didn’t say rewired correctly, but when ever you hear a French sparky suck his teeth, shake his head  or go 'merde' under his breath you know that your wallet is going to take another hammering!

The new fuses

..and these were the old ones which are apparently not very good. Yeah I'm none the wiser either.

It turns outside that all the fuses were basically crap and noone had bothered to set our massive hot water boiler ( I’m still at a loss why it’s so big) to only heat during off peak times. So they are now replaced and we on ‘heures creuses.  Hopefully the bills will reduce.

Ok so that's plumbing and electrics sorted, just one more thing to sort out before Michelle has to lock up and join me back in Perth.

Plumbing!

I think most old properties in France have idiosyncratic plumbing and ours is no different. There are still noises and gurgling sounds in the house I choose to ignore, but some have to be addressed.  When we bought the house there was a pump under the sink. There was some sort of gravity issue, so after the sink emptied the pump kicked in, and moved the water under the lounge floor and into the waste water pipe in the laundry.   When we had the kitchen remodelled our builder took a different approach and connected the waste water to run straight outside the house along the gutter into the drain halfway across the square and down the road!  Très rustique non?  Well apparently not. We were advised this was ok by our builder. Anyway, the Marie asked us to get it running underground.  I thought it went very well with the medieval history of the village. Ah well.

Michelle found a contact on the Ariège network Facebook group who was available and able to do the job. Sighh....more money!  The local tradesmen must rub their hands in glee every time we arrive!  This house is getting more like a financial tardis each time we visit!!!

2015 to 2018 changes

It seems an eternity since we were last here together in our French home.  Michelle was able to come for a few weeks in the spring, but I was unable to get the time off so had to wait until the end of August.

In the intervening period we have made steady progress on making our little home more liveable.  The stop gap  furniture from Emmaus is gone and replaced with more comfortable furniture from the 'But' store in Pamiers.  The outside is almost painted and we now have our cooker and stove top connected. If I'm not careful I may run out of excuses not to use it.

Kitchen in 2015 and 2018

Inside the house, old sink now replaced with window seat.

...and finally got around to painting the outside

The cats are still there and hungry as ever!

La France in Perth

Having recently invited some friends over for a French-themed lunch here in Perth, I felt inspired to write about our experience of seeking out French food, and the presence of French culture in Perth. Most important was to look the part so Richard secured a typically French outfit - beret and stripey t-shirt (hey, no stereotypes here!), adopted his best French accent, and grew a Poirot-type moustache (oops, Poirot's Belgian, isn't he?!).

"It 'az been a good day. I 'ave sold all zee oignons!"

Food-wise, we have bemoaned the lack of variety of Australian cheeses in a previous blog post, but it is possible to buy French cheeses over here - albeit at hugely inflated prices so we rarely purchase them. Roquefort, for example, can retail for around AUS$100 per kilo, making it more than twice the price of the best rib eye steak! C'est fou!

AUS$100 is approx 65 euros. The same cheese retails in France for around 28 euros per kilo.

One of the cheeses we selected for our lunch was a small slice of one of our favorites, a mild cheese made from ewe's milk called ossau-iraty. At AUS$90 or so per kilo, the little 100 gram slice we purchased was probably equivalent to small rib eyes!

Ossau-Iraty cheese for sale at Little Sister deli in Fremantle

You have to be a bit careful when selecting your French cheese, however, as some available over here, such as Le President Camembert, are actually made in Australia, not in France. Ce n'est pas pareil!

Cheese, wine, baguette, cheese jam (not very French) and quince paste (also not very French)

For charcuterie (cold cuts), we were unable to find anything originally from France so settled for prosciutto, chorizo and salami which were probably produced in Australia or China! French paté is also non-existent over here - I think because of Western Australia's strict importation and quarantine laws - although you can buy Normandy paté made up the road in the suburb of Malaga (bof!), and we did hunt down a few small tins of terrine.

Otherwise, all things French are greatly appreciated in Perth, and none more so than French bakery/pastry shops or boulangeries-patisseries. To provide an authentic lunch, we were obliged to sample several of these boulangeries-patisseries to find the best French bread - baguettes - and cakes, including Choux Café in Swanbourne, La Galette de France in Nedlands, and Jean-Pierre Sancho in Dalkeith. Actually, Jean-Pierre Sancho have a chain of bakery/pastry shops across the metro area and coincidentally, the name of the business is inherited from a small boulangerie-patisserie in Lodeve (where Michelle's parents live) called Sancho - it's a small world! The Australian Sancho even include a photo from the 1920s of the original Sancho in Lodeve in their promotion (see below):

The Jean Pierre Sancho on Hay street in Perth City

Zoom in on the photo at the top to see the original Sancho in Lodeve

After all our sampling (poor us), we settled on macarons, small eclairs, petit-fours and a sachet of freshly baked palmiers biscuits from La Galette de France for the dessert course of our lunch. Michelle also made a galette des rois - a frangipani-type almond pastry available in France throughout January, traditionally made to celebrate Epiphany on 6 January. All washed down with cream (not French) and a bottle of French sparkling wine, a Crémant de Limoux, Limoux being only 20km or so from our residence secondaire. We're fortunate that we live close to a Dan Murphy liquor store which carries a range of international booze so buying French wine is easy enough although there's not a huge selection. I did, however, draw the line at buying a 75cl bottle of Normandy cider for over AUS$20 - it would probably cost the equivalent of about AUS$5 in France!

Interestingly, the staff in the French boulangerie-patisseries are often French and indeed, there are now enough French people living in Perth that you often hear French voices in the street - that wasn't the case when I lived here before in the 1990s. There are a number of French organizations in Perth promoting French culture and language, and social interaction for native French speakers, including Alliance Francaise and La Maison de France, and there are even pétanque clubs where you can play in competitions. And, of course, there are a number of French restaurants in Perth run by some internationally acclaimed chefs - Guillaume Brahimi, who featured on the Australian TV show French Food Safari springs to mind with his Bistro Guillaume. So all in all, it is possible to live the other side of the world from France and still experience a taste of France locally, albeit a lot of it comes at a pretty steep price!