Aix it is!

We're going to Aix-en-Provence for 6 months after Paris. Cool apartment on rue cardinale, a few blocks from cours mirabeau. Aix is a "college town", with a bit of the atmosphere of my (Jim) hometown: Madison. Filled with art and music. 40 minutes to the mediteranean. 2 hours to skiing in the alps. Here is the view from our front door:

J'ai hâte d'y aller! The date is so soon! I'm really getting excited but I'm also daunted by the to-do's that remain. Hard to do my job and focus on preparing as well.

We're in the throes of a decision: in what village should we spend our winter and spring? Top candidates: Nice and Aix en provence. We were leaning toward Nice (close to sea, close to Italy, close to Alps) but are now gravitating toward Aix (university town, very french, the heart of provence that we love dearly). We hope to decide before next week.

Signed up for 3Jam last week. Soon (Thursday...why do the english think the days of the week merit capitalization?!?!?) our home phone number of 25 years will become virtual. Looking into what it takes to unlock my iPhone so I can use it with orange.fr or some such provider. Just cancelled Netflix (they won't ship overseas and they restrict on-demand to US ip addresses).

Starting to feel real. We have rented our house for the year to a wonderful german couple with kids. Fantastic!
Just committed to our first accomodations in France: 2 months in Paris on Rue Mandar (2nd arrondisement).
Just bought ONE-WAY tickets to europe. We're going to fly to Dublin and spend some time (~ 10 days) in the U.K. (Ireland, Scotland, London) before wandering down to Paris.

A long time since my last post. A number of things have conspired to slow down our exit...most of them positive. We've rescheduled notre sortie to September. This will improve the scenarios for our 2 most difficult efforts: work and renting our house.

Meanwhile on the phone situation...
Google Voice STILL does not have portability but there are others in this space now. 3jam has a cool offering as well. It's not free but close to it. 3jam offers portability so we can keep our home number and calls will be routed to Skype and/or voicemail.

Scouting trip update

Alas, it has been too long since we've updated the site. I (Jim) have been super busy at work so I haven't been able to keep up.

Jane and I recently returned from our "reconnaissance mission" from France. Our goal was to make a decision on a village for our year in France and hob-knob with the local government.

It was wonderful to be in France but it was a lot of work and we covered a lot of territory. Ultimately we failed at our mission. We couldn't nail down a village. The apartment agencies weren't interested in showing us things because we weren't real clients yet...too soon to be looking for a property to rent in March. So...we decided on a new approach. We're renting for the first month in a gite where we have stayed before. We'll use this month to look at properties to rent for the next month. With this approach we'll know exactly what we are getting when we make our decision.

We did meet with the local prefecture to talk about visas, etc. Not surprisingly, the information was less than perfect. She was thrilled that we could speak French so she didn't have to explain in English. However she turned out to be poorly informed (I should have been suspicious when she kept going to the back office to ask questions of her supervisor). Upon further research we have discovered that the paperwork is even easier than we thought. Nothing more than a marriage certificate and passports! All of our translating was for naught!

We spent a few days in Paris and the rest in our beloved Provence. We had a great dinner with an old friend who lives in the suburbs of Paris. He offered to help us with our car purchase when we hit France in March. Very cool.

Upcoming scouting expedition

In a few weeks we're going to France to scout things out. I (Jim) have a technical conference in Paris for 2 days (CITCON 2009) and then we are headed down to Provence for a week. We're hoping to make some decisions about where we will spend our year. We've gotten some good feedback from others that, though beautiful, Avignon will have a lot of tourists. We'd prefer a place where the people are less transient so the locals will be more interested in getting to know us. We've also gotten some advice from other French folks that Aix might be a good choice. I think we'll be visiting lots of towns.

We'd also like to meet with a local appartment agent and check out a few places to get a sense of prices and paperwork.

Finally, we'll meet with a local prefecture to do an advance check on our papers...do we need something else? What are the expectations?

Will we have any time for fun?

Phones

Moving to France presents a couple of interesting phone issues:

1. What do we do about our current home phone number?
2. What kind of phone do we get in France?

The goal for our home phone is to keep our existing telephone number so that the companies who we do business with will still have our existing U.S. phone number. It's not important that we pick-up when called. Rather, it's just important that the caller can call our usual number and leave a message. We can call them back from France using a lot of cheap options. I'm hopeful that we'll be using Google Voice ( http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html ) for this problem. Google voice is expected to add portability sometime later this year so we can have our existing number ported to Google voice. Very cool...and very cheap.

The phone in France is easier. Our contract with Verizon ends pretty close to the month we leave so we'll buy new phones in France and pay-as-you-go for calls. We'll try to use Skype or Google voice for any communications back to the states.