Babysitter drives a hard bargain

My first few weeks living in the centre of town were spent walking around and deciding which café to sip coffee at next. That was in between my babysitting duties of course. My first job after arriving in Dijon was looking after the children of the director of the lab that Michael was working at. It was a nice gesture to help me occupy my time while I was without work. I soon discovered that at 5 euros an hour it wasn’t such a nice gesture.

The boys, Felix and Victor were 7 and 3 years old. The parents both worked, as is common in France I noticed, and were hardly ever home together during the week. I found it a bit odd that a couple would have kids and not see them very often but I’ve been told that’s very common throughout the world. I guess it’s my upbringing.

Anyway, I would pick these kids up from school in the afternoon around 5pm and sometimes take them to school in the morning. On Wednesdays I often looked after Victor before he started going to the daycare centre at the university. Then they paid me pittance to spend half an hour on the bus taking him there. And remember that the father went to work at the university every Wednesday too. It wasn’t like he couldn’t take his kids himself. Maybe it was all part of the nice gesture thing.

I absolutely loved the kids. I actually got to be a kid again myself (except when cooking with hot water - very dodgy with a 7 y.o who wants to help). And despite what the father said about lazing on the side of the pool at the Cap Vert water centre while Felix amused himself in the wave pool, I didn’t. Maternal instinct told me to be observant with little kids at a swimming pool and so I followed him around incessantly in case he should fall or drown (he consequently kept moving from pool to pool). I spent every hour that I was with the boys playing their childhood games in French and I learned the rules of soccer (le foot) and basketball (le basket) in French too.

But the French of games wasn’t the only French I learned. I thought of my time playing with these kids as valuable French language learning time. From Felix I learned the current French being tossed around the primary school playground. Words that cannot be repeated in polite company and definitely not in front of the parents. I, of course, was a babysitter loyal to her 7-year-old boss and never told his parents about the bad language he’d employed in my company (obviously I wasn’t polite company).

From 3-year-old Victor the story is a bit different. Bad language was rarely used at home and he was too young to understand that it was bad. That is, until he started going to Maternelle (pre-school but in the same school as the primary kids). I was flabbergasted one day to hear him say ‘Pipi Caca Merde!’ (Wee, Poo, Shit!). I ignored him at first (I wasn’t his mother) and tried not to laugh because it really is funny to hear little ones try to shock you with their naughty words. In the end though, he let the words slip during dinner with Mummy and he got into big trouble. After that, whenever he repeated the words, I got angry, to no effect of course – I wasn’t his mother!

Victor wasn’t all bad. I realised just how young and fragile he was one day when we were walking past a building site on the way to the park. Two beefy guys were digging up the dirt with a big tractor thingy (bulldozer?) and then depositing it in the trucks. Victor stopped to watch (his favourite toy was a tractor thingy that digs up dirt). After a few minutes I noticed he was facing the opposite way to the work that was going on. I asked him what he was doing and he replied, (read out loud in a very high-pitched voice) 'Je regarde le mur' - I'm looking at the wall. I asked him why (secretly laughing because he was so cute!)? He replied very seriously, 'Parce que j'ai peur' - Because I'm scared. I was confused so I asked him to repeat what he’d said, thinking that maybe I had misunderstood the French bit. ‘Je regarde le mur parce que j'ai peur'. He was scared of the noise the trucks were making and so obviously the thing to do when you’re scared (and 3 years old) is look at the wall! It was so cute and it took all my willpower not to laugh at the poor little guy!!

I’m afraid the language learning might have been a one way thing. I learned a lot but all the boys learned from me was the word ‘oopsidaisy’. It’s the best word to teach a kid of any language, not just French. It’s a nonsense word but is so useful in preventing a kid from launching into a crying saga if he/she falls over or hurts him/herself. I used this ploy with Victor several times and it actually worked. And his parents thought I’d actually taught him some English when he came out with it one rare dinner time that they were all together (little did they know!)! 

I guess they took this as a cue to my being an excellent English teacher because they subsequently asked me to tutor Felix for a week during his summer holidays. It was basically glorified babysitting (and not that glorified really). So I demanded a pay rise. Felix’s father argued back that since I was going to be doing around 35 hours in just one week, I would already be getting lots of money (strange logic). I argued back that teaching deserves some form of extra payment and being a hard woman to bargain with, he acquiesced. I got a whopping 1 euro pay rise. But I guess it gave me an extra big paycheck at the end of the week (again strange logic). Needless to say, as soon as I got a real job I got out of there (although I was sad to say goodbye to the boys).

I quickly realised that I wouldn’t be sitting in cafés sipping cappuccinos all day. The few ‘cappuccinos’ I tried at different places were all the same. A long black coffee topped with whipped cream and a chocolate on the side. Where was the milky coffee with the frothed milk and sprinkling of chocolate on top? I couldn’t believe that they couldn’t make a decent cappuccino in Dijon (according to my professional coffee-drinking standards). I soon discovered that the Dijon idea of a cappuccino was the same as Paris and other towns in France, which was very different to the Australian idea of a cappuccino. So very quickly I adapted to the cappuccino climate change and got used to black coffee. I also noticed that one cappuccino cost twice as much as a petit café (equates to a long short black by Australian standards), which meant that if I bought these instead, I could sit for twice as long at one café and drink twice as many coffees! 

Pondering #3: Social Security

One of the first things that we had to do when we got to Dijon was sort out Michael’s working visa and my social security. These proved to be two things that took longer than we thought possible. It was Michael’s introduction to real French red tape and my introduction on how to become Frenchified.

To be able to work legally in France, most foreigners need a carte de séjour. Even citizens of EU countries other than France need this work permit apparently. However, because of the red tape many people are living and working in France without the necessary papers. Some of my friends had been living and working in France for 3 years before finally getting the piece of paper that allowed them to be legal money-earners. Michael went to the Prefecture (regional immigration registration office) countless times and even travelled in and out of the country in the time it took for the ‘system’ to award him his carte de séjour.

Michael’s first brush with French red tape was in Sydney with the French Consulate before we left. They had told him he needed a visa to enter France, which would allow the process of getting a work permit to begin. As part of the paperwork requirements for this visa, Michael had to provide the Consulate with an itinerary of his trip. They said that this is normally obtained from your travel agent. Alas! We didn’t have a travel agent. We were flying standby. And alas! Michael made the mistake of telling them this fact! They then refused to award his visa without proof that we were definitely travelling to France. They needed an official itinerary or he wouldn’t get the visa. So, being a smart person, I printed out an itinerary of our standby flights on United and, not being smart people, the French Consulate accepted it! Phew! Michael could now enter France legally. All he had to do was visit the Prefecture within 7 days of his arrival in France and he would be given a carte de séjour.

You would think this was too good to be true, and it was. After lining up for an hour, he was swiftly told that he could have his carte de séjour only after he provided another set of papers. These needed to be faxed over from Australia. Several months later, when he went to hand in some more required documents, he came across another man at the window of the Prefecture office who suggested he get a 10-year carte de séjour, since his wife (that’s me) was French (on paper anyway). This process cost more time and finally after 9 months and many renewals of permit pendings, he was granted his 10-year carte de séjour. Yay!

But what about me? I am French on paper but I wouldn’t know how to be French if I tried. Having a French passport and a French Dad should automatically give you a free ticket to access the French health system, shouldn’t it? Apparently not. The first 2 or 3 three visits were pointless. Each time I explained how I had dual nationality but had never lived in France and each time I was directed to the same desk (the one for foreigners). There I was told the same thing yet again, that I couldn’t have access to the French social security system with an Australian passport.

So one day, having learned my lesson, I went in there and only showed my French passport, explaining that I was born in Australia but had never lived in France and needed to know how to get social security now that I was living in France. This tactic worked and I was directed to take a number to make an appointment to come back (in 6 weeks!) and see the man who could help me.

When the day finally arrived, the man did actually appear to know what he was talking about but I still had to obtain documents from Australia to complete the dossier they needed to process my request (part of the problem with the bureaucratic system in France). I, of course, gave up and only tried again after a few more months. This caused the lady at the front desk to remonstrate me for not organising it straight away when I arrived and she promptly sent me to another counter to fix the situation. And wouldn’t you know, this time, at last, the lady simply said, “Oh yes, all you need to do is fill in this form and return it to us. You should have you social security card in the mail within 14 days.” And get it I did, within 14 days!

The most frustrating thing about the system is the system itself. The employees at the respective offices seem to be armed with a minimum of information and a maximum of buck-passing tools. If a customer has a query or question that the employees can’t answer, they’re taught that obviously the customer hasn’t come with the right form or piece of identification and they should be promptly sent away. But don’t dismay, the French people themselves know that perseverance is the key and this always works in the end. As it did for me. I ended up receiving my social security card in January, a mere 8 months after starting the whole process.

In the meantime, while I was still trying to sort out my social security problems, I had the bad luck to need to visit a dentist. I’m not one for going to the dentist every 6 months for a clean and $60 thank you very much. I hadn’t been to the dentist for a clean for maybe 10 years? So, silly me, after brushing my teeth one night before bed, I felt a hole on the inside of one of my bottom teeth. I thought I’d chipped one of my teeth and even my aversion to dentists had to be put aside in this case. Michael was worried about how much it was going to cost to go to the dentist and I slept very badly for several nights, dreaming that one of my teeth actually fell out! I have these dreams sometimes...I wonder what they mean? Actually, don’t tell me – maybe I don’t want to know!

Anyway, after ringing a dentist and having a very rude lady on the other end of the phone tell me that I needed to find out what health cover I had before I could see their dentist, I got in touch with a different dentist, a lovely lady who booked me in that afternoon.

To my great relief, when she saw my teeth she said it was only tartar! Yay! And she inspected my other teeth with interest then stopped and asked me how old I was. That's when I started worrying again. Were my teeth really going to fall out? But no need to panic! She just asked me why I had such good teeth and why I didn't have any holes or tooth decay! Phew! (I did start wondering that maybe it wasn’t such a good thing to have no holes or decay…why else would she be so shocked?)

In the end I had to go for two tartar cleaning sessions and she even told me how much it was going to cost before I committed to making a booking with her. It was unfortunate that I didn’t have my social security to claim back the expense but she was such a nice dentist! She has completely changed my view of dentists (but she has also confirmed that I don’t need to go for cleans every 6 months…not yet anyway).

Bread and Keys

The day came (finally) to exchange the keys for our new apartment in Rue Musette. I call it an apartment because it wasn’t really a unit (too old for that) and it wasn’t really a flat (it wasn’t flat - the floor was a bit not level in places!) so it was an apartment. In French they shorten the French l’appartement to l'apparte so that's what I'll do too. And it was our dream apparte. It was tops! We moved in as soon as it was legally ours and began to make it our home.

We did find some minor problems with l’apparte but they paled when we thought about living at the fac. There were a couple of leaky taps and gurgling frog-like sounds that came up from the bath drain. The plumber who gives quotes came to see about making a quote to give to the landlord to see if he’d ok the fixing of the leaks for the quoted price, after which time he would call us to make an appointment for the plumber who fixes things to come and fix things. So the leaks got fixed eventually. Ah the French! But the frog lived with us for almost the whole 14 months we were there (mysteriously disappearing after we finally tried frogs’ legs at a local restaurant)!

The markets woke us up on our first morning but we soon learned to close the windows on the nights before market days. We could people-gaze from our bedroom windows! And our windows had shutters (a strange concept coming from Sydney where shutters are pieces of wood nailed to the sides of windows to give the appearance of having shutters). Real proper French shutters! Cool - or as they say in French - supercool! (I learned that saying quite easily - I wonder why?!)

The apparte was located above a very poor-quality chain bread shop called Point Chaud, but no matter how bad the final product seemed to be, the smells of chocolate, butter and pastry, creeping up from the ovens were absolutely divine (and enough to destroy the strongest person’s diet!). Also very warm and welcoming when leaving for work early on winter mornings. When it came to choice of bread shops nearby, there were many. And we tried most of them before deciding on making one of them our local. It wasn’t the closest but it worth the extra 50 metres in walking (walk off the bread). It had scrumptious baguettes and bread loaves that didn’t go hard and inedible after 2 days like the ones we’d been buying at the fac. This bread shop used fresh dough every day, which really made a difference in the end. It also had variety, not just the usual baguettes and patisserie selection that other bread shops provided. 

And the ladies who worked there, obviously sisters, were charming. When Michael’s parents came for a visit in October, we told the bread shop ladies that they would be coming in to buy our bread but that they didn’t speak French. The ladies were happy to oblige and Michael’s parents commented on how friendly and helpful they had been. It probably wasn’t the best bakery in Dijon but it was all we needed in a bread shop. 

Fete de la Musique

When they say they're having a party in the streets of Dijon, they actually mean it! One Saturday night in June, and the first day of Official Summer, Dijon unpacked it's mini stages, plugged in its amps and presented the public with a musical display that rivalled the Big Day Out (music festival that tours around Australia and New Zealand in January every year).

On every street corner, and even in between, bands of all persuasions strummed, bashed and harmonised their way into the night. Some bands were so close to the next band that they clashed (maybe that was the desired effect!). There was traditional French accordion music with audience participation. There were your usual covers rock bands who really should have stayed in their garage. There was a very brave boy who sang Red Hot Chilli Peppers songs with a French accent and an acoustic guitar-playing friend. There was a thrash, crash, hard rock, heavy metal band whose lead singer burst into a fascinating opera voice. There was a Celtic dancing corner in a courtyard of the Palais des Ducs, where passers-by could do a bit of a square dance before heading to the electronic dance stage around the corner where the DJ played trance, stance, dance music.

The night was great. The day leading up to it was not so. We had a timetable printed out from the website of the local paper and had made a meeting time of 4pm with a friend from Michael's lab at Place Darcy, near the Dijon version of the Arc de Triumph. The music started at 3pm the timetable said. Uh-huh. At 6pm we sat down at a cafe and ordered Monacos (shandy with grenadine) and pondered whether we had the right day. We'd seen endless stages setting up and bands tuning (start a song then stop - sound check. Start the same song again then stop - sound check.), but no real action. At 8pm we sat down at our favourite Irish Pub (one of two in Dijon) and had a beer (very unFrench). What to do? Should we stay and watch this band that's setting up inside their truck and that keeps playing the same backing track while they warm up their instruments (Irish flute, banjo, and other strumming guitar like things that probably had strange names)? Or should we head off home and give up on the old music festival?

Well, to cut to the chase (phew!), we didn't give in. We finally worked out that the light probably had a lot to do with the fact that everything started late: the entertainment started about 8.30pm and was still going strong when we started the forty minute walk home to the fac at 1.30am. We kind of breathed easy thinking that we weren't going home to our future flat since it was right above those two bands competing for loudness and crowdness. The walk home was a bit cool and we now know why all those girls walk around town with cardigans tied around their waists in the middle of summer- they don't plan on coming home for dinner!

Aix-en-Provence-or-not

The saga all started when the alarm went off at 4.30am on Saturday morning (kind of like the good old days working at the airport). We put on our walking shoes and our backpacks and headed out the door and towards the train station. As we entered the station after our brisk 40-minute walk (you may think we were stupid but there are no buses at 5am in Dijon so we had no choice!), we got excited. We were going to Aix-en-Provence to meet up with my sister, Jo, for a couple of minutes before she left to return to England.

Alas!!! A sign displayed at the entry to the departures level informed us that due to strikes the past few days (surprise, surprise), some trains had been cancelled and we were all of a sudden not going to Aix. What to do, what to do? Cry? No, another girl was already doing that at the counter next to us. Get angry? No, that's too American (sorry!). Get our money back? Yep. Got it. We caught a bus home after a cuppa at the train station café and regrouped. For the simple reason that we did not want to stay at the horrible fac all weekend we decided to hire a car and go on a tour of our local Burgundy area.

From the time I was old enough to be given a sample of wine at the dinner table (about 3 years old or so…), my father had gone on about the fabulous wine at Nuits St Georges in France. Just after we’d arrived in Dijon we realised that it was just south of us on the way to Beaune. So this was our goal for the weekend: we would drive to Nuits St Georges, sample the lovely wine and enjoy the country town feel.

Alas! It didn’t have such a country town feel. It was a boring town with nothing to attract us young wine lovers other than a Cassissium. So we went there. After all, it had free tasting of crème de cassis! And actually it turned out to be very informative about the life and times of the blackcurrant.

Unfortunately it wasn’t going to keep us entertained all weekend and so we had to come up with another plan (Plan Z?). With us we had a Michelin Guide to the Burgundy and Jura areas and, after a thorough reading of about 2 pages, decided that we would head for the Morvan. Situated in the heart of Burgundy, this regional nature park had been described to us by friends native to the area as a great place to go for beautiful waterfalls, magnificent mountains and luscious green hills. It seemed just the place to relax and wind down after a bad start to the weekend.

After driving for what seemed like an age, we came across a place called Châteauneuf, an old fortified town set high up above a valley. We wound our way up the hill and into the town to check it out. We were mostly after a church where we could take shelter from the horrible heat (no air-conditioning).

As we sat admiring the vaulted ceiling from a pew, we contemplated what to do next. As it stood we didn’t have much direction and if we continued as we were, we’d end up driving around in circles all weekend and not really see or do anything out of the ordinary (other than drive around in a foreign country seeing amazing foreign things!). Something must have clicked in our heads because we suddenly had a brilliant idea. We would try and make our way to a little village called Rogny-les-Sept-Écluses (sept écluses – seven locks). Just before leaving Australia we'd been given a book to read on the plane to France called French Spirits by Jeffrey Greene. The story was based on an American couple who’d bought a disused presbytery in the village. We thought we might try to find the presbytery since we were in the neighbourhood (well, as far as Australia and Burgundy are concerned).

We bought a map and off we went in our little diesel car (with turbo for the boys). We made it to Rogny at about 9pm (broad daylight in other words) after a few hours of ambling along winding country roads.

We found that Rogny does indeed have seven locks, no longer in use, but still an impressive sight, rising 34 metres. They look like a giant staircase. I could see why they were a marvel of engineering at the time, built to overcome the large difference in height between the Loire River and the Loing River. These connected with the River Seine through a series of canals and rivers to form an important unbroken water trade route between the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea. The old locks aren’t used anymore though. The Canal Briare, which runs through Rogny, was re-routed in 1880 around the old locks through six new locks.

I’d never seen a working lock in my life so I was captivated when a boat came through. I watched in awe as they closed the gates behind the boat and slowly let the water in under the front gates from the river ahead, which was higher. Then when the water levels were the same, the gates opened to allow the boat to go on its journey. It was fascinating.

The next morning after breakfast on the terrace of our hotel, we ventured up the hill to the presbytery to see if it really did look like the picture on our book cover. We knew as soon as we came to the little square that it was. Exactly the same. And who did we encounter outside painting the very shutters that he’d talked about painting in his book, but the author himself! I was overcome with a strange feeling of already knowing the place through reading his book and like silly tourists we walked up to him and introduced ourselves. He was lovely and showed us around his property and we chatted away for about half an hour, after which time we got him to sign our copy of his book (first time I’ve ever got an autograph…well, there was that time I got one of the Wiggles to sign a piece of paper just before their flight to LA took off but that was for someone else…I swear!).

We needed to get the car back early the next morning but we had been told that Vézelay was definitely worth a visit and being on our way home, we decided to take a look. Our directions were to follow the signs to the autoroute (you can sometimes drive 50km to get to the autoroute just by following the signs!), and along the way we’d find Vézelay. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the massive stone steeples of a church rose up from a perched village on a distant hilltop.

I don’t know what draws me to these kinds of big stone structures. Perhaps it’s the fact that in Australia we only have a small number of stone buildings less than 200 years old. Whatever it is, the Basilique Ste-Madeleine in Vézelay really did loom up and although you can imagine it’s big from a distance, up close it’s absolutely massive.

We parked our car in the pay parking and headed up the steep cobblestone street to the main square outside the church (where of course we discovered there was free parking!). We also wanted a bit of lunch seeing as how it was already nearly 2pm and that’s when all the food places tend to close for the day in France. I can’t even remember what we ate for lunch it was that unmemorable! It was probably something French like onion tart and salad.

We followed a group of tourists around with a monk explaining in detail the different features of the basilica. It’s amazing how informative some guided tours are. It’s a bit hit and miss but if you get a good one you’ll always learn something interesting that you just won’t get out of the self-guided tours.

What started off as an abbey church then a parish church was raised to the status of basilica in 1920 (don’t know what the difference between all these are…their physical size?). Back in the 12th century, St. Bernard preached the 2nd Crusade from its steps and almost 50 years later, it was at Vézelay that the French King Phillipe-Auguste and the English King Richard the Lionheart met before their departure on the 3rd Crusade. Its main features are its capitals and its tympanum. Now, if most of you are like me, you won’t have a clue what these are! Well, I found out (one of the many things I learned during our hot summer of visiting churches to escape the heat!). At the main doorway into the church is normally an arch decorated with statues set around a sculptured centrepiece. This centrepiece, or tympanum, is meant to symbolise the mission given by Jesus to the Apostles upon his ascension into Heaven: to spread the Word of God. Pilgrims coming to the Ste-Madeleine to look at the relics of Mary Magdalene in its crypt would have been welcomed by reassuring stories of salvation after a long and hard journey. Not being very arty I would usually just take a quick look, say, “Ahh” or, “Ooh”, and move on. With our monk guide we stopped for a good 15 minutes and studied in detail the story depicted in the sculpture and its interpretations and I actually learned something.

The group moved on into the main hall of the basilica and the monk took us through some of the capitals. At the top of the pillars lining the sides of the hall are sculptures that depict different scenes and images depending on the artist and the period they’re constructed in. These are called capitals. Again, I actually saw the scenes the stone carvings represented instead of just looking and moving on to the next point of interest written in the guide book. There was such expression in the faces of the stone figures and such detail in the animal statuettes. It really is amazing how talented the artists were. These days art means many things but I think they had it pretty spot on back then (again, I speak as a layperson in the artist world!). 

Our tour ended and we went for a stroll around the back of the basilica to find the gardens and view of the countryside our guide book told us about. To our surprise, there was a fair in full swing, complete with children’s competitions and stalls selling all kinds of wares. We tasted honeys and watched woodcarvers before taking some pictures of what we thought might be Dijon (a mere 140km away!), which reminded us that we should be getting home. And so ended a spur-of-the-moment weekend trip. And we still haven’t been to Aix!

Pondering #2: No Sunday Openings

During our first few weeks in Dijon, we discovered many things that were new to us. The biggest shock to our system was that nothing opened on Sundays. The streets of Dijon are completely deserted in the morning except for a few desperate people who can get up early and catch one of the few supermarkets that open until midday (hey - midday's early on a Sunday!). Bakeries also open early for a few hours but it’s not until about three in the afternoon that the tea shops and patisseries open for the afternoon strollers, presumably the time when everyone has finished having lunch with their families.

In Australia, most supermarkets are open every day of the week, including most evenings until late. This means that no real meal planning is necessary. If you need something on a Sunday, you can just step over to the local supermarket and buy it. Not so in Dijon. We learned from fairly early on that we needed to plan our Sunday meals in advance, something that took a bit of time.

The adjustment was hard and in the beginning we were resistant, complaining to our friends about the fact that we couldn’t buy any provisions or do any shopping on Sundays. But then once we got used to it, we gradually started to enjoy the fact that everything stops on Sundays. We have friends in the retail business in Australia and they never have days off together, let alone a Sunday, to spend just relaxing with their family or friends. We like the idea that it’s basically a forced day of rest for almost everyone, and those that do have to work on Sundays usually get Mondays off to make up for it. 

In the end, we enjoyed it so much that even though we now live in a place where shopping is possible on Sundays, we still provision ourselves and avoid the shops!

Beaune 1

Soon after our arrival in Dijon we heard that the beautiful Côte d’Or that we could gaze at from our unit at the fac had wineries enough for an army. The country trains from Dijon go through the heart of this wine country to Nuits St. Georges and Beaune. Being lovers of fine Australian wine (and not so fine Australian wine that is still fine because it’s Australian), we were excited about visiting one of the best known wine regions of France to see what all the fuss was about. In Australia we get French wine but it’s normally not very nice (unless you pay outrageous prices for the good stuff).

One hot Sunday, just two weeks into our stay, we took the train to Beaune. First on our list of things to visit was the Hôtel Dieu or Hospices de Beaune (our priority was to go to one of the many wine merchants for a wine tasting but it was before midday and we have to have some principles about drinking, don’t we?).

The Hôtel Dieu was built in the 15th century as a hospital for the poor who were suffering from sickness and famine after the Hundred Years War. We paid our €5 each and took our pamphlets in French and English, explaining the many rooms and halls of the hospital. It was actually used as a hospital until the 1970s. Now it has been opened up for the public to visit. It really is a beautiful example of medieval architecture. The most impressive part of the place is the courtyard where you can stare in wonder at the glazed coloured roof tiles, which were apparently the first in the area to be arranged in the famous geometric patterns that have come to be recognised as typically Burgundian.

After having lunch (smartly eating before going drinking, I mean, wine tasting), we proceeded to the Marché aux Vins and for €9 got to taste 4 white wines and 14 red wines. We thought at first that this was a bit hefty. But then we were told that we could proceed unaccompanied and try as much of the wine as we wanted, as long as we were finished within about an hour. Not a bad deal in my opinion.

The first half of the tasting is below ground in the cellars and as you walk from one wine to the next you pass barrels of ageing wine. There’s also a display of really old wines (behind locked bars of course) with their name and year tagged on them. The oldest we saw was from 1915. It was definitely impressive, wish we could have tried those wines in our visit! Above the cellar was the more expensive and presumably better selection of wines (prices all higher than €20 a bottle), but in our opinion some of the cheaper bottles were nicer. I have a feeling though that we had our Australian wine hats on and not our French ones.

I know for a fact now that Australian and French wines can’t be compared. Having developed my taste for wine in Australia, I tend to enjoy a full-bodied tannin-filled wine. No light fruity wines for me thank you very much. That’s why every time I tried French wine in the past I really didn’t like it. Tasted a bit metallic.

But I discovered through lack of Australian wine while living in France (there’s so much of the French stuff that they don’t need to sell wine from anywhere else) that when you don’t compare the two, French wine can actually be thoroughly enjoyed. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I like French wine better than Australian wine. I don’t. But I can appreciate it now that I’ve been able to live with it for a year and it’s not as bad as I originally thought. I just don my French wine hat and Bob’s your uncle (or Bernard is in my case).

Anyway, we walked away from the Marché Aux Vins in Beaune with a few bottles of nice wine that promptly got put under the lounge to be transported later in the year back to Australia for long-term storage.

Summer #1

Did you know that Dijon is the French city the furthest from any sea in France? When people found out we came from Sydney, we were often asked how we would cope living in Dijon given the above information. We were told that to get to any large body of water, you have to travel 500km to the south to Marseille, 630km to Nantes in the west, 500km to Le Havre in the northwest and don’t even bother about looking to the east. And that’s all travelling by the motorways. If you are in any way poorer than rich, you can add a whole lot of extra time by going by the slower Routes Nationales! For a couple of Aussies who had grown up in the fresh sea air of Sydney, the prospect of not being near the ocean, and most importantly, a beach, kind of scared us (well me anyway). So imagine how we felt when we arrived in Dijon to be told the news that there was no water near us.

Then the summer hit. It seemed that there were varying opinions on how hot it actually got near us but some thermometers actually said 38°C. (It did get up to 45°C but we’d escaped to London by that stage.) It was an indescribable heat, oppressive and lethargic. A heat that made you sweat more even if you were just rolling over in bed to get out of your wet sweat patch. A heat that came inside and smothered you as soon as you opened the windows with the intention of cooling the place down. The only time the heat subsided was at 5am in the morning just as the sun, the source of the heat itself, was about to rise for another day of torture. The only place with air conditioning to escape the heat and humidity was in the Galleries Lafayette department store and that was packed! There wasn’t even a body of water we could go and cool off in. Except of course if you counted the Lac Kir and the Cap Vert water centre. But the first from a distance looked filthy and not safe to swim in (even though we did see some people around its banks later in the summer), and the second you had to fork out €8.50 to get in and then there’s some French regulation that nobody’s allowed to wear board shorts, not even boys. Mmm. A real bargain. Paying to swim and not even having the choice of what to swim in? Doesn’t compute in an Australian’s brain. Needless to say we didn’t bother with either. In the end we had to settle for the River Thames in London! But we didn’t swim in it of course…errrgh!

Dream Apparte

As part of my effort to get myself not bored, I took to looking in the classifieds for prospective apartments. One day I circled an ad for a two-bedroom apartment in the centre of town, but not really understanding the codes used for the number of bedrooms, facilities etc in real estate classifieds, I kind of forgot about it. One weekend we happened to walk past a real estate agent and went in to ask about the process for renting an apartment. We were told we had several alternatives. One would be to go directly through the owner in a private agreement. Another would be to go through an agent who organised everything and then added their fee to the monthly rent. The third option was to register with these guys for a fee and they would give us a list of places for rent that fit our requirements. They would then give us the details of places we were interested in and leave us to organise any meetings or viewings with the owner. It seemed that we would be paying this agent to be a source of information rather than a help in finding our dream apartment. We didn’t like the idea of paying someone to do what we could do ourselves for free so in the end we sat on our tails and stalled the apartment-finding process while we considered what to do.

A few days later Michael saw my circled advertisement and we tried to find it the next time we were walking in town. It was in a street called Rue Musette, which to our delight was the exact same street that had enchanted us on our first night in Dijon! We thought we should have a look before making a decision so we called the owner from where we thought the apartment was (there was no building number on the ad) and five minutes later we were being shown around. It was perfect! It had been redone only a year before so the paint was fresh and modern, and the bathroom was clean and, my favourite bathroom colour, blue! We were in love. It even had wooden floors - or so Michael thought – he only realised that it was lino about 3 weeks after moving in!

But we had a problem. The location and the price, although on the higher end of our budget, were right. But we’d said we’d have a look at another place that someone from uni had suggested, because they were moving out soon. We had our hearts set on Rue Musette and we didn’t want to miss out on it. But we also didn’t want to say yes in case the other place was better. I felt like we were little kids standing in front of the lolly counter at the corner shop, undecided about which lolly to choose for our lolly bag!

We were in a real bind and all we knew was that we had to act fast. So we organised a viewing of the other place and hoped that Rue Musette didn’t get snapped up in the meantime. You can guess what’s coming, can’t you? Yes, thank the lucky stars! The other place was a dump, I mean, totally unsuitable. Up several winding old staircases into the attic area of the building, it had a half size bedroom that wouldn’t fit a double bed in it and a second bedroom that had just enough room for the built-in bunks in it. The living area and kitchen were the only things going for it, although to get from there to the bedrooms you had to go back out into the stairwell and around the corner. I can’t even remember if there was a toilet or not! No, we’d found our dream home and no matter how great this attic apartment could have been, it would not change our minds. We called the owner of Rue Musette the next day and arranged to sign the contracts as soon as possible.

The following weekend we met with our future landlord, Mr Berthaud, at a café in the centre of town, right under Dijon’s very own Arc de Triomphe, actually called the Porte Guillaume. Here, we drank coffee and tried to decipher the terms and conditions of the contract. Luckily Mr Berthaud was friendly and helpful otherwise we could have been signing our lives away without knowing it!

Contracts signed, we started to feel a bit edgy, that we might have been too hasty in signing. We’d been told by some friends that it was hard to find good apartments in Dijon, that they had looked at up to 20 places before finally finding something acceptable. We were worried that we’d found something acceptable first time round and what if it was a mistake? So we asked Mr Berthaud if we could look again at the apartment just to be sure. Of course we knew all along that we’d been lucky when we found Rue Musette. It looked just the same as when we saw it the first time. And because we were new to the country/city/area, Mr Berthaud offered to take us on a tour of central Dijon! I bet there aren’t too many people out there who can say that their landlord took them on a tour of their town!

Pondering #1: To kiss or not to kiss

Most Australians shake hands to say hello or nice to meet you. We don’t usually kiss unless it’s girls and we already know each other (or we’re a couple). Guys NEVER kiss each other (not including couples). It's just not done (not manly enough I suspect). 

My family always kisses hello and goodbye with other French people. Men and women kiss each other and women and women kiss each other. Men sometimes kiss each other if they haven’t seen one another for a long time or if they are congratulating someone on something pretty important. And I’m not talking about French kissing. Normal greetings kissing, pecks on the cheeks. I thought that when we got to France I’d have the kissing thing sorted for sure. Surely sorted it was not.

In most of Burgundy, it’s polite to kiss even if someone is meeting you for the first time. When saying hello and goodbye it is polite to give 2 kisses. Older generations of men kiss each other hello and goodbye. But not everyone living in Dijon is originally from Burgundy and it seems that the number of kisses that you greet someone with depends on which region of France you come from. This is fine when two people come from the same region. There is no confusion. The confusion comes when two people meet and are not from the same area of France.

Take my family, for example, which is from the centre of France near the Loire Valley. We kiss 4 times. Our friend was from Brittany and he kissed 3 times. How do you know how many kisses to give? Do you just keep kissing until someone pulls away (you’d have to know them pretty well)?

I always thought that the kissing thing in France was an older generation thing, that the younger generations wouldn’t really be into physical contact so much. But I was wrong! At Michael’s lab, where students were in their early twenties, kissing is the norm, but only in social situations. If you’re both at work, kissing is not performed. If you are outside of work you kiss and if someone not from your work comes to your work you kiss. Spinning your head? Well consider this: before you even get to the kissing part, you have to work out which side you’re supposed to start on! Now you can see where the Eskimo kiss (picture nose rubbing) comes from – not from the North Pole but from France!

I have to say that it took many trials and many errors to get used to the number of kisses, which side to start and when it was appropriate to kiss at all. It was easier for me because I’m a girl. Once it’s been established that kissing is to occur, I just kiss everyone. For Michael it was harder to adapt. He had to gauge whether it was appropriate to kiss someone he’d only just met. He had many embarrassing moments of hesitation (possible offence to the girl for not wanting to kiss her) and just going for it when she hesitated (maybe he wasn’t supposed to). My advice in these situations is you have to just follow the experts’ lead. If they keep kissing past the 2 Dijon kisses, just go with the flow. After all, even the French get confused between themselves and they just laugh about it.

It's a lonely life a la fac

While it was nice to have temporary accommodation organised, the unit turned out to be the unit from hell! I had never lived on campus during my uni days in Australia and boy am I glad if that’s what it’s like! Our new ‘home’ had 2 big rooms and a separate bathroom and kitchen. They were the only positive things about it. By way of furniture, it had 2 of everything: two single beds with two hard foam mattresses, two bookshelves, two bedside tables, two desks and two chairs, all stain proof and very simple. It had a little table about the size you get in a squishy restaurant – very romantic for 2 but impossible for any more than that. The floors were lino-covered and were extremely slippery and squeaky with or without shoes (again stain proof!).

We soon got sick of that horrible sterile place and decided we needed to make it a bit more homely. So we hired a truck and went around to troc places that sold second hand goods. In French the word troc means trade or barter. The idea with these shops is that people take their second-hand goods along and the shop gets a commission if they’re sold. It means that items can be sold for less, although it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are guaranteed to work. Luckily they have a 24hr returns policy so we were able to return the washing machine that didn’t work. But unluckily it’s only a 24hr returns policy and we didn’t work out that the dryer wasn’t working properly until a few days later and then had to live with a piece of useless furniture for the rest of our stay.

Living on campus (or à la fac as they say in French) did have its advantages (no, really). The Côte d'Or was about 30km away - the big wineries all situated in a line along the side of a hilly stretch of countryside. Our block of units was a concrete monstrosity but from our top floor windows we could actually see the Côte d’Or (but not touch it. Shame!). And it was fairly quiet (except for the Mirage fighter jets doing flybys throughout the day) but this could have been because all the students had left for the summer. I guess that’s all the advantages it had. Not many really. It had more negative points. Especially when the heat started in mid-June and the unit became a furnace day and night. 

Life for me at the fac was strange and dreamlike and very lonely. As with a lot of universities around the world, the University of Burgundy was situated on the outskirts of town and I soon tired of being so far away from anything interesting. Even the purchase of a stereo and TV from one of the local trocs (thankfully fully functional) so I could watch crappy daytime French shows and dance to really repetitive French music didn’t help. My days became a routine of seeing Michael off to work every day and settling down to boredom. Oh, I did things to combat it, like going in to have lunch with Michael and his new colleagues, but it somehow felt like I was intruding, especially when they all talked about work. I also went shopping or used Michael’s computer in his office to email friends and family but even this became awkward when one day his crazy (psychotic) roommate who was doing her PhD came in and accused me of cracking her computer password and stealing her files! Why?? (She went on to finish and obtain her doctorate, even though many thought her work didn’t deserve it, and continued to haunt everyone in the department by sending them abusive emails, including the department head! She really knew how to entertain people, even if she thought she was being serious!)

No matter what I did, I always returned to the unit feeling more lonely than before. This was not the way I thought my first month living in Dijon would turn out. We had to do something about finding a more permanent apartment in a more interesting part of town. 

Arrivals

We finally arrived in Dijon on a Monday evening and were met at the train station by Michael’s supervisor, Ronald. He’d been waiting for us to let him know when we were arriving and had been a bit confused when Michael told him we didn’t know! As he drove us to our hotel where we’d be spending our first night in Dijon, we used what little energy we had left to tell him in French all about our ordeal getting there and he finally nodded in understanding, although I don’t think he really did.

As I watched the buildings whizzing by, I found myself taking in as much as I could, as though we were just passing through. It was the strangest feeling, seeing a town for the first time and realising that we weren’t just going to stay for a few days. It dawned on me that we were finally there, that we had actually packed up our lives in Australia and moved to the other side of the world. And this blur of strangeness flying past us was our new hometown.

Ronald left us at the Hôtel Jacquemart in the middle of town and that night we explored a little with the help of a bad map. It was kind of an explore-by-feel. We walked down cobblestone streets and gazed at the stone buildings with wooden frames on the outsides. We came across a pretty square with a fountain in the middle and French signs in all the windows of the surrounding shops and cafes, making it strikingly obvious that we weren’t in good old suburban Sydney anymore. At one point, we wandered up a beautiful cobblestone street filled with little speciality shops. It was one of the most pretty places I’d ever seen and so beautifully silent in its desertedness. I remember saying to ourselves that this was the kind of place we wanted to live in.

The next day Ronald came and picked us up. We were refreshed and ready to start our new lives. First thing to do was open a bank account so we could get accommodation. Ronald had organised a student apartment on campus, and after helping us with the bank account and dropping off our luggage at the new apartment, he took us to the local Carrefour shopping centre.

Now, when I think of a shopping centre in Australia, I think of a couple of big department stores and lots of little independent shops all in the one centre. In France, they have what they call the hypermarché. This is a massive supermarket that sells everything from food and clothes to electrical goods and gardening tools. It’s amazing and absolutely great to get lost in! So this is where Ronald took us on our first day in Dijon to buy our food and essential household items. We were set! 

Introducing

I’d always wanted to live overseas for a while. I studied Japanese and French at university, which of course led to a wealth of career choices, namely none! So I was all for going to Japan for a year of teaching English after my uni days were over because I’d heard it paid really well (and I wanted to use my Japanese skills of course…). My husband, Michael, also wanted to do something similar but when I was ready, he was in the throes of his PhD and couldn’t afford to take time off to live overseas before his thesis was done. So we agreed to consider a year in Japan after he’d finished and I went out to find a job.

The job I got wasn’t exactly the flight attendant job I’d secretly dreamed of but it was in the airline industry and I got to pretend that the few people I came across with whom I could show off my language skills proved that my university degree was worth the time and money involved. For five and a half years we travelled around during our holidays, seeing places that took our fancy (and that were cheap to get to using my airline benefits!). Finally, as he came to the end of his PhD, Michael’s sights were set more on the career aspect of an overseas jaunt and decided that Japan provided little opportunity for him. He kept his eye out for postdoctoral positions (or postdocs), one to three year research contracts in universities for people who have completed their PhD thesis and want to continue in academia. One day he saw a postdoc position in France advertised on a web mailing list and decided to get some experience applying for jobs. He prepared and sent off his application and didn’t think much about it after that, until he got a reply saying that the University of Burgundy in Dijon would be happy to welcome him on board as their newest postdoc. It came as a bit of a shock because it happened so fast and he didn’t even have an interview!

After the initial shock that comes with the news that you’re going to up and leave your native country, along with all your family and friends, we decided that it was the perfect place to go and live. Both of us had studied French before so we were at least familiar with the language. It was also a good place because it had special links to my family. Well, actually, my family had special links to it. You see, my father is French and has been living in Australia since he was 21. Ok, so it’s a pretty strong link! But the link for me wasn’t a strong French link.

My mother came from New Zealand when she was in her early twenties and met my father in Sydney. I knew my sisters and I grew up in a slightly different way from other Australian families. But it wasn’t that different. We spoke English at home but heard French spoken when my parents had French friends over. Meal times were heavily influenced by the French cooking that my mother had adapted over the years but for big holidays we went to visit the family like anyone else, only the family was in France and New Zealand.

All up, my childhood was like any normal Australian childhood only I never really considered myself 100% Australian. I liked the idea that I was part French and so when I found out that we were definitely going to France, I wasn’t too phased about living in a country where they don’t even speak English. I knew about French culture from all those dinners spent with my parents’ friends and we both at least spoke a little of the language. So it couldn’t be that hard to live there, could it?

Sleeping through First Class?

We were looking for the next available flight to anywhere on the east coast of America, since the next flight to Paris wasn’t until the next day and it was also overbooked. We found a helpful check-in agent (a rare thing in airports, except of course when I was on duty!) and she advised us to get the red-eye to Newark, where there was an empty flight to London leaving the next evening. My back up plan had been to go to Chicago, which had one flight to Paris, also overbooked. London wasn’t really in the right direction but we were tired and decided to leave our plight up to the experts. We made camp in one of the sparse airport lounges for about 10 hours until the flight to Newark was open for boarding late that evening. We found ourselves playing a game of ‘you look after the bags while I have a snooze for a couple of hours’. The idea was that the bag minder wasn’t allowed to fall asleep and leave the bags free to be stolen. It was a hard game after a 14-hour flight.

All went well for our flight to Newark (we were on our way again!) and when we arrived we tried to find lockers to store all our bags for the 12 hours before our next standby flight to London. No joy! Since September 11, American security has increased somewhat (!) and they now don’t allow left luggage in airports. So we chose our other option, which was to get a cheap hotel room, using the benefits of being an airline employee, i.e. big discount, and leave our luggage there. The added bonus of a hotel was that we could have a shower and breakfast as well. Opting (stupidly) against having a rest to catch up on some sleep, we decided to go in to Manhattan on the train.

We’d been to New York before but not since the September 11 attacks. I’d been working for United Airlines the day we found out the horrible news in Australia and we all at least knew somebody who knew the flight attendants that died on UA flights 175 and 93. So I really wanted to see Ground Zero. I had a feeling that being there would somehow bring relief and an end to the feeling I got every time I thought back to that horrible time. When we got there, I was touched by the messages from the thousands who, like me, had come to see the place where so many people had perished through no fault of their own. But I wasn’t prepared for the enormity of the destruction and the overwhelming sense of helplessness that enveloped me. No sooner had we arrived that I felt I had to get out of there.

That evening we not only got on the flight to London, but we got First Class! We managed to take a photo of ourselves enjoying the luxuries of the Boeing 777 First Class cabin as soon as we boarded (pre-flight cocktail in hand), even if we fell asleep straight after the camera was switched off! It was fitting that my last ever flight on standby with United was in First Class because 6 years before, my first ever standby flight with United had been in First Class. What a nice ending to a fun, but sometimes tumultuous and always stressful (have you seen the TV series Airport? All true!), career in the airline industry. And what a nice beginning to a new life in a new country.

But wait! That flight only got us as far as London. We still had to somehow get to Dijon with our 158kg of luggage (hey, our whole lives were packed in those suitcases!)! So we hunted around for the United desk and got advice from a ticketing agent. He suggested that we try to standby for a British Midlands flight to Paris as there were lots of them and we were sure to get on quite easily. I think my definition of quite easily is a bit different to his because it wasn’t that easy. We missed two flights before we got accepted on the second last flight of the day. A very close call in my opinion. Being stranded in London is not a cheap option! But it was definitely a relief to land in Paris because I knew we were home free, wherever home was now.

So there you go. Getting to France was a saga in itself. It should have been easy except that we travelled on standby, with all our possessions packed into four 32kg checked bags and two 15kg hand bags. And instead of flying directly from Sydney to San Francisco and then on to Paris, we ended up spending 76 hours travelling to our final destination, via San Francisco, Newark, London and Paris, with a couple of 12 hour layovers in there for good measure. And I still can’t believe we slept right through the First Class flight!