version française

My first real experience of staying in France (apart from crossing the north of France each summer on our way to Germany to visit our family there) came at the delicate and dynamic age of 14. My school had organised an exchange with a school in St. Julien en Génévois , a small town on the outskirts of Geneva. We were 3 boys in all, out of a group of about 20 – it wasn't considered “cool” to be good at languages – but we didn't complain. The scenery was superb – I had never seen mountains before – as was the weather, and we spent our time visiting Geneva, Lake Annecy, Aix-les-Bains, Evian, Chamonix and going to parties... All the girls were beautiful, and so warm and friendly, quite unlike the girls we were used to in England. Our parents were hundreds of miles away, and there was an amazing feeling of freedom. Looking back these are some of the best memories I have. At that age I was in love all the time! In love with life, in love with love, and in love with every French girl I met! I will never forget the feeling I had as the plane took off from Geneva as the sun was going down over the Alps, climbing over the clouds, all lit up in pink... it felt like my heart was being ripped out of me, and felt lost for days afterwards.

That was back in 1980. I first came to live in France ten years later, at the beginning of 1990. After working briefly as a tax consultant in London, which I was totally unsuited to, I wanted a change of scenery and to see what teaching was like before starting a teaching course in England. Most of all, I had a girlfriend in Strasbourg – and I thought I'd give it a chance overseas for a while. I was able to stay initially with my girlfriend (now my wife, and mother of our four children!) and was lucky enough to land a 12 month contract teaching English as a foreign language to adults. I had to stay for a year of course, which meant putting off the teaching course in England... and like it or not I had to accept the first teething pains of life in France for an English expat.

For about three months all was rosy, fun and exciting. The work was new and interesting, I met loads of English-speakers and made lots of new friends, and of course I appreciated being near to my beloved. After the three-month barrier, the difficulties seemed to arise. I found people unfriendly in the shops and around town. The first few encounters with French bureaucracy started to take their toll: I'll never forget the expression of an American colleague, just back from some office or other and particularly bitter about his reception there, who confided in us, “I felt like asking her 'Who pissed in your cornflakes this morning?'”. The dream seemed to fade, France was a fake, its people unimaginative, Strasbourg a wash out after life in a British university town. The language barrier wasn't the only problem: there is a cultural barrier, that one finds even when going to live in a different part of Britain, and which is so much more pronounced when you travel further afield. When you start to understand what people are saying to you, it is so much easier to take offence! Sometimes it is the expression that is used, that jars upon ears trained in typical English reserve and understatement. Sometimes even the tone of voice is enough: “In England no one would have spoken to me like that!” “Arrogant bastard!” Having thoughts like that once in a while doesn't get you down too much, but when its every day...

But the paranoid feeling that everyone was against me and had decided to be rude to me and make my life a misery, was one that I simply had to get over. And as the months passed I got used to the different tones of voice and became hardened to the bluntness of a language where feelings are expressed and not just implied. I appreciated the unspoilt beauty of the villages and towns, the cheap restaurants, swimming at the outside pools and lakes, the mountains nearby... the exotic still had its appeal, and I couldn't leave the house without seeing beautiful women everywhere.

So we decided to get married, before returning to England to take the PGCE course in Religious Education and French, and the following years saw us going back and forwards over the channel with our gradually growing number of possessions (and growing number of children!), to Bristol, then to Strasbourg again, then to Swindon, and finally to Colmar, before finally buying an old farmhouse in a village in the Vosges mountains 20 km outside Colmar. I write these lines in the garden, to the sound of the rushing river over the road (and the occasional car!), birds singing, and the bells of the cows in the fields above. We are quite literally surrounded by mountains, in the heart of a deep valley, with fields, forest, fruit trees, streams, beautiful houses and flowers everywhere... Most evenings there is a wild deer that comes down to edge of the wood behind our house to eat the young leaves on the bushes...

Every silver lining has a cloud, as they say, and there are obviously drawbacks to living somewhere so beautiful. It is difficult to make close friends in a small, rural village. In spite of Internet and satellite TV there is sometimes a feeling that we are in a cultural backwater. At the best of times French art, cinema, music, theatre, seems like a poor shadow of what we were used to in Britain. And living in mountains isn't the same thing as visiting them for a brief stay in the summer or for winter sports. The sun goes down much earlier, the evenings are almost always cold, there is lots of rain...

Most of all there are frustrations on a professional level. The French are reluctant to recognise anything other than French qualifications, and if you are a teacher you will have to start more or less from scratch and take a very competitive competition exam, which requires you to learn all sorts of things that will never be of use in a classroom. Academic knowledge rather than classroom competence are what count, and if French isn't your mother tongue you are at a serious disadvantage. I sat the written exam to teach English once, and at the end of the oral exam (which required a trip to Montpellier, all at my own expense), I was informed that my level of English only represented a “quite good” model for pupils! I was able to find work as an RE (religious education) teacher in Alsace, not on the basis of my teaching qualification, but because there were no specific requirements for teaching RE here. I am not entitled to take the competition exam that was introduced in this subject a couple of years ago, and I can only have a contract for a maximum of twelve months, and the pay is lower than that of any other teacher... All very frustrating in fact. I began working as a freelance translator in 1998 to complement our income, and enable me to work from home while our children are small.

On the whole though, living and working abroad is fun and exciting. It is always a challenge – but it isn't an easy option.

Richard Quinn – Fréland, May 2003

 

Life in France:

> moving to France
> finding accommodation
> finding a job
> driving in France
> staying in touch: receiving English TV and radio in France
> learning French
> getting married in France
> becoming a French citizen
> my own experience

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