Expat Life 2 – A New Life in Montpellier

Written By: Paul

Moving to a new country is both exciting and scary. On the one hand, there’s the potential for adventure, new beginnings, and in the case of Montpellier, a huge upgrade in winter weather.

On the other hand, there’s a possibility it can all go sideways. Expats deal with mountains of paperwork, bureaucracy, financial challenges, and language barriers. While we consider ourselves optimists, Angela and I had no idea which way our experience in Montpellier was going to go. When planning a move like this it’s all sunshine and mountains of delicious cheese in your mind, but reality could be rainy days and disgruntled football hooligans for neighbours. It’s impossible to know.

As outlined in our first Expat Life post, we arrived in Montpellier on January 1st. It’s often been said that if you want to test out a city as a potential place to live, to do so in the lowest season and see how you like it. It’s too easy to fall in love with a place when it’s at the height of its mesmerizing powers, only to learn that it’s mind-numbingly dull in the downtimes. January, it turns out, is about as low a season as Montpellier experiences. So we were happy to land on New Year’s Day and test out our new city at its worst.

Now that we’ve been here for two months, we’re happy to report that our experience has been incredibly positive and our neighbours are not disgruntled football hooligans at all – we’ve only met one of them and she’s very nice, with the likelihood of hooliganism quite low. And since you’re here for details, I’m happy to share with you some of our January and February highlights (and lowlights) as we began to build our life in our new French city.

The City

Montpellier is a great place to live. Let’s start with the weather – compared to the Toronto area in winter, there’s no contest. January and February in Ontario were pretty nasty this year, with plenty of snowy, icy days dipping below -20 degrees C. Here in Montpellier we enjoyed sun almost every day, with cloudy and/or rainy days being extremely rare – I can count them on one hand.

As we explored Montpellier we found a city full of energy, things to do, good restaurants, and fun little corners to explore. There are great alleyways, cobblestone streets, and every neighbourhood has its own identity. When we imagined moving to Europe, this was the kind of city we always envisioned, a mixture of things to do and a reminder of the long history that endures.

This is a city of town squares, gardens, cathedrals, and walking streets. Montpellier is fantastic for maintaining local parks, public spaces and gardens. One of the places we enjoyed exploring in February was the Jardin des Plantes, a massive public garden that’s open year-round. There weren’t a lot of leaves on the trees or flowers to marvel over, but it’s still a nice place to wander and I dug this small bamboo forest they planted in the middle:

Each week we vowed we would explore a new quadrant of Montpellier in the hopes of getting to know it better. What we found was a very unique place that has many identities – each neighbourhood quite different from the next. Thanks to Montpellier’s incredibly well developed tram system (free on the weekends for residents) it’s an easy city to explore.

Accomplishments

January and February were big for us. We had some tasks that had to be completed, and we tackled them with all the tenacity of a French rugby team fighting for the Six Nations Championship (which, incidentally, is happening right now). In our first month we were extremely fortunate to:

• Get our cell phones set up through Free, a mobility company here in France. Our plans include 210gb of data, free international calling and free texts within France – all for €20 a month! We were paying more than three times that for much worse plans back in Canada.
• Set up Doctolib accounts (the portal for making French medical appointments), which in turn allowed us to book our 3rd Covid shot. We received our shot about four days after arriving here, which was amazing.
• Arrange Angela’s appointment at the Hérault prefecture so she could submit her carte de séjour application. This was no small feat! Booking appointments at the prefecture is like the Hunger Games – it was my full-time job clicking on the appointment link on the Hérault website, trying to get something booked. Finally about ten days in we booked one, which was amazingly lucky – some people wait months.
• Thanks to her appointment, Angela received her récépissé (receipt) which would allow her to work until her more permanent card would be ready! I have a passport from the Netherlands, so as an EU citizen I am not required to have a carte de séjour or any other kind of visa to work or set up a business. So her having her récépissé so early on in the game was a big deal – by mid-January we were both able to rock and roll, professionally speaking.
• Set up our apartment. Thanks to meeting a fantastic relocation consultant, we were able to find and rent an apartment in the perfect part of town – Antigone, right on the River Lez and a ten minute walk from the Place de la Comédie. We love our location, and we managed to side-step the nightmare that many expats face when trying to find apartments in France.
• Replace one of my guitars. Okay, I know this is self-indulgent, and certainly not a requirement for living in France, but when I left Canada I sold and gave away many of my guitars and music gear – items I had been collecting for a lifetime. There aren’t many items either of us miss from back home, but for my own sanity I wanted (needed) to replace at least one. We found an amazing music store called Azema Musique, out in Castelnau-le-Lez on the outskirts of the city and made a day of it. Angela was incredibly patient as I tried about fifteen different Fender Stratocasters before settling on this beauty. It was a good day.

Challenges

Moving to the south of France sounds like a fairy tale, and we’ve definitely been fortunate, but many people think we’ve slipped into some kind of alternate reality where wine flows like water and perfect baguettes drop out of the sky (which, I think, would be a massive boon to the French helmet industry). The “perfect life” syndrome painted by many expats is almost always an illusion – while things can be pretty fantastic, there are always challenges. Here are a few we ran up against in our first two months:

• Paperwork and bureaucracy. You’re probably heard about the famous French love of red tape and paperwork. It’s real, and although we’ve been successful navigating our first few challenges, the time and effort involved can be significant. If you find yourself in a similar position just keep your head down, stay organized, stay positive, and keep moving forward.
• Language issues. Angela is phenomenal when it comes to speaking and understanding French. She’s a rock star who has worked hard at it and is enjoying the opportunity to speak it every day. For me, however, my French is less than stellar. My comprehension is average at best and I’m learning every day, but it can be intimidating to find myself in situations where I don’t always know what’s going on. I’m not used to that, and it can be humbling. I have phrases I have gotten good at using, and there are certain interactions which are becoming more and more natural for me, but the minute I get a follow up question (I hate the follow-up question with the heat of a thousand suns) or someone thinks I’m better at this language thing than I am, I’m screwed. It’s part of the adventure, and I’m working at it, but it’s definitely a challenge.
• Finding social groups. We miss our friends and family, and I miss some of my social circles like my karate dojo and even the people we would see in our daily routines like at the grocery store or on our block. A feeling of belonging is a huge part of the human experience, and it takes time to cultivate that in a new country. Here there are no karate schools that teach the style I practice, and finding new friends as an adult in a foreign land is tricky business. We’re working on it, but it’s not easy. We recently got our first “ça va?” from a waitress who recognized us at a restaurant we go to regularly, and we almost did backflips. Gotta take the small victories when they come.
• Other small inconveniences include no good peanut butter (the few brands they have here are not even close to being right and they’re really expensive); no clothes dryers, which is great for the environment but takes some getting used to when your t-shirts are about as soft as your basic cardboard box; and not having things like cars, printers, and some of our other items we sold before moving. Don’t get me wrong – we’re thrilled to be car-free, but there are days, especially when setting up an apartment, it can be a bit of a hassle.

So there you have it! There are pros and cons to everything, even moving to a place as fantastic as Montpellier.

Travel

One of the big reasons we chose Montpellier was its location as a travel hub. We wanted to be able to travel throughout southern France and beyond, exploring as much of Europe as we can. In January and February we managed to do pretty well, getting to:

Carcassonne – wow, did we ever enjoy Carcassonne. Both of us had been wanting to visit Carcassonne for years, so it was a thrill to make the easy trip from Montpellier in mid-January. Click here to read our post about this amazing medieval city.

We also made it to Narbonne for a day trip, a place we had high on our list when considering locations to live. We loved our time in Narbonne, and will certainly be back. Click to read.

Paris, of course, will always be on our radar. We both absolutely love Paris, and we’ll try to get there every few months. This time we managed a four-day ultra long weekend that confirmed our feelings for a city that remains magical. It was a super-sized weekend, absolutely packed with Paris-y goodness. Click here to fill your boots with all things Paris.

In addition to jumping on trains, we also jumped on buses. A local bus took us to La Grande Motte, a seaside resort about 16kms from Montpellier. It was a gorgeous, sunny January day and it was quite a bit busier than we expected. If it’s a busy spot in January I can only imagine what it’s like in the summer. Here’s Angela dipping her fingers in the Mediterranean for the first time.

That covers our out-of-town adventures for January and February. Not a bad start, and it confirmed for us that Montpellier is a really well positioned city for getting around. With direct trains to Paris and easy trips throughout the south and into Spain, we’ll look forward to exploring a whole heap more as the year unfolds.

So those are the highlights of our first two months in Montpellier! We’ll be back with another Expat Life post covering March and April, two very busy months to come. We have trips to Nice / Monaco, Arles, Sete, and Paris already on the schedule (and possibly Barcelona), so I have no doubt we’ll have plenty to report back on!

In the meantime, look for individual trip reports from all of these fabulous places and feel free to comment or leave any questions below – cheers!