14 September, 2000

It was nice to hear from all of you that e-mailed us. Here is what is going on in France for us:

I (Andrew) have been having a terrible time with both French and American phone companies. US West, which promised to provide call forwarding to France, discovered three days before we left that they couldn't do it after all.

So, I signed up with AT&T, who said they could do it. Yesterday I called to check on my order, and they'd lost all my information, so I'm back to square one. To make matters worse, they refused to work via e-mail and provided only an 800 number to call. I can't call 800 numbers from France. I spent most of yesterday in phone-mail-hell trying to find a real live person I could work with to set this up. Fortunately I have, and barring further disasters I will be reachable at my American business number in a week and a half.

In other news, we are preparing to (possibly) buy a 1985 Audi. We'll look at it Saturday morning. We enquired a week ago, but our landlady, Gabrielle, who would have had to intrepret for us, said "Oh, you should never buy from a private person, just from a dealer." We didn't have the heart to ask her to take us to see it when she was so strongly opposed. But now we know Fred (details below) who says "Oh, you should never buy from a dealer, just from a private person." C'est la vie.

Speaking of Gabrielle, she is our 56-year-old landlady. She's great. She takes us to France Telecom every other day, and then to the bank to try to get everything under way here. She's got a new BMW diesel, and apartment on the hill behind Cannes. She and her friend Jacqueline, who's a bit older, invited us for hors d'oeuvres and drinks (champagne with blackberry liqueur added) yesterday. They live in a delightful 3rd floor apartment that overlooks the center of their town. Jacqueline likes the traffic noise because it reminds her of Paris, where they lived for 15 years. Jacqueline doesn't speak English at all, and I (Andrew) had a long conversation with her in French! It was my first, and very satisfying. She was so nice, and she spoke slowly and used simple words.

They served little pizza-on-ritz crackers, miniature hot-dogs with mustard, quails' eggs, tiny cm3 blocks of cheese, potato chips, and littly pastry sticks that looked as though they should be sweet but were salty. Everything good, except I don't eat eggs.

I'll try to get pictures of them and stick them up here. I've still got no scanner; almost everything is a higher priority. Only: I realized that I can't bill any clients until a buy a printer, so that's important.

Gia's enrolled at the College International du Cannes (or something like that). She starts intensive French classes next week: Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. till noon. It's about 2/3 of the way to downtown from our apartment, or about 3 km; a 10-15 min. bike ride. She's quite excited.

When she went to register, she found a notice on their bulletin board of a man (Fred) wanting someone who was a native speaker of English to proofread a web site I (Andrew) called him yesterday and we had coffee this morning. He was quite nice. His web site is at www.in-cannes.com. He didn't need a proofreader, but he wanted to meet me in case of future need, or a desire for graphic work. We met and had coffee. I had 5 croissants, which he laughed at, saying that I was definitely an American. We arranged that I could help make his site more comprehensible and attractive to Americans and he could help me buy a car, set up internet access here, etc. He lived in Japan for 15 years, but was born here. He's got an American wife.

What else? We're much more at home now; we know where to go to get things, we've figured out how to send mail, etc. The last remaining major hurdle is that we don't know where the laundromat is. I expect that soon that will become a priority. I have only two pairs of shorts and two shirts, as well as a bathing suit. We've been washing by hand, but that can't go on forever.

We get television in French (6 stations) English (2 stations) German (5 stations) Italian (2 stations) and Spanish (1 station). On the English stations the only thing is news and sports. I love motorsports, but the rest isn't that interesting. The news is important since it tells us which vital services are in danger of being interrupted. Right now, we are in the enviable position of having a government that resolved the fuel crisis a week ago. I'm glad I'm not in England. Do you even know there's a fuel crisis, in America? Europe is in danger of grinding to a halt, by all accounts.

We've had a message on our phone for 5 days now, but I can't understand the manual enough to listen to it. That is also becoming a priority.

Our existence is pretty minimal right now. Each day we go out for a ride and get just enough food to last us for a day. We do what has to be done, look around a little, and try to get a little further down the list of "must be done's". This includes things like getting our phone service solidified, getting a bank account, getting residence papers, etc. etc. We haven't really had any time to completely relax and enjoy being here. That will come when life's necessities are on more solid ground.

That's all we can think of for now...