Even though we’d figured out how to get “regular” telephone service in France before we left (see Taking our phone service with us (or not)), we knew we’d both also want cell phone service. We could have waited until we got here to figure it out, but we weren’t confident enough in our French to […]
Several months before our move, we started thinking about how we’d make and receive phone calls with people back in North America. Our presumption was that we’d have both a landline and cell phones, but that using either one to make calls to North America on a regular basis would be prohibitively expensive. (It turns […]
At our second-to-last visit to the French consulate in San Francisco, the agent told us that if our visa applications were accepted we’d need to present not only our passports, but one-way plane tickets to France before we’d be issued our visas. We didn’t think this would be a problem until we started looking at […]
We knew from the start of our planning that we would take our cat Zora with us to France, we just weren’t sure how to make that happen. Many people were surprised when we told them she was coming with us, but it seemed the obvious choice to us. No matter how difficult it might […]
If you want to take your pet to France—and we did—you have two entirely separate sets of problems. One is simply that of transportation; Morgen covered that in Flying the furry skies: Finding transportation for our cat. It can be a pain, but it’s ultimately not that much harder than buying a plane ticket for […]
One of the requirements for getting a long-stay visa (which lets you apply for a carte de séjour once you get here) is to provide proof that you have health insurance coverage for the first year after your arrival in France. In the past we have purchased travel health insurance for longer trips out of […]
Even though the consulate told us that we did not, strictly speaking, have to have a lease on our apartment before we applied for a visa, we thought it would be prudent to keep our eyes out for a place we liked. And we decided that if the right deal came along, we’d just go […]
When we started thinking about this blog, we had the idea that we’d document every step we took to get to France in real time. We thought other people trying to do something similar would find it useful to see a chronological record of all our steps (and missteps). Although that didn’t happen, there’s a […]
Truffles for Breakfast is the ongoing story of two people, Morgen Jahnke and Joe Kissell, whose dream it was to leave behind their familiar San Francisco surroundings and live simpler but (we hope) more interesting lives in France. I described our decision to move to France in an article on Interesting Thing of the Day: […]