Its truly fascinating to see the hundreds of comments she gets from faithful readers, ie, pre-teenagers, to every post. She talks about everyday issues these pre teens face in France: the end of year school show, arriving late at school, being nervous about going to summer camp, etc…

–> Lulu’s Blog

– > Astrapi magazine information online

FEES:

There are fees of course:

• Homes are not all listed in all real estate agencies. I know of one network, ORPI, that lists its properties through all its network’s agencies, but this is a recent and novel approach.

• Agency fees are about 6% (but run from 5% to 10% depending on the price of the home)

• State fees are about 8% on homes more than five years old, and 4% on recent homes.

So that’s right there between 10% and 14% of the house’ s cost in fees!

Then there’s the administrative hassles.

LEGAL and ADMINISTRATIVE CONSTRAINTS :

Think you’d like to renovate, and maybe add some rooms to your new property? You’ll have to ask for a building permit ( ‘permis de construire’), which may take up to 3 months to be granted or refused, for reasons you often do not completely understand.

There are rules pertaining to the land you may be buying, restricting how much you can enlarge the home. In one instance, even though the house is on 5 800 square meters of land, ten minutes from a city, the only possibility is to enlarge up to twice the size of the existing home. In this case it was not a huge home, with 170 square meters. This means the owners can only up to 85 square meters to the home, leaving a huge part of the land unused for housing- thereby reducing its value.

Information on the land and the home is supposed to be maintained by the local town hall ( at what is called ‘ le cadastre’) , but it is often incomplete and not considered as legal proof.

In conclusion, be forewarned, buying a home in France is an adventure!

France Home Finance is a Paris-based company I’m familiar with who helps non resident buyers find loans.

- > Here’s a good page they have on buying a home in France.

Apart from books we got a lot of great stories, quality illustrations and writing from magazines (which look like soft cover books really) published by Bayard Presse, a France-based publisher that sells worldwide.

For 3- 5 year olds who are smart enough to read or have someone who can read to them , the magazines are: Pomme d’Api and Belles Histoires. They are available only by subscription, although Bayard Editions eventually publishes book versions of the stories.

For 3-5 year olds:

• For a great look into French society today and really fun text and illustrations, there’s a collection of fine hard cover books from Bayard Editions with the following titles:

• 
  • ‘Des Grands Parents, quelle aventure‘, by Roser Capdevilla, A-L Fournier-le Ray - (’ Grands Parents, what an adventure‘)
  • ‘Un Bébé, quelle aventure‘, by Gaudrat Ma ( ‘ A baby, what an adventure’ )
  • ‘Une maman, quelle aventure‘, by Roser Capdevilla, A-L Fournier-le Ray ( ‘ A mom, what an adventure’)
  • ‘Un papa, quelle aventure‘ , by Roser Capdevilla, M-Agnès Gaudrat ( ‘ A dad, what an adventure‘)

The kids love to read them over and over as they depict tens of everyday situations they really relate to, in a fun way.

• Other charactersfound in book series for this age group:
  • Tchoupi: a cute little bear, a boy symbol
  • Martine: Martine is a little girl probably about 7 years old. She does babysitting, etc…
  • Caroline: Caroline is a cute 7 to 9 year old girl who seems to live with a ménagerie of animals, all very human-like in their behaviour, so that the little ones can find an interest in her adventures. A typical French culture story is ‘Caroline et la Galette des rois’: Around the Epiphany, on January 6th, called ‘ la fete des Rois’ in France, traditionnaly a ‘galette’, a French pastry, is eaten with a ‘ fève’ in it, that designates the queen or the king. Here the event is full of surprises as one of Caroline’s pets eats the ‘ féve’…
  • Léon le Bourdon, Mireille l’Abeille, and other animals series: A cute series with very original illustrations that I liked a little less because it had some mean, sarcastic elements in some of its stories.

For 5 to 7 year olds:

Nathan publishing, a French publisher, a collection of books called Première Lune ( ‘ First Moon’ ), in high quality, hard cover forma, with text that’s nice and large in size and many illustrations on its pagSome titles in the series we enjoyed are:

• Je le dirai à ma mère, by Béatrice Rouer ( ‘ I’ll tell on you to my mom ‘)

Is about two girl friends who quibble and involve their mothers in their fighting. The mothers first react agressively with each other and then find a way to make things fine again.

Searching for it on Amazon.com it says its out of print, but there’s another book in the same collection by Beatrice Rouer: Le Pestacle et Les Pétards, which looks fun too.

• Calamity Mamie, by Arnaud Alméras (’ Calamity Grandma‘)

There is a series of ‘ adventures ‘ involving Calamity Mamie, a forgetful, disorganized and ‘unny grandmother who gets maried again, puts makeup all over her face by mistake, etc… If you know a grand mother like that among your family circle, you’re sure to enjoy this reading with your children.
- >Petite Librairie online bookstore has some of these titles and others

Here are some lunch ideas and techniques:

• I prepared a menu for the week everyweek, which did not vary very much. There was enough to do just preparing the meals!

• For desert, I ‘d most often give them:

- > Unsweetened Yogurt,fruit, raisins, unsweetened applesauce ( in an individual serving). Whole Foods has those.

- > Or mild cheese like Gruyère, Comté or unprocessed cheddar and fruit.

• Here’s what main courses of a weekly menu were like:

Monday:

Peas, cooked, with butter or cream, with small pieces of ham mixed in. Stored in a small round thermos.

Tuesday:

Tuna, rice, corn and tomatoe salad, with oil and vinegar dressing.

Wednesday:

Green beans, cooked with butter, and pine nuts, with some pieces of meat or fish.

Thursday:

Squash with butter and some meat or fish

Friday:

Pasta with fresh tomatoes and pieces of chicken. That was real chicken that I ‘d bought raw and cooked , not the bleach white kind unfortunately found in many Caesar salards in US restaurants…

So there you have it. Alternatives are broccoli with cheese melted on top, whole potatoes with cheese or butter, etc… It takes a little time to prepare but you can plan in advance and you it spares you the thought of what sort of chemicals your child will be eating that day at school!

I do wish I’d had a service that prepared these sorts of meals for me, and remember a person in San Francisco had started doing this but cannot find her name again now.

But while adults have the means to complain, should there be a problem with the quality of meals served in their company’s cafeteria, school meals of extremely poor quality overall are served to a passive audience: children, at a very high price to parents - and municipalities,who often finance part of the cost in the public school system.

The cost of meals four days a week in a school in France is between 800 and 1 000 euros. Let’s take a 900 euro average cost, and see what that amounts to in terms of per meal cost. Given the number of holidays in French schools, kids only eat there about 3 weeks a month on average. So with 10 months of school, the 900 euros comes down to 90 euros a month, where kids only eat (3*4= 12) meals. That’s 7.5 euros a meal! For this price, I can get a good sandwich with protein, fresh vegetables and quality bread, followed by a desert, at any corner take out. I can also get a medium, thin crust pizza, with lots of tomatoe paste and limited amounts of cheese, the way they’re supposed to be made - making for a relatively healthy lunch- at a local pizza place.

Now let me describe the sort of things served to children at this price..

• For starters: Pizza, ’saucisson’, paté

if any of you have an notions of nutrition, you may know that what is considered good practice in a meal is to start with a raw vegetable, prepared a certain way of course. IN France we are quite good at preparing our world famous vinaigrette and serving it with shredded carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, or to serve raw mushrooms with olive oil… Basically, we have quite a few options available to start a meal in a healthy manner. Fat rich pizza, saucisson ( salami) or paté made from unidentified meats are NOT part of them.

• For Main dishes: breaded turkey or other types of meats, overcooked and accompanied by a highly salty and startchy sauce, and tasteless ‘green’ beans or other vegetables

To say that kids have trouble eating the stuff is putting it mildly. My daughter says she has to eat a lot of bread to help some of it ‘go through’…

• For desert: highly sweetened and starchy industrial pudding, rock hard fruit, served unscliced or fruit salad out of a can with sugar syrup

Most kids dive on the desert for lack of other options, and those who try to eat the fruit give up after trying to peel it or bite into it.

I’ve seen in four schools so far in France with my children, two public and two private, and in all the parents presented demands for higher quality. Only one school responded favourably and accepted the staff take simple surveys of what was really eaten by all children there during the meals. Quite sad, really.

-> Article on UFC Que Choisir, a major consumer group, about the poor quality of school lunches confirmed by a national agency.

We finally found a house to rent in the end, at the end of June.  We were supposed to move in in July- it was about time!  Only thing is, the house was occupied until… September 3rd.  And holiday seasons ends in August, both for work and for school. Our children were going back to school August 29 to be exact.  After a few days, we were able to negociate an August 25 move in date, but by that time, our movers had filled all their delivery slots and we could only get our things delivered August 27th.:-/

On top of this, we were expected on the other side of France, about 7 to 8 hours away by car, for a wedding in the family August 30 th!  Yes!  How convenient.  So we barely had time to open up some boxes before we hopped into the car for a day-long drive, slept, went to the wedding, slept, and drove back the following mornig.

Finally, we could look forward to a weekend’s worth of unpacking, before school started and work started again…And we unpacked, threw away yet more things, and put the remaining items away ever so neatly.

Now, we didn’t have a phone line at that time.  Did I mention the house is brand new?  Although this could sound as a positive point, here it translates into: it don’t work yet. No phone, no TV antenna, unfinished cupboards, water mysteriously seeping through the floor in various rooms…

The phone story, still unraveling at the time of writing, could make a hilarious Charlie Chaplin movie.  Enter the phone company technician.  Which, by the way, in socialism-ridden France, is NOT an employee of France Telecom, the monopoly provider for land lines, but an outside contractor.  Well well. So much for state-sponsored entreprises with generous worker conditions.

Phone technician is a comical character- if you don’t have to depend on him.  He never comes at the time of the appointment, never appologizes, always complains about the way the wires were laid, about the way his colleague works, and can’t refrain from SHOUTING in your home.Poor guy, he was out of luck with us.  After two unsuccessful tries at trying to locate where to link the house to the phone network, and beaucoup de moaning and complaining, we find out the needed elements had been buried in the ground and covered with grass… Believe it, it’s true.  So he comes back a third time, and there, succeeds in linking the house to the main network, but…Alas, there is a problem on the other side now, with the main network.  And so ten days after having started to pay rent on a house in the middle of nowhere, we are still phoneless, with limited hope of ever having access to such a modern luxury.

I’ll spare you the details on the green pool water we had to deal with the day of the signing, the real estate agent who counts the number of lightbulbs in the house, should we steal them, but cannot explain how anything in the house works, the 20 page move-in inventory (for an unfurnished, four bedroom home)…I’ll also pass on the high tech dishwasher we mastered after two days of head bashing and a call to the owners, who knew the ‘ trick’ to get it to finally start, as well as having no washing machine for 7 days after the movers damaged it.

I will say the countryside is beautiful, the weather wonderful, and our neighbours very welcoming.

Let’s just say, moving in in Aix en Provence, and in the South of France in general, is something which has to be earned.

However in my recent experience of moving within France, it seems to me the moving staff could adopt a more people-focused attitude to make the experience a little less stressful.

Some of the tricks we felt were played on us were:

• The Coat Disappearing trick :

If you’ve moved with professionals who pack your items before, you know its essential to isolate all the items you want to take directly with you prior to the moving day, lest they be packed up before you have time to say: “NO, not thaaaaat!”

Well, despite my experience of such matters I was a victim of ‘the coat trick’. The evening before our move, I’d hung my rain coat in the usual coat closet it goes in, this being Paris in August, it was raining! I hadn’t not realized we were on the eve of a hurricane sweeping the appartment. So when the following evening, after the movers had packed most everything, I went to get my c… The closet was empty.

You’d think this has happened to others than myself, and these individuals who have experienced this before might ask before packing coats: ” Are you sure you don’t need this?”

• The Internet Connection trick

I’d clearly indicated not to pack up the ADSL modem and telephone unit until the very last minute, for obvious reasons… But there was another unit connected to these items, an odd French creation called the Minitel. One of the movers clearly wanted to pack this item urgently, and proceeded to disconnect all the telephone equipment. They were plugged into a multiple outlet.

Why in this case, pack the Minitel WITH the multiple outlet, I asked? WHY? Was it not clear that there were at least two pieces of equipment( the phone and the modem) that needed to remain plugged in for the two to remain active?

Ahhh, that’s how it goes folks. Just a few tricks among the series that were played on us upon our latest move. Messieurs les movers, just maintain a little human touch and judgement and things will be so much nicer.

Running Dry

Running Time: 80 minutes
Country: USA
Genre: Documentary
Narrator: Jane Seymour
Director: Jim Thebaut

• Description: 

“Running Dry” was inspired by the late Senator Paul Simon’s powerful book “Tapped Out.” Jim Thebaut, the film’s producer and director, had been developing the project in association with Simon until his recent death. Simon’s widow, Patricia Simon, has continued her husband’s legacy by working with Thebaut. Award-winning actress Jane Seymour narrates as the film takes viewers on a journey that explores the impending severity of the global water crisis throughout specific regions in southern Asia, northern China, the Middle East, Africa and the American southwest. Various experts and world leaders, including former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, are interviewed throughout the documentary stating their concerns, not only about their own regions, but also about the challenges that exist throughout the world.Enjoy free movies every month!

• Play A Game & Win!

The Tiburon International Film Festival will have a movie game each month until its opening in March 2008. Those who send the correct answers will receive a comp ticket to the March 13-21, 2008 festival
Game # 2: Name 7 films with the number ‘7′ in the title! This is TIFF’s seventh year, and seven months left to its opening!
Email your answer to: info AT TiburonFilmFestival.com and write Game # 2 in the subject area, and your info in the text area.

Game # 1 Answer: Is Paris Burning? is the name of a war film directed by Rene Clement made in 1966. The winners have already been notified.

A blog: an interactive journal

• A blog is simply a site for articles that is very easy to edit because a tool is provided to the editor to create the site template ( the look and feel) , the pages, the categories on the site.

• It is also unique compared to a plain old site in that it enables users to post comments to the articles, and enables the owner(s) of the blog to moderate those comments.

They don’t have to be published instantly therefore. They can if desired only appear once they’ve been validated by the site owner. How nice, no?

• Another nice aspect of blogging platforms is what is called ‘ RSS’. This is an obscure way to say a subscription to articles on the site.

It’s a way for readers of a blog to follow new posts without having to go to the blog address regularly. The same way you subscribe to an online newsletter or to a paper magazine, you can subscribe to a blog! Where it says RSS or RSS 2 on the blog, you just click and you’ll see the options offered. In Firefox, one simple option is to use ‘ live bookmarks’ to follow a blog’s activity.

You can also install a tool to receive all your ‘blog feeds’ ( or subscriptions to posts) called a feed agregator or feed reader.

Popular Feed Readers

Applications

• NewsGator - FeedDemon 2.0
  (Windows, more info)
• NewsGator - Inbox for Microsoft Outlook
  (Windows)
• NewsGator - NetNewsWire
  (OS X)
• Firefox
  (via “Live Bookmarks” feature)
• Safari
  (feed support in the Apple OS X native browser)
• Pulp Fiction
  (OS X)

Or use online readers provided by our dear old Google, Yahoo and others:

Online Services

• Google Reader
• NewsGator
  (Online)
• My Yahoo!
• Bloglines
• Rojo
• Newsburst

What I find a little troublesome about using on line services rather than an application on your computer relates to privacy concerns. Again, you’re telling these sites exactly what you’re interested in reading about on a daily basis. I don’t know if I want to get that close with them?

• The WordPress platform is one of the most well known free web blogging platform, especially for people like me who already have a hosting account for their site. But you can also have your blog hosted on Wordpress.com if desired. DotClear is another very good French designed alternative, even though its name doesn’t indicate that.

• There are tons of blogging platforms that will host your blog for you, free or for a fee, from TypePad to Blogger to MovableType. The web has comparisons on the benefits of each when you type ‘ blog platform comparison’.

-> WordPress.com self-hosted blogging platform and basic blog hosting platform

-> DotClear self-hosted blogging platform- No blog hosting provided. Documentation still largely in French.

Description  and playdates from the French Alliance in San Francisco:

• Mauvaise foi (Bad Faith)

Directed by: Roschdy Zem
Language: French, English subtitles

Clara and Ishmael are gorgeous, happy, in love and in Paris.

How nice is that? Like many cosmopolitan Parisian couples, the fact that she is Jewish and he is Muslim barely crosses the minds of these oh-so-secular lovebirds…until Clara announces that she’s pregnant.

That’s when the troubles start in this charming and timely romantic comedy whose title could have been “Guess Who’s Coming to Shabbos Dinner?”

- > For full schedule and prices, go to:
http://sfjff.org/festival_2007/film/472/

Co-presented by the Alliance Française de San Francisco.

• Screenings:

> Castro Theatre: July 22 2007 5:00pm
> The Roda Theatre: July 29 2007 6:45pm
> Aquarius Theatre: July 31 2007 6:15pm
> Smith Rafael Film Center: August 4 2007 6:30pm

• Comme t’y es belle! (Gorgeous!)

Directed by: Lisa Azuelos
Language: French, English and Hebrew subtitles

“Gorgeous!” really earns that exclamation point. In this tale set in the City of Lights, director Lisa Azuelos and her co-writers have crafted an inviting comic drama that celebrates the au courant Parisian woman. They’ve whipped up a coterie of breathtaking Sephardic femmes whose witty, rat-a-tat-tat dialogue crackles with energy.

The entire film vibrates with their smarts, charm, guile and not an insignificant amount of sex. Isa (Michele Laroque), Lea (Aure Atika), Alice (Valerie Benguigui) and Nina (Geraldine Nakache) are nobody’s fools as they stare down traditional gender roles, the tax system, the beauty business and the institution of marriage - such as it is in France.

- > For full schedule and prices, go to:
http://sfjff.org/festival_2007/film/484/

Co-presented by the Alliance Francaise de San Francisco.