My coat is not warm -
Yet it satisfies your eye -
By hiding the truth -

Glazed crazed iced cover –
Deep sleeping summer promise –
Our pool rests and waits –

….. Waiting for you at Villa Roquette this summer

Fractured cream froth coat
Roquette flowers will push through
March snow is soon gone

I aim to “Suffer A Sea-Change”. A time to alter, a time not to fade, but to make bones of coral and eyes of pearls.

Our home has been the focus of work and investment for over two years, creating apartments and services so we can welcome guests, as we did for ten years in our previous home in Nizas. the problem is I am divided between working on two more apartments and working on the marketing needed to bring paying guests to our home.

Being a simple person, a bear of little brain, I am incapable of doing two things at the same time, so when I am ‘rude mechanical’ mode I am incapable of working on internet sites and writing newsletter, blogging and networking – but when, like now, I work with the keyboard, the vital painting, bricklaying and concreting are vague duties to be done “later”.

The stimulus is the need to earn some money – all we have is invested in our home at Villa Roquette and the Internet has changed from an open playing field to a vast sporting complex. Competition is fierce, so getting clients to our apartments from a web-site is much harder.

Hence the need to ’stiffen the sinews’ and do a bit of loin girding. I cannot do two things at the same time, so I will try to organise my time to both building and writing yet avoid conflict withing the few active grey-cells I have remaining.

Since naming our home Roquette, I have only really begun to notice the huge fields of this magical plant around us (roquette is also known as arugala and rocket). At this time of the year the fields are left to themselves and wild Roquette (there is no domesticated variety) – here is a photo I took today walking the dogs…

Field of Roquette in Montblanc

In the second world war the French resistance fought the occupation of France. near us there are many memorials, this one for the Maquis is near Moreze…

A beautiful sunny Sunday in Languedoc – we drove to a local beauty spot (with Carole my local beauty) Moreze – it is unique in Europe – if you know what a dolomite is then….

For the fifth year running, France has been voted the best place in the world to live by some magazines and journals. This is the reason why hundreds of thousands of educated and qualified people are moving to France to live or to retire.

Being the best does not mean it is perfect, there is a cost, not only in the cost of buying food and shelter, but adapting to a different culture and values.

Comparing income and expenses is simple, there are many websites offering this service such as the one I mention in this reply to a letter today ( http://www.worldsalaries.org/france.shtml ) – but if you need the adrenalin buzz of wheeling and dealing, building a business or developing new ideas – France may not be the most fertile place for your skills and imagination – in fact it is hard to succeed in business anywhere, but just nigh on impossible in France.

It all comes down to the unmeasurable “quality of life” – (if you know parameters I can use to quantify the quality of life I would like to learn)

Her is the mail I replied to a few minutes ago……

===

Hi Tony,

I really enjoyed your post, I can’t remember the link, but you had written “Wisely, Paris built their Disneyland outside the city & they plan to keep it there.”. You articulated in that article exactly what my wife and I experienced in France at different times and exactly why we want to move there- in France life is not always judged in terms of money value.

I have one question in particular I’m trying to answer to help assuage some anxiety I have about this move:
I get the impressive that the French generally save a lot of their paycheck, I think I read somewhere that they saved 10%, which is about 11% more than what the average American saves. I also have the impression that food costs are rather high compared to the US, and rent seems a bit higher too (in Grenoble I’ve found 800 Euro seems to be the going rate for a one bedroom place). I have contradictory impressions; a lower salary, a higher cost of living, and yet higher savings rates than in the US.

The approximate salary I have found for my work is about 50K euro in Paris, and less in the provinces, although I’m not sure yet how much less.

Would this be enough to provide for myself and my wife, own a car, and still save money?

===

Hi,

Income in France is low – average is about 22,000 euro a year – you can get a better idea about income from this site – http://www.worldsalaries.org/france.shtml

However a salary has a lot of social charges paid by the employer – it virtually doubles the cost of employing someone – for this you get the best health care in the world and excellent social services, education etc.

Housing is,expensive, the rent for Grenoble sounds about right, 800 euro a month for an apartment.

Cars are comparatively expensive, as is fuel, about 5 euro a gallon

Food I am told is more expensive than the USA, quality is good and the French are very careful shoppers.

The French are traditionally savers and the 10 percent or so of earnings does not surprise me.

You hit the nail on the head – it is impossible to put a value on the quality of life. With the sort of salary you have been offered you would be considered a wealthy person in France and could live comfortably, nut never luxuriously.

Hope this helps

Best wishes

Tony

I like WordPress and use it on most of the websites I have, not just this Blog, but as a Content Management System on our rental site for our home at http://VillaRoquette.com. I use Google Webmaster Tools to try to keep my sites in order, one of the services they give is to tell you about any Malware or Phishing hacks that appear on your site – the disadvantage is they tell you after you are attacked and that your site is blocked by Google. but at least they tell you where the problem is and how to fix it and get re-established.

I have lost a couple of successful businesses from being hijacked and hacked on the Internet – I suppose this is some sort of reverse success as usually these evil scumbags only hack successful sites – but by keeping software up-to-date and using good passwords as well as monitoring the sites daily I seem to be holding back direct attacks on the sites.

However two weeks ago I seemed to have opened the door to a whole new problem – it is as if I saw this big wooden horse outside my home and decided that I must bring it in – I loaded a Plugin to Wordpress called Zamanta – the idea is that this helps give relevant links and information, pictures etc to make the content more interesting. What it did do was insert a link which then had other code inserted and as flagged as Malware, getting an immediate ban from Google.

Thanks to Google they mailed me, told me the problem page and I could fix it in seconds, they then re-spidered my site and gave me a clean bill of health.

There is no doubt it was this Zamanta link which I put to software called Drupal – I am sure that neither Zamanta nor Drupal are the villains, but as Drupal is very popular, it looks as if hackers have corrupted the links, possibly via Wikipedia, for references that Zamanta uses. The page with this bad link on only had three lines in it and one link – so there is no doubt.

It was not a “Dark and Stormy Night” – but a bright and Sunny day today, so we went to the seaside to collect some seashells for my Mum.

Not much more to say really except “Wish You Were Here” and show some photos or Marseillan Beach and Marseillan Town (the beach is on the Mediterranean and the Port is slightly inland on a huge inland sea-lake.

Marseillan Beach on the Mediterranean in Languedoc

Marseillan harbour Entrance Languedoc France

Marseillan Port

Front Entrance for Villa Roquette

We collected plenty of sea-shells, but could not get a stick-of-rock for my Mum.

– At Twiku dot com
– I made a haiku website
– Then I lost the plot