nil_desperandum wrote:Lots of excellent advice on here.
I think that you would be surprised how many Clarets either now reside in France, or like us, have a 2nd home there and spend significant periods of the year out there.
(Having a 6 week break without a home game is a definite incentive to stay away for longer.)
One point not really mentioned so far is that France is such a vast and diverse country, and so you can't generalise on many points.
The guy I sit with on the Turf has a property near the South coast. He needs air-con turned high throughout much of the year, but it gets really cold in the winter.
We are more in the North West, and winters are very mild, (rarely dropping anywhere close to freezing due to the warm Atlantic breezes), but then we get a lot more rain in the summer months - although they can still be v hot.
Culturally though the regions are much different, and you will find far more English speakers in some areas than others, and of course in certain areas - such as the Dordogne, you'll find a lot of British.
Contrary to what is often rumoured, we find virtually all French people to be very helpful and co-operative, and if you just try a little bit of French speaking then they respond really well.
As said in a couple of posts, most things that involve bureaucracy are a nightmare, (e.g. i recently wanted to cancel my mobile phone contract. To do this I had to send a letter by recorded delivery to the Head office of SFR, and wait a week for confirmation!), and transactions at the bank and at public offices are rarely straightforward.
That being said I pay virtually everything by direct debit now, and pay most other bills online, so it's the same as being at home.
Pace of life is much more relaxed everywhere, and food and drink are - unquestionably - excellent.
Distances between major towns / regions are huge, but infrastructure and roads are much superior to ours, and pot-holes are a rarity even on rural lanes.
Buying cheap and renovating is probably the best way, but it does mean that - depending on the size of project - you spend a lot of time working on it for the first couple of years, (and for some people a decade or more!).
Without stating the obvious, the more time you are able to stay out there the more opportunity you will have to balance work (renovations) and leisure.
It's a very easy decision to make if you are retired and have the funds, but if you are thinking of going to live out there permanently as a worker, then you will need to do a lot of careful research - especially if your linguistic skills are limited.
Good luck!
Excellent post however, regarding the two points I've underlined:
Their inter-city infrastructure is excellent, however their smaller roads and train lines are arguable worse than in the UK. More of their funding is directed at linking cities.
So if you want to travel, for example, from Nice to Paris or Montpellier to Lyon then that's fine - the auto routes (motorways) are great (though you pay a toll fee) and the TGV trains are superior to our little trains restricted by our pre-Victorian gauge.
However, if you want to travel from a small town to a little village then good luck to you (however you choose to travel) because you'll need it.
There's also still the omnipresent scourge of Socialism over here. It's much more prevalent than in the UK sadly with resultant more likelihood of your train/bus/plane etc being cancelled and leaving you stranded.
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