Table of Contents for this Episode
Categories: Learn French, Provence
Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 613, six cent trente.
Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.
Today on the podcast: Learning French Later in Life
Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with the wonderful Nan and Marty Deniston, longtime listeners who spent three months in Avignon to sharpen their French.
They share how they found a private tutor, structured days around lessons and excursions, leased a car through Peugeot’s long-term tourist program, rented out their own home to cover the costs, and found villages most tourists never see.
Podcast supporters
Annie: [00:01:00] Before we start, this show runs on listener support. If you want to work with me directly, I do itinerary consults, I write tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, and I do day trips around the southwest of France in my electric car. And you can read about all of that at joinusinfrance.com/boutique.
And if you shop on Amazon anyway, starting at joinusinfrance.com/amazon costs you nothing but helps the show.
Magazine segment
Annie: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Nan and Marty today, I’ll discuss the Journée du Patrimoine coming up in France, and I’ll also give you an update on my summer vacation, which was all in France, of course.
I am looking for new trip reports, ladies and gentlemen. I’m getting lots of solicitations from people who sell stuff, and that’s not really what I do, is it?
I want you. So if you had a trip to France and you’re game to chat with me about it, whether it was [00:02:00] great or maybe some things weren’t so good, tell me what happened and how it went. I would love to talk to you. Shoot me an email, annie@joinusinfrance.com.
Meet Nan and Marty
Annie: Bonjour, Nan and Marty Deniston, and welcome to Join Us in France.
Marty: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie: Wonderful to have you. I’ve known of you for a long, long time.
You have been supporters of the podcast for quite some time. Introduce yourselves, would you? You come to France a lot, don’t you?
Their France Backstory
Nan: Yes. We’ve been to France probably at least 10 times. The first time I went I was eight years old. My mother’s a French teacher. Neither of us are French, but we certainly love your country and know many, many regions, so it’s a special place for us.
Annie: Right.
Marty: I didn’t start [00:03:00] coming until I was in my late 40s or mid-40s. So I haven’t been as many times as Nan, but I’ve been quite a few times.
Annie: And you both are people who learn French. Like, you have really… We’re going to start there, with your journey on trying to learn French. What have you done, and what has worked for you?
Nan Learns French Early
Nan: Well, I learned French in high school. My mother was a French teacher, as I said. I majored in French at college. I spent my junior year abroad with a French family in Toulouse.
Annie: Ah.
Nan: And so I was fairly conversant as a young adult. Then, of course, we proceeded to have our family, have our careers. Going to France became very difficult. But we continued to take classes. There’s an Alliance Française in where we used to live, and we would meet as often as possible with francophones and speak as much as possible. But for, you know, a long period of time, [00:04:00] it was very difficult to really speak French in any regular manner.
So as we got older and as we approached our retirement, we started focusing more on, that was one of our objectives, to maintain fluency and increase fluency, and also update our French. I mean, you know, we used to joke that we spoke 19th century French- … and we don’t know street French or current French or, you know. So that was one of our focuses, that we really wanted to improve our fluency in French.
Annie: Right.
Marty Starts Later
Marty: My journey was a little bit different. I, when I was in college, I learned Spanish, and I spent a year abroad in Spain, in Madrid, Spain. So I knew Spanish quite well, didn’t know any French. We started going to France, like I said, well, I did, in our mid-40s, and I couldn’t speak a word of French, and so I kind of got tired of that. And so when I was in my 50s, then I decided, “Well, I’m [00:05:00] going to learn French.” And so I started taking French classes in my 50s, and I’m now about 70. So it was more difficult for me, but since I spoke Spanish, I had some understanding of how the grammar worked and all that. But the pronunciation, of course, is completely different.
So, that was my journey.
Annie: Yeah. Yeah. Well, when you come from Spanish, you can drop a few tenses already that we don’t use in French, that we have, but we don’t use them, and they still use them in Spanish, at least in Spain Spanish. But yeah, the grammar is kind of similar, isn’t it? It helps quite a bit.
Marty: That was the hardest thing for me, is that in Spanish you pronounce every syllable, in French, you don’t.
Annie: Ah, you don’t need English either, so you know.
Marty: Yeah. That’s right.
Nan: So as we returned to France, we had made French friends, and they would invite us to their homes, and we would have dinner with them, and we’d talk politics and philosophy. And, you know, Marty being a [00:06:00] lawyer, he loves history and politics, and he was very frustrated that he couldn’t express himself in an intelligent way.
And so that was one of the reasons he just said, “Forget it. I want to learn this language and be able to just communicate with people at a level that we would want to be able to communicate in our own country.”
So that was one of the motivations behind him learning at a later age.
Tools and Practice Habits
Annie: So did you mostly do that with your French classes, or did you use some books, some apps, some programs?
Marty: Oh, French classes, and I bought all sorts of CDs that I would listen to back in the era of CDs. Can you listen to CDs? Yeah. So I used all different methods. I had books. I had classes. I had CDs. I used everything.
Annie: Yeah. I really think that that’s the thing, is when you have a strong determination to learn a language, you will try everything and see what sticks. And progression happens in hops. Like, somehow your [00:07:00] brain understands a concept that you didn’t used to, and so you, you make that hop, and then it’s going to take you a while to get to the next hop. You know what I mean?
Marty: Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Why Immersion Matters
Nan: And currently, at this point, right before we decided to spend the three months in Avignon, we take one-hour conversation classes every other week with a French tutor, and then there’s a group here, we currently live in Santa Barbara, there’s a group here that meets once a week and speaks for an hour and a half. They’re not native French speakers, so, you know, sometimes you can just be repeating mistakes. And there’s another group called Les Français de Santa Barbara that, you know, we attend occasionally. And all of that is helpful, and certainly much better than apps and all that kind of stuff that I think doesn’t do me any good. But it still does not replace a long-term stay in a foreign country where you’re hearing the foreign language from 7:00 AM in the [00:08:00] morning to, you know, midnight at night. There’s no replacement for that.
Annie: Right.
Planning Three Months Avignon
Annie: So tell me about this three months experience in Avignon. I’m dying to hear all about that.
Nan: It was incredible. It took me maybe a year and a half to plan it. As I said, you know, we’ve been working our whole lives, and finally now at this point, we are semi-retired, and so we finally have the luxury of time to do this. A couple years ago, we did a one-week immersion in Avignon with Julie Gaudin, who has a wonderful program called Le Français chez Julie. And it’s in Avignon, and she spends a week or two weeks with her clients. She has a apartment that’s already taken care of. She takes you on excursions. She prepares meals for you. You meet out in the city, and it was a lot of fun, and we really enjoyed Avignon and felt comfortable [00:09:00] there. It was really the perfect city for us. And from there then we planned a longer three months. We chose that because that’s as long as you can stay in France without applying for a long-stay visa. 90 days was all we needed was our passports.
Finding Teachers and Housing
Nan: Julie helped us find another teacher that we could arrange lessons with. She was a professional French as a second language teacher. And we started working our itinerary around that. So first we found the teacher, made the schedule of meeting with her twice a week to learn French, then we proceeded to look for a place to rent in Avignon, and that was a trick. That was probably the harder part because I had pretty strict parameters. I wanted it to be extramuros, which is right outside of the walls, the medieval walls of Avignon, because we wanted to lease a [00:10:00] car. So I needed parking, but we also wanted it to be within walking distance to the cité medieval.
So I spent quite a bit of time looking at VRBO, looking at Gîtes de France, looking at the websites of the Office de Tourisme. It took me probably six months of poring through all the options, and I finally found the absolutely perfect place. The parameters were it had to have a couple of bedrooms, couple of bathrooms, because we were planning on hosting friends and family. It was a turn-of-the-century gorgeous French house that happened to belong to an American man and his family. It was just ideal for us.
So once that piece of the puzzle got put into place, we were kind of ready to go, and everything else fell into place after that.
Annie: Right. So you started out with Julie Gaudin, and then you went to Fanny Fourés, who were both [00:11:00] in Avignon. Why did you switch?
Nan: Because Julie Gaudin only does intense one to two-week immersions. She is not available for a longer period of time.
Annie: I get it. Okay.
Nan: It’s a different business model. So I knew that Julie, who’s an Avignonnaise, she’s lived in Avignon most of her life, would know other resources, and she did. She was friends with Fanny Foures, who’s a certified teacher, and meets with people in her apartment. That was step one, finding the right teacher who would meet with us, who could adjust to our levels, because Marty and I are, you know, slightly different levels.
Marty: Usually different levels.
Annie: Yes.
Nan: So, we just really fell in love with Fanny. We became really good friends with her because basically it was one hour of conversation.
Marty: It was two hours.
Nan: Two hours. Sorry.
Marty: Two hours at a pub.
Nan: And, you know, we had a million questions. “How do you say this? How do you [00:12:00] say that?” She was really trying to help us speak current French and make ourselves understood and be able to speak to each other and make jokes and, you know. It was… She was just wonderful, and we became pretty close friends and talked to her about all kinds of things, politics, you know, culture, all the things going on in Avignon.
She had a million ideas for us, suggestions of where to go to eat in Corsica and Côte d’Azur, and she was just an incredible resource, far more than just a French teacher.
Marty: Yeah. If I could add something around that, for me as a learner of French later in life, it was a huge help to just sit with a native French speaker for two hours and just speak French the whole time and listen to French and not have to, you know, you’re not doing grammar lessons or sentence structures or anything like that. You’re just listening and saying, [00:13:00] and that really helped me because I would get hung up on grammar and things like that when I’m taking classes.
But when you’re just speaking French for two hours straight, you don’t think about that. You don’t think about how the word is spelled or how the sentence is structured. You just, you listen and repeat. And that really helped me a lot.
Annie: Right. I have the same experience with my Spanish teacher, who’s a wonderful young man. We couldn’t be possibly more different people. Like, we have nothing in common other than his parents rent me the parking garage that I use when I go to Spain, and they happened to mention that their son was a Spanish teacher. I said, “Oh, I should talk to him.” And so I did. But it’s wonderful because I get to talk for a whole hour, and I do 90% of the talking. Like, he will really keep it minimal, and only if I ask him a direct question, and then he takes notes of everything I say. And every now and then he will stop me and say, “Okay, let’s go back, and I need to explain [00:14:00] this, or give you a suggestion. And then he writes it correctly.
And from one lesson to the other, I just go back and review what he’s written. And sometimes it sticks, and sometimes he has to correct me 50 times. But at least I’m talking, and that’s really what makes all the difference, is that you forget about your hangups and you just talk to someone.
Marty: Yeah, and you just, you learn phrases and expressions and if you just repeat them in a conversation, you start to remember them.
Nan: Mm-hmm. It’s really mimicry.
Zoom Tutors Anywhere
Nan: And for those listeners that don’t have the time or means to actually go to France, there’s another option. You can Zoom with people all the time. My sister has a tutor who’s in Aix-en-Provence that we actually met when she came over. They talk to each other for an hour or two over Zoom, and it’s really effective. So I highly recommend that method as well to your listeners.
Annie: Yes. Yes. And I do the same with my Spanish teacher. He’s in the same village where, the same city where I go, [00:15:00] but I’ve only met him personally twice. The rest of the time it’s over… Well, we use Teams, but it’s the same.Clockwork once a week, I mean, unless I’m away and really unable to accommodate the one hour. But I, I rarely skip, I really enjoy it. And every week I’m like, “Okay, what can I tell him about?” I try to show him that I’m not that old.
Nan: Exactly. Yeah, because we’re a lot older than our teacher, Fanny. But we really became, you know, good friends and enjoyed her and talked all kinds of stuff.
Annie: Yes, yes, yes.
Best Season to Stay
Annie: And so this long-term stay you did was September through December, you wrote that, it was because of weather and fewer tourists. That’s something to consider as well, especially for Avignon.
Marty: Right. Right.
Nan: Exactly.
Marty: Yeah. There were still tourists there, of course, but not like in the summertime.
Annie: Right.
Peugeot Long Term Lease
Annie: Tell me about the lease that you did through Peugeot. I’m interested in that because a lot of people ask about this.
Nan: Yes. It was a [00:16:00] wonderful program, and it’s very easy to do. Highly recommend to your listeners who plan on staying between 21 days and 175 days. So for anybody who plans on going to Europe, and this is not just France, it’s anywhere in the European Union, and you plan on staying longer than three weeks, it’s called the TT program, Temporary Transit. It’s available to all non-European Union members, and it’s just through Auto Europe, I believe. You get a brand-new Peugeot. So it’s like a lease in the US. The rate for the three months was $2,500 all in, total. The insurance is incredible. There’s no deductible. You’re insured on everything. Something goes wrong with your car, and they literally deliver you a brand-new car. You have the latest model. I think it’s Peugeot, Renault, and Citroën are the three main manufacturers. And you just pick up your car similar to, you know, any other [00:17:00] rental. The paperwork is very easy. It’s all done in advance. And then you drop it off at the same place three months later and off you go. So as far as insurance and cost, it is a wonderful program for anybody who’s planning on staying in Europe for a long-term period.
Annie: You drove a lot and you never got a speeding ticket.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: And because thanks to Waze, which can be put into French, by the way, and it warns you when there’s a zone de contrôle, which is a speed trap or whatever they call it in English. Thanks to Waze, it always told me when I was coming up to a place where, you know, there was cameras. And I was very careful because I’ve listened to your podcast, all 500 episodes, and taken note of how easy it is to get speeding tickets. But honestly, I would say that it’s very hard to speed in France, at least I believe it is. The roads [00:18:00] are narrow. You know, there’s a lot of speed bumps. The French system is excellent. It’s really quite difficult to get going too fast. I was really proud of that because I was kind of expecting some speeding tickets, but I didn’t get any.
Annie: Good for you. That’s fantastic. That’s really fantastic.
Oh, you even took the ferry to Corsica. How fun.
Nan: Oh, it was wonderful. Yeah, we just drove down to Marseille, drove on the ferry, spent the night and then the next morning at 7:00 we arrived at Ajaccio, drove off the ferry and spent 10 days in Corsica. And it was inspired by one of your episodes, because you’ve interviewed a couple of experts on Corsica, and we loved Corsica.
We’re Californians, so we’re used to, you know, beautiful beaches and natural, rocky, mountainous geography, and we felt right at home, and it was just absolutely gorgeous. We really enjoyed [00:19:00] that.
Annie: Yeah, Corsica is gorgeous, and Marseille is also very nice. I was surprised. I spent just one day. I was taken around recently by the lady who, one of the people who runs the tourist office in Marseille, and the way she showed it to me, I thought, “Oh, wow, this is, this is a really nice place.” And we’ll do an episode with her soon. But, yeah, there’s so much to visit in France.
How did you structure your days? What did you do besides the French lessons?
Nan: Okay, so first thing in the morning, as all French do, we walk down to the boulangerie, and the Sept/Sept.
So, you know, we would go down, just down the street and get our croissant or chocolatine, and have breakfast. We planned our day the night before. Even though there’s all kinds of technology nowadays, Waze and things like that, I actually brought my Michelin atlas, that is my Bible.
And I studied the night before the roads, for the scenic routes, [00:20:00] and Marty and I would talk about what we wanted to do. Our basic structure for the week was we had two two-hour conversation classes with Fanny every week, and then we would go to lunch, because between noon and 2:00 you don’t fight the system, you go to lunch and enjoy a nice two-hour lunch, because everything’s closed anyway. And then we would take probably three to four excursions a week, to the Vaucluse villages or the Luberon or go across the Rhône River to the Gard. I had at least 75 villages and places on the list that I was going to go, so we were pretty organized when we left.
We had a lot of things that we planned to do. We took cooking classes. That was a lot of fun. One of our assignments was to choose a meal and go to Les Halles and order all the elements of the meal and then prepare the meal and then have Fanny come and [00:21:00] taste it and analyze how well we did and…
Marty: Yeah. We prepared a cassoulet, so we wanted to prepare something more local. So that’s what we… We picked out all the ingredients at Les Halles to prepare that, and then we cooked it, and then we had our French teacher come over for lunch and try it out. So that was a lot of fun. And Nan also took a cooking class at La Mirande, which is a real fancy hotel in Avignon, and there’s a old medieval kitchen underground.
Annie: Wow.
Marty: And they give cooking classes there. So Nan went to a class there, and of course it was all in French. So she was able to, you know, listen to an entire cooking class for a couple hours in French. And then we also took a cooking class at the Les Halles that was given by an American who’s lived in France for about 20 years and is married to a French woman. So we took a cooking [00:22:00] class there and cooked some local dishes. So that was a lot of fun, and that was in French, and English too for people who didn’t speak French. So we did that, and then the day trips. The days we wouldn’t have French classes, we would go places just for the day. We would get in the car, you know, 9:00 in the morning, drive out and see whatever we were going to see that day, have lunch wherever we were going, and then get back that night.
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Favorite Towns and Gems
Annie: Well, since you saw so many places, do you have favorites that you can recommend? I see you listed a few. I would have to agree with you on a lot of those.
Marty: Yeah. I’ll mention a couple of them, and Nan can mention some. For me the top ones were Vaison-la-Romaine was excellent for people who like Roman history, and they also have a neat medieval town there.
Nan: Gorgeous.
Marty: Arles was incredible. We both loved Arles a lot. We liked Cassis. That was really a [00:23:00] beautiful seaside town. And Nan, you can mention some as well.
Nan: I mean, I like old and lost and not over-touristy. So one of the hidden gems for me was Séguret, which is this charming little village perched on a hillside that couldn’t be cuter. It’s teeny, though. And we just happened to arrive on a Saturday when there was a wedding going on, and we peeked into the wedding, and it was just, the views were beautiful. But, you know, two months later, right before we left, we went back, and it was deader than a doornail. So-
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: I also adored Oppède-le-Vieux, which is another lost little town where you walk up along a gorgeous trail. It was just magical. We had high hopes for certain towns that we found over- You know, over popular. Eze was a disappointment, even though it was kind of cute. [00:24:00] It had a turnstile going into it, and just piles of tourists, and we just kind of felt oppressed by the over popularity of it. Uzès is another one that, that fewer people go to that is completely worth going to. It’s in the Gard, right next to the Pont du Gard, probably like 35-minute drive from Avignon, and it has a lot of things to recommend it.
Annie: Right. A lot of people confuse the two, Eze and Uzès, because they kind of sound the same. But Eze is very close to Italy. It’s very close to Monaco, whereas Uzès is close to the Pont du Gard and close to Nîmes and places like that. It’s in Occitanie, so it’s much further west.
Nan: Right.
Marty: Yeah. We also like going to old monasteries and so we went to a couple of those. Montmajour, which is just outside of Arles. You can actually see it [00:25:00] from Arles. Fontfroide, in southern France was beautiful. We went there as well, and quite a few other monasteries we went to, but those were two of the highlights.
Annie: Yeah, you have the time, you had the time to visit all these beautiful places. That’s wonderful.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: Right.
Avignon Area Highlights
Nan: We even got bus passes so we could take the bus up to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. That’s another one that we want to mention because in Avignon you get a two for one, which you do often in France. Right across the river on the other side of the Rhône is the Gard department, and there’s a gorgeous village called Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, which is within easy sight of Avignon.
In fact, the two towns used to be at war with each other, and so they built up all these, you know, ramparts and fortifications, and you can get up on the top of the Palais des Papes and look across and think, “Wow, what is that gorgeous town over there that’s all walled?” And it takes [00:26:00] 10 minutes, you know, to get over there. And it’s just a charming town. So Avignon was really magical. And also between Villeneuve and Avignon along the Rhône River, there’s a huge island called Île de la Barthelasse, which you can ride bikes all around. The Avignonnais, the people from Avignon, spend their weekends on their bikes just riding all throughout this gorgeous natural area. So there’s just a ton to do in Avignon. There’s at least eight or nine museums. There’s the Palais des Papes and tons of beautiful hôtel particulier, which is the, you know, the mansions that used to be lived in by the cardinals, during the Pope’s era. And then you’ve got, you know, the Rhône River, and you’ve got all these beautiful villages, not to mention Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which if you like wine, or even if you don’t like wine, it’s a beautiful area because all the [00:27:00] wineries are in gorgeous châteaus, and just going to them is part of the fun. So you can spend months in that area, months and months and not see the same thing twice.
Marty: Yeah.
Bikes and French Only Tours
Marty: I wanted to mention another thing we did was, we bought used bicycles, because we’d be able to ride around town and not have to be in a car all the time. And so our French teacher said, “Oh, well, there’s this, there’s this local association that takes used bikes in from people, and you can go buy them, and they’re really cheap.” So, we bought them for, like, 50 euros, and so we had them for three months, and we would ride all over Avignon in them, and there’s all these bike paths along the Rhône River, that you can ride.
Annie: Right. Yeah. So, it sounds to me like you kind of tried to turn French a little bit, didn’t you?
Marty: Yes. Yeah. And all the sites that we went to, if there were any tours that were being given, we would always take the tours in French. And we were [00:28:00] usually the only Americans on the tour, and everybody else was French.
Talk To Locals
Nan: You know, everybody’s curious about what’s life like in the US or what are foreigners like? But most of the time, you know, you don’t have the language ability to really ask people probing personal questions. And so it gave us an opportunity to learn from them and vice versa. You just start talking to people, and before you know it, you’re learning all kinds of stuff. And it just so happened that our neighbor living next door to us in this rental home was the deputy director of the Chamber of Commerce for the Vaucluse.
Annie: Oh, wow.
Nan: And so invited them over immediately for apéro- … and while we’re… Well, I have personal friends that own this, this winery. You got to go there and make sure go here. It was just the resources that are open to you once you start talking to people, and you are not [00:29:00] required to speak fluent French. So your listeners who think, “Oh, this is never going to happen because my French isn’t good enough-” Not necessary. You just have to have the right personality. You have to have the guts to talk to people.
Marty: You have me having started to learn French in my 50s is any… I’m nowhere close to fluent, but people could understand what I was saying, and, you know, you could carry on a conversation with them. So yeah, you shouldn’t be hesitant about going over there and trying your French, because you do not have to be fluent to be able to talk with people.
Nan: Right. The key ingredients is curiosity. You have to have the interest. You have to ask people, you know, politely obviously, but asking people their opinion, asking, “What do you think of this?” or, “What’s happening there?” opens up a world of answers.
Annie: Oh, definitely.
Nan: Yeah. People love to be asked questions.
Annie: This is vital. Like, talk to the people around you and ask [00:30:00] them whatever pops into your mind. Yeah, like, “Why is it like this?” Or, “Is it always like this?” Like, “Is it always this empty?” Is it… You will learn things just by chatting to people.
Marty: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And most people are, you know, interested to talk with a foreigner, you know, too. They’re interested in your country too, so.
Annie: Yeah.
French Rhythm Gotchas
Annie: Were there some gotchas, some things you learned that you hadn’t really anticipated, things that didn’t work out so well?
Marty: That didn’t work out well, I would say that my two… I had several gripes that, you know, about France, but there’s nothing that I can do to change them. First of all, everything closes down from noon to 2:00, which is, you know, right in the middle of the day when you want to be out seeing sights and things like that. I didn’t like that. I don’t particularly like eating two-hour lunches every day.
Annie: Yeah. You do need to plan your visits. Like, you have to check on the opening times [00:31:00] because you will be surprised sometimes.
Marty: The French apparently do not believe in shifts at jobs. You know, everybody leaves at the same time and comes back at the same time. You know, we would be in museums, and they would say, “Oh, we’re closing down, you know, for the next two hours.” It’s like, You mean you don’t have somebody here that can fill in for these two hours while you’re having lunch?” “Nope. The whole thing closes down.”
Annie: Yeah.
Marty: And then everything is, all the store- most of the stores at least, are closed on Mondays and Sundays, so very little is open on Mondays and Sundays. And then the other complaint… It sounds like I had a lot of complaints, because I, I really didn’t. But, since you brought it up, the weather, once you get into November, in that area of France, there’s something called le mistral, and it’s this, this super cold wind that, that blows through, and it lowers the degree, the temperature by 20 degrees. So it’s, it gets quite [00:32:00] cold in November.
Annie: It feels very cold, yes.
Marty: Yeah, yeah. So, but I really had very few complaints. Those are just, you know, a few of the ones that stood out for-
Annie: Culturally, we really don’t think that places should be open all the time. Like, you could think, oh, perhaps they could go on a skeleton crew, just have somebody at the door, letting people in or whatever. But they don’t want to do that because what if something happens and they don’t have anybody else to work with them or to intervene or whatever. It’s just they’d rather make you wait.
Marty: We were over there when the break-in at the Louvre took place too.
Annie: Oh, yeah.
Marty: So we can understand why museums would want to at least have some security guards around.
Slow Down And Savor
Nan: But in my mind, that’s the beauty of the French life. It’s the l’art de vivre, joie de vivre. We Americans are efficiency experts. We’re always thinking about how much can you cram in in the least amount of time. And it forced us literally, [00:33:00] to slow down, enjoy lunch for two hours, and not be trying to check a thousand boxes a day. Now, for those of your listeners who go to Paris, a lot of this is not relevant, because, you know, Paris is a city where things are open all the time. But if you start getting into the provinces and the smaller towns, you do have to think about the rhythm of French life, and the rhythm of French life revolves around meals. And you just have to stop, you know, thinking about eating a sandwich at your desk and rushing to the next thing. You just have to start enjoying life and focusing on that beautiful meal, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. That’s why we adore France.
Annie: Yeah. There’s not much of a point having eating, wolfing down a sandwich in 15 minutes if you can’t go back to the activity you had planned until 2:00 anyway, right?
Marty: Right.
Nan: Right. The museum’s not open [00:34:00] anyway, so you might as well do like all the French people, exit from the chateau or the museum or whatever it is you went to, and go to the one or two restaurants that are in that town. Make sure you show up right before noon, or it’s going to be, “Désolé, madame.” You know, you’re not going to get a table. But once you learn that, once you learn the system and you don’t try to fight it, life is excellent. We really, really enjoyed it. Of course, the minute we got back to the US, we were back to our running around and efficiency scene. But, you know, that’s what’s so beautiful about France. That’s why people love France so much.
Annie: And it’s very important also to mention that finding a place to eat out on Sunday nights and Mondays can be difficult. Not in Paris, not in cities, but when you’re in smaller places, they’ve worked all week, they close, I mean, they do lunch on Sunday. Not always, some [00:35:00] just serve till Saturday night, and then they close Sunday-Monday. Make sure you check on restaurants, on opening and closing times, and don’t try to do more than a couple of things a day, like a couple of visits. If you like museums, go to one in the morning, one in the afternoon, the end. You can’t do more than that.
Nan: Right.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: Pay attention to hors saison, which is out of season. The French use that all the time, and, you know, to us, it seems like, wow, the weather’s great. People are here. Why is it out of season? But they definitely, you know, hew to a certain seasonal rhythm in France. There are times when things are going to be closed, and so you just do less, or you adjust your schedule.
Marty: Yeah, we were in some small little towns, like one little mountain town I remember in the Alps we were at, and there was only a couple restaurants in town that were open for dinner that night. And, you know, they only had, like, five [00:36:00] or six tables, so if you didn’t show up right when they opened, you weren’t going to get a table.
Nan: Yeah, we snuck in, you know, and we were all jammed together, which was really fun because we were right next to a guy, it was hunting season had just started, and he was a local. And we started a conversation with him, and he was telling us all about les sangliers, the wild boars- … that he was really excited about hunting. And then the people on the left of us had just gone hiking, and they were giving us all these recommendations.
It was incredible. I mean, you know, that’s the true beauty of travel, being able to talk to people halfway across the world and learning the wonderful places to go. And you know, that’s why we love doing it. It’s just magical.
Annie: Yeah.
Skip Influencer Hype
Annie: And truly, people, when they ask, this happens to me almost every day, people ask me for restaurant recommendations. And unless they’re in Paris, half of the time I feel like saying, [00:37:00] “You’ll eat wherever is open,” because you’re not going to have that many choices.
Nan: The whole idea that there’s one best restaurant, one best boulangerie, one best anything, is ridiculous. And that is perpetrated by the influencers and people who have something to sell. People need to use their own, you know, their own resources. And actually, one of the resources that we love is the Guide Michelin. We bought them in, you know, at our local bookstore in Avignon, and I have one for Provence, Corsica, and Côte d’Azur. And, you know, old-fashioned guidebooks are just wonderful.
Annie: Yeah. The Green Guide, you mean, right?
Marty: Yes.
Nan: Yeah. Exactly.
Marty: Yes.
Nan: Your listeners should really do some of their own research and not count on, you know, oh, I’ve got to go to this one restaurant, or life is just, you know, not going to be good.
Annie: Yeah.
Marty: We found the best source for restaurant recommendations is just talking [00:38:00] to local people.
Nan: Mm-hmm.
Marty: You know, if you’re staying in a hotel, if there’s somebody at the front desk when you’re checking in, you say, “Oh, where’s some good places, you know, to go to dinner here?” Or you meet somebody and you ask them. The local people who live there, they know where the good restaurants are. Like our French teacher, she’s, you know, lives in Avignon, and she gave us tons of great recommendations of places to go that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a guidebook.
Annie: Right. And also, if it’s a special occasion, of course, you should tell people, “Oh, this is for a special occasion,” because French people tend to not spend that much money on dining out. And so most of the time, they’re going to recommend their favorite pizzeria, their favorite, I don’t know, everyday joint sort of, you know, lunch joints, that we have. And you find those just because locally you can see that there’s a lot of people eating in there, and you try it. And sometimes you’re very pleased. Even in small villages, there’s [00:39:00] really cool little places that are unexpected.
Nan: Absolutely.
Great Food For Less
Nan: There is no necessity to spend a bunch of money. I mean, we’re not, you know, Michelin star restaurant type of people. To us, that’sover-choreographed and not even really enjoyable. We like the little local, you know, bistros and the little local family places where you can get a glass of wine for three euros, literally a bottle of wine for eight euros or 10 euros, and eat like kings and queens. There’s absolutely no reason to spend an outrageous amount of money.
The French people expect excellent food at a low price point. They’re just, you know, you guys are used to eating excellent food and getting a good bargain. We Americans think that, you know, the more money you spend, the better things are. That’s not necessarily true in France. So just because it’s expensive doesn’t mean [00:40:00] it’s better, and you can find fantastic restaurants for a complete bargain in France.
Annie: And very often locally, you’re not going to find a lot of fancy restaurants. You’ll find places that French people can afford, which means even if it’s a nice sit-down place between 25 and 35 euros, for lunch or dinner, is a pretty nice place, honestly.
In France, usually, in Paris, probably a little more high season in touristy places it’ll be a little more, but not that much more because they couldn’t stay open year-round with just locals. We don’t go very often to places that are more than 35. That’s like, we just don’t.
Nan: Right. Absolutely, yeah. One thing I wanted to mention, as far as cost, that your listeners might be interested in.
So going to France for three months and renting a place, you know, that’s an expensive proposition. So, we often do home exchange. In this case, we weren’t able to [00:41:00] do it because we’re going to be gone for three months. So we rented out our own house. Now, it may not be possible for all people to do it, but it’s more possible than most of your listeners probably believe.
Annie: Now, you mean you rented your house in the US?
Nan: Yes.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: In the US. So it’s something to consider. There are more people out there who are willing to rent homes for a short period of time than one would imagine. And we didn’t use Airbnb, because I’m not a fan of that at all. We happen to live in Santa Barbara, California, which is, you know, a fairly touristy area. But even if we lived somewhere else, it’s something for your listeners to consider.
Is my house rentable? Yes, there’s some work to be done, but it’s not as hard as you think, and that took a lot of the financial pressure off of us to know that we could spend this wonderful three months in France and not come back to, you know, a total empty wallet or a black hole of money.
Marty: Also, if you’re going for a [00:42:00] shorter period of time, if you’re not going for three months, if you’re only going to go for a week or two weeks, you can do home exchange, which doesn’t cost anything. We’ve done that multiple times in multiple cities, London, Strasbourg, Amsterdam, cities in the US, and you can do it for one or two weeks. You just have to find somebody that’s willing to do the exchange with you, and then they come to your house, you go to their house, and it doesn’t cost anything.
Annie: Right.
Home Exchange Tips
Annie: I haven’t done the simultaneous home exchanges, but there’s also a fair number of people who do home exchange with a secondary residence, where they would be open to letting you use it for longer than just a few days.
And this last one I did in Lyon, it was a fairly young couple who have family nearby, and they were already planning on leaving for a three-day weekend. But when I asked to be there the whole week, they said, “Oh, well, fine, we’ll just go stay with his mom and then her mom.” [00:43:00] And I had their nice place for a whole week. I kind of felt bad, but they were very grateful because they got enough points to go on vacation this summer, so.
Marty: Right. Yeah.
Nan: Right.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: Yeah, we’ve never done a simultaneous exchange. Ours have always been-
Marty: Yeah, we have. Yes, we have.
Nan: Maybe we did.
Marty: Yeah, we have.
Nan: Okay. Most of the time we don’t, though. It’s non-simultaneous. And we don’t do it for points because I don’t… I personally believe that you get a better quality renter if you’re actually going to their home. But we’ve gotten to know the people that we rent or we do home exchange with and become friends with some of them.
Annie: Yeah, no, it’s a really good system. I’ve done it now a few times. There’s been some things where I was like, eh. In Paris, be very, very careful with home exchange in Paris, because there are people who have these teeny little apartments that they don’t maintain very well, and not always pleasant. But most everywhere else I’ve been in France has been really, [00:44:00] really cool. Like, it’s a nice place, and it’s free. You can’t beat free.
Marty: Yeah, it’s free.
Nan: Right.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: So, and I wanted to mention one more bonus of renting a house in France. It happened that the owner, as I mentioned, was American, and he hadn’t been to the house for a while, and he knew that Marty and I spoke French, and there was a whole bunch of work to be done on the house. So he was sending workmen over to repair the shutters and put in screens and, you know, there was a flood that happened. And this to me was wonderful because I got to play house and talk to the workmen, speak French, learn all kinds of, you know, detailed technical terms-
Marty: Vocabulary.
Nan: … I would never, ever, you know, know. But I didn’t have to pay a penny doing it. I was just there, enjoying it, and kind of opening the door to these guys and, you know, asking them a bunch of questions and working on the garden. So it’s kind of like playing house without [00:45:00] having the cost, obligation, and everything else of owning a second home in France, which we’re not in any position to do.
Annie: Yeah, yeah. That would be extremely expensive and perhaps not necessary. I mean, that’s, every person decides what works for them. It’s not for me to decide. But you know, I definitely don’t need, feel the need to own a place everywhere I would like to go spend some time.
Marty: Right.
Nan: Exactly.
Marty: Exactly.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Renting Without Airbnb
Annie: All right, so you mentioned that, um, you’re not a fan of Airbnb. Neither am I, really. So I’ll put a link to Home Exchange, and also booking.com has a very good kind of apartment rental system that, I’ve liked it. I’ve used it a few times, and I’ve liked it, so perhaps that’s another one to consider.
Airbnb for, I know around Toulouse, for an Airbnb, you’re going to pay 2,000 to 2,500 for the month for an apartment or a [00:46:00] house that would probably be on the long-term rental market for 1,000 or 1,200. So, you know, you’re not getting fabulous houses, but you’re paying fabulous houses prices.
Nan: Exactly. Yeah, I actually found the house that we ended up renting through VRBO. It took me a while because I had to, uh, you know, there’s a lot of houses on there.
Annie: VRBO is also a good solution, yes.
Nan: But what happened was, and, you know, I don’t want to get the guy in trouble, but, he found us, through conversations, he found us directly, and we worked out a much lower price than what VRBO would’ve charged.
Annie: Right. Right.
Nan: Got to do that by having detailed conversations with each other.
Annie: Gîtes de France is also another good place to look for long-term, you know, but it’s never for more than three months because after that you have to get in the, kind of the, in the regular rental market. So if [00:47:00] it’s a furnished apartment or house, breaking the lease is pretty easy. If it’s unfurnished, then obviously for visitors who are only going to be here for six months, that wouldn’t work anyway.
Nan: Right.
Annie: You’re not going to buy a whole bunch of furniture just for six months. But for furnished houses or apartments, if you can… I had a conversation yesterday because my good friends from California are moving to France, and I found a really nice house not far from mine, that’s a couple thousand euros a month, but it’s furnished. And I said, “Well, these are Californians, they’re moving, so they will eventually buy their own place, but they need a place to land in, you know, arrive.” And he said, “Well, just get them to talk to GarantMe, which is a kind of an insurance for long-term rentals, and once they have the certification from GarantMe, call me and we can set you up.” [00:48:00] You just need to talk to people. Like what you were saying before, just talk to people. Explain what the situation is and hopefully it’ll all work out.
Nan: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, three months is really the perfect time. It’s quite a long time. It was enough for us to feel that we had a good immersion experience. The house was completely furnished and equipped. We needed nothing. So it was a perfect setup for us. So I would recommend to your listeners that, you know, if they have the luxury of three months, that’s a perfect time. And there’s lots available.
Marty: And our French definitely did improve for sure.
Nan: Right.
Annie: Of course. Of course. With all the people you connected with, how could it not?
Marty: Right.
Annie: Mm-hmm. That’s wonderful.
Well, Nan and Marty, you are a lot of fun. I love talking to you.
Toulouse And Day Trips
Annie: You should do the same thing around Toulouse.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: We’d love to.
Marty: Yeah. We love Toulouse. That’s a great city.
Annie: Toulouse also has the advantage that we have a lot of day trips out of [00:49:00] Toulouse. It’s not quite as fancy a city as Lyon, for example. Similar size, but not as fancy as Lyon. But we do have a lot of wonderful day trips out of Toulouse. But again, if you did that, you would have to be careful with dates because things do close in hors saison. Things do close.
Nan: And you have the Pyrenees near Toulouse, and that’s magical.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: You know, we really enjoyed. We listened to your program and went to the Grotte de Niaux, and that was incredible.
Marty: Yeah.
Nan: Foix and all those beautiful towns in the Pyrenees. Toulouse is incredible. So, you know, I just, I think it’s really important to choose a city that’s large enough to have enough to do for three months, and then those wonderful excursions around it.
Annie: Yeah, you knew exactly what you wanted.
Driving Medieval Centers
Annie: You wanted to be close enough to the city so you can walk in, but also park. Because in Avignon, that’s a problem. Once you’re within the walls-
Nan: Yeah. No, I [00:50:00] got caught once. We went, we made the mistake of driving to Les Halles once, and getting out of Avignon, I was terrified. I thought I was going down the wrong way, and I didn’t know how I was going to back out, and- … that was probably one of my scariest moments as a driver, and I would not recommend driving in these little teeny medieval towns unless you’ve got a, you’re a nervy person.
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s not for everybody, and it’s not even for me. If I can avoid driving in medieval city centers, I will avoid it because it’s awfully close. Even if you don’t hit anything, it’s awfully close.
Marty: Yeah. It is.
Nan: Yes, definitely. Definitely. Yeah.
Farewell And Thanks
Annie: Well, Nan and Marty, thank you so much for talking to me. You have been wonderful.
And, well, many more great trips to France to both of you.
Marty: Oh, thank you.
Nan: Thank you.
Marty: And thank you for having us.
Nan: Yeah.
Marty: Really enjoy your show.
Nan: Oh, you are a treasure. We’ve listened to all of your episodes, and I’ve learned so much, and we’ve really used it for our trips. You and [00:51:00] Elyse are just incredible. We really enjoy your program, and thank you.
Annie: Well, thank you.
Marty: Yeah.
Annie: Thank you, thank you.
Marty: Give our best to Elyse. She gave us a tour a couple years ago of, in Toulouse. We went on one of her tours there.
Annie: She’s fun. She’s fun. Yeah. Yeah. I will. I’ll see her, I think I see her tomorrow, so.
Marty: Okay. Nice.
Nan: Merci beaucoup, Annie.
Annie: Merci. Au revoir.
Marty: Bye.
Nan: Au revoir.
Thank you Patrons
Annie: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patreons get several exclusive rewards for doing that. You can see them at patreon.com/joinus.
And a special shout-out this week to my new Join Us in France champion, Barb.
I would love for you to join them, too. You can do it for very little money, three bucks a month as a matter of fact, but [00:52:00] if you can pledge more, that’s wonderful.
Patreon is really where my most secure source of income is.
I know more or less how much I’m going to get every month, and that matters a lot to an indie podcaster like me.
And to support Elyse, of course, go to patreon.com/elysart.
If you want to learn about my VoiceMap tours of Paris or my day trips around Toulouse in my EV or even take a look at my cookbook, Join Us at the Table, you can do that at joinusinfrance.com/boutique.
Journées du Patrimoine
Annie: Now, let’s talk about the Journées du Patrimoine. If you’re going to be in France on September 19th and 20th, 2026, don’t miss the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine. This is the weekend when thousands of historic and unusual places all over France open their doors to visitors, and often [00:53:00] for free. You can visit everything from chateaux, churches, and museums to government buildings, military sites, workshops, and private homes that are normally closed to the public.
There are also guided tours, demonstrations by craftspeople, concerts, exhibitions, and special behind-the-scenes visits.
Annie: For example, more than 100 monuments run by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux are opening free of charge this year.
In Paris, many places such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Quai d’Orsay, the Italian Embassy are offering special visits.
One important tip, don’t assume that free means you can simply show up. Many of the most interesting visits have limited capacity and require a reservation, sometimes with a free timed ticket. Others don’t require a reservation at all, so go to the official [00:54:00] Journées du Patrimoine site, I will put a link in the show notes, which are going to be at joinusinfrance.com/613.
And you can check out what’s happening and drill down to the website or the venue that is interesting to you, and try to see when the reservations are open. Try to do it as soon as you can because the most popular tickets disappear very quickly.
Annie’s Summer Vacation 2026
Annie: Now, about my summer vacation. My husband and I set off from Toulouse in my electric car, and we drove just about 600 kilometers to stay in Cholet for the night. Cholet is a city of about 55,000 inhabitants in the Maine-et-Loire department, Pays de la Loire region. The little bit of it that I saw was really nice.
We had a nice dinner on the main plaza. I looked around, thought it was very interesting. But the real reason we went is because we were going to visit Le Puy du Fou [00:55:00] historical theme park the next day. It’s a pretty large theme park, and we spent the whole day there.
We entered the park as soon as it opened, and we didn’t leave until they kicked us out just before midnight. I absolutely loved it. I liked it more than I thought I would. I wouldn’t say that you should go just to learn history because they take liberties and they simplify things too much, but the productions are so good.
You can see a series of spectacular historical performances. We did not have time to see them all. To do that, you really need two days, but we managed to see six or seven of them. Our favorites were Le Mime et l’Etoile. That’s a staged, live, black and white silent film set with actors performing in front of moving sets, a very large moving set.
I had never seen anything like it. I loved it. It’s received several major international awards since it [00:56:00] opened in 2023. The other one we both loved with the Cine-Cine Late At Night, absolutely fantastic.
I mean, overall, I liked it better than Disney because there are no rides at Puy du Fou, and I’m a scaredy-cat, and I … Many rides I won’t do anyway. But this is just shows, really, really good shows. So I really, really loved it.
Then we drove another 350 kilometers to Brest in the Finistère department where we spent a week.
We had great weather. It was not too cold, not too hot. Summer 2026 will stay in the books as the awful year where we had five heat waves in a row in France. But in Brest it was just right. It was fantastic. We went to visit many towns on the coast around Brest, both going west and north and south.
I won’t list them all here. My goodness, Brittany is [00:57:00] so beautiful. Great, great landscapes, fantastic walking paths. Great boating opportunities, biking. I mean, if you love nature, you are going to love Bretagne. And we had lovely galette, and kouign-amann, and Breitz Cola. The food is great as well. We went to the Festival des Cornouailles in Quimper, for a heavy dose of Breton pride and bagpipes.
They blew me away, almost literally. I loved it. It was a great ambiance, fun events. Do bring earplugs. And if you’re going by car, use their park and ride areas.
Next, we drove to Lorient, they were also having the Interceltique Festival, but I didn’t go to that because my ears were still ringing from the previous weekend from all the bagpipes, and the two festivals share a lot of similarities except that it’s even bigger in Lorient.
More [00:58:00] groups come to perform, there are competitions, and they come from all over the Celtic world, you know, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, England. It’s a huge deal. The Interceltique is a huge deal. But there is lots to do and see around Lorient as well.
We love the K3 La Base. It’s a U-boat, German World War II construction. It was really impressive. The tour is not to be missed. And we also, really liked the French submarine Le Flore.
I also went to Carnac, Pont-Aven, Port Louis, Aure, Vannes, the Poul-Fetan Breton Village, which is a nice reproduction of what life was like in Brittany in the 1800s.
I’m missing many beautiful, beautiful area.
When I go somewhere, I love to try and see everything. Try all the attractions, the museums, I go into all the churches. I saw some amazing church art. These are long days for [00:59:00] me on vacation because I want to see it all. That’s how I can do quality itinerary consults, where I can make first-hand recommendations based on your specific needs and wants.
And I know people use ChatGPT for itineraries, and it’s better than nothing, but expect a lot of surprises because guess what? I also run my ideas through ChatGPT, and then when I show up, oh, sometimes, surprise, it’s not at all what they said or it’s closed or there isn’t anything there or they give you the wrong address or whatever.
Anyway. Yeah. You can do better than that.
I have to say that everything we did was in French, and we both speak French, so it was not a problem. I looked, most places had translations available, but not all.
Puy du Fou had no English that we could find. When we asked, we were told that the new app will have some way to translate all the words that you hear, but it wasn’t working [01:00:00] yet.
But it’s like any show, if you don’t know the language, it’s not as fun. Visually, the show is still amazing. The music is amazing. You know… I mean, you’re coming to France. If you don’t speak the language, you’re going to miss out on some stuff necessarily, but it’s still so much fun, in my opinion.
I have many, many hours of great video that I took on this trip. I’m working to share some of it with you on my new channel, Join Us in France Video on YouTube. I’m not very fast because I’m learning, but I’m enjoying the process, so there you have it.
If you want a short recap of the weekly episode or want to hear about France news or know about what’s going on in my life, sign up for my free weekly newsletter at joinusinfrance.com/newsletter.
Bootcamp 2026
Annie: The boot camp is coming up fast, and Elyse and I have everything nailed down by now. Boot campers, start thinking about what to pack. We’re looking forward to having you, early October in [01:01:00] Toulouse.
My thanks to podcast editors Anne and Christian Cotovan, who produced the transcripts.
Next Week on the Podcast
Annie: Next week on the podcast, an episode about Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse with Elyse, and I saw a lot about him in Brest as well.
He was such an interesting person, had a great life. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together. Au revoir.
Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Comments, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.[01:02:00][01:03:00]
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Episode PageCategories: Learn French, Provence