Apartment Pics

Here are our new digs. These pictures were taken by Peter von Ballmoos, friend and colleague, who kindly found the apartment for us.

The Prologue

We thought we'd masquerade as hip people and start a blog about our up-coming year in France. Truthfully, the blog, to no one's surprise, is Nancy's idea; Marty's still not sure what a blog is and is naturally suspicious since it involves typing. We are currently wallowing in the pretension that there are people in the world who may actually be interested in our drivel (besides Nancy's mother, who we suspect will be our only reader - Hi Mom!). If Nancy maintains interest, never a sure-thing, you will be able to get breaking, up-to-the-minute news on La Vie en France from our blog. (Sorry to you Anglo-philes, the sprinkling of foreign phrases throughout the text will be necessary to give the blog a properly pompous flavor.)

Here, as they say in the Tour de France, is the prologue (no Mom, that doesn't mean we're doping, although, if it weren't for that facial hair issue, we'd welcome a little testosterone boost at this point...): We are leaving August 15 and will be living in a furnished two-bedroom apartment in St. Agne, outside of Toulouse. The apartment is about 1.5 miles (as the crow flies) from the research institute where Marty will be working. Yes, for you suspicious tax payers out there, Marty will be working. Nancy will stay busy trying to complete the last two requirements for her Masters in Organizational Management: fluency in a second language (French) and finishing up her research project on land trust mergers. Both of us will take French classes.

For those of you who don't see us regularly, we spent a couple of months in that frantic stage of feeling like we had to take care of the million things that one thinks should be taken care of before leaving for a year. We recently zipped through the triage stage and eliminated things that didn't really need to be done. We are now entering that zen-like, philosophical stage of realizing that none of it really matters. This is a nice phase to be in, although reality may intrude its ugly head again and send us back to the frantic stage (see stage 1) before we depart. We know that we can expect no sympathy because we are, after all, going to be living in France for a year, and who can feel sorry for us about that?