My Good Life in France: In Pursuit of the Rural Dream (The Good Life France)

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You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. So you can only imagine our joy when we finally got to settle down for a few weeks on a vineyard in Gaillac, France. While there are plenty of books about France, most of them are about the big city and/or not so interesting. I do not like taking the ferry boats that the Brits frequent -- they seem slow-moving and make me anxious, and I have taken them from Portsmouth, Folkestone, and Dover. Sure, there will be red tape and difficulties and builders who don’t understand the concept of keeping appointments.

We have to go back in time to the beginning of her story, she is known as the Iron Lady, la Dame de Fer in French, to find out why this towering icon is even there in the first place! The more they repaired the house, the more they discovered problems, but their energy and optimism eventually carried them through. During the whole month, we shared our tips with our Instagram community to help them ditch plastic too. I might not be brave enough to renovate a run-down barn in rural France, but as an ex-pat living in a French village, I can totally relate to Janine Marsh’s book, My Good Life in France. We learned to play chess, read a lot, and we have found hobbies and things we like doing together and separately so that we have “me” time.

There isn't much that will beat a freshly baked baguette from the boulangerie, a hunk of cheese from the fromagerie, some fresh tomatoes from the marché and a cake from the pâtisserie. From her early struggles and homesickness through personal tragedy, to her attempts to become self-sufficient and to breed "the fattest chickens in the village", Janine learned that there was more to her new home than she could ever have imagined. A great read if you've done it you will appreciate every line of Janine's book , if you haven't don't let it put you off the end results are well worth it. That said, it is what the title says - one person's experience of adapting to life in a foreign country and attempting to become more self-sufficient. This book isn’t just a wonderful way to enjoy experiencing someone else’s life in another country, or your adopted country if you, like me are an English expat, it is a way to get a real feel for what living in France is really like – warts and all.

I discovered that my husband gets angry when things are out of his control and that things getting out of control when you start a new life in rural France is a common occurrence. Here we follow Janine and Mark through the renovation process which, they carried out on weekend trips over to France and involved a lot of hard work and determination. He wanted us to take time out to renovate our French house and see if we could make a success of a different life, one that didn’t involve a daily commute and grind. We were lucky to be here during the Foire de Gaillac, when local producers gather in a park, set up kiosks and allow you to taste their best wines. Along the way she became maid to four cats, three dogs, four geese, nine ducks (that's a long story) and thirty-eight chickens!I had only told about 25 of my friends, and I asked them to follow me on Facebook as Mark said I could share my blog that way with them. There are lots of tears and laughter along the way and quite a menagerie of dogs, cats, ducks, chickens, and geese were collected.

Janine has a very readable style and reading this felt as though I was catching up with a friend’s about what had been going on in their life. Marsh says that friends who visited during the early days of their “house of horrors” construction project could not believe the scope of the work they had taken on. e. within an hour or two, to deal with medical problems, French pride in their land, language, literature and ways of doing things are all pointed out, along with many other interesting tidbits. She shows clearly the charms of this part of the world, and shares the pleasures of their largely rural life. Item despatched quickly and as described, but damaged in transit due to plastic wrap packaging being inadequate protection.A land where people apparently say 'Oh là là' every five minutes and eat frogs’ legs at a drop of a hat (or beret). Nowadays, though I don’t consider myself fluent, French people say “wow your accent is great” – because I listened to real people talking and it’s influenced my learning. It's not just the landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum, that make us fall in love with Paris. The very last section detailed a lot of things expats moving to France should know about French law and French customs and culture that will help them.