Positive French Administration

Often expats living in France find the administration system difficult to navigate through.  After recently experienced a couple such experiences (mostly with Mr B's bank - it does have to be said where one person being on holiday for 3 weeks can bring a whole house sale grinding to a shuddering stop), today I received word that fairly cheered me up and restored my faith in the country in which I live.

I'm a member of our conseil d'école and at our last meeting an issue was raised by the head teacher regarding the safety of the children entering school in the morning and after lunch now that they no longer had an administrative assistant.  It was decided that the safest thing was for the children to enter by a side gate.  A decision I wholeheartedly supported.

This was before I tried to take the Twinks to school when I discovered that the zebra crossing did not go to the pavement and in fact the children would have to cross the road directly into a car parking space.  I raised the concern with the head teacher but as the building itself is the responsibility of the mairie I duly trotted off to the mairie to discuss my problem with the dangerous parking.  They were very helpful and promised to tell the Adjoint in charge of Travaux on Monday and get back to me.

Two weeks later when I was in getting cantine tickets I was delighted to learn that he had looked, and my idea for a solution had been voted in by the Conseil Municipal, and the work will be carried out shortly.  I don't think that this would be possible in the UK, either to be so reactive, so quickly or even to feel I'd been listened to.  Bonne soirée..

How did we get here?

in 2003, my husband and I (whilst still not married) were on holiday in the Gironde, and bought a house - as you do, intending to use it as a holiday home and to rent it out.  Five months later we moved into our "Coup de Coeur" and started the long process of bringing it up to a decent standard.  By that I mean having more than one plug in each room.

Since then, we've got married, had 2 chilren, moved house, had jobs, gone back to school and become integrated members of a small community of about 1,200 people in the north of France, and are now building a house in a 500 strong rural community.

It's been hard, but then again what we've done would have been hard anywhere, fustrating at times, joyful at others. We've faced challenges - like bilingual dyslexia, hit our head against the brick wall that is the french banking system but, I wouldn't swap it for the world. The hardest thing is missing family and friends.  We are just a family trying to make a living and enjoy a reasonable work/life balance, and this is how we have faced the challenges and  our ramblings...