Written By: Paul Bonjour! It’s been a while since our last Expat Life post here on Unlocking France. Instead of back-dating a bunch of monthly posts to get you caught up, we thought it best if we just did one post to update you – covering from the end of 2022 to now, July 2023. So this post covers a…
Written by: Paul Fresh croissants, regular trips to Paris and three hundred days of sunshine – these were some of the things we envisioned when we boarded the plane from Toronto to Montpellier exactly one year ago today. We were anxious but excited – after selling everything we owned and leaving our home country behind, moving to France was a…
Written by: Paul Ah, visitors. As expats with no good friends in our new city, we LOVE having visitors. It gives us an opportunity to have conversations in English, we can enjoy showing off our new country, and it usually provides us with an excuse to run to the bakery and pick up enough pain au chocolat to choke a…
Written by: Paul Our first August in Montpellier was spent close to home. We were scheduled to travel and also have a full house of visitors in September, so we decided to lay low and just enjoy the hot, lazy days of summer in our medium-sized city near the Meditteranean. Montpellier Each month I do a quick write-up on our…
It’s always nice when you have high expectations for a city you’ve always wanted to visit and those expectations are met – or in the case of Arles – exceeded. As Van Gogh nerds and lovers of quaint little history-soaked French towns, Arles was always on our radar. We finally made it there in July, seven months into our French…
July in Montpellier is hot. Ridiculously hot. Melt your face off hot. We knew it was going to be hot in the summer when we moved here, and yet all the mental preparation and prehydration in the world couldn’t help us escape the fact that it was just consistently, unrelentingly hot. Despite the heat, it was a good month and…
Written By: Paul Our sixth month in France was all about one place – PARIS!! We spent most of the month living in Montmartre, a block from Sacré Coeur. Taking Paris for a “test run” as a possible future home was a brilliant experience, one that informed us about some of the highs and lows of living in the City…
Written By: Paul In our previous Expat Life posts we covered two months at a time, but we’ve decided to switch to a monthly posting schedule as two months at a time is simply too much to pack into one post! So Expat Life 4 will focus on our experiences in May, our fifth month in France. May was a…
Written By: Paul Everyone loves Barcelona. I mean everyone. When I told my family and friends we were heading to Barcelona for a four day road trip we got an avalanche of superlatives thrown our way, and since it was a place that we’ve all wanted to visit for many years, the bar was set high. When I say “we”…
Written By: Paul We’ve been in Montpellier for four months now. It’s flown by, and yet it feels like a lifetime ago Angela and I were cursing the snow and ice in Canada (an annual tradition undertaken by all Canadians except cross-country skiers and snowplow drivers). Today, a Thursday in late April, it’s 23 degrees and sunny, a perfect day…
