Last year, we almost didn’t get our château because of the month of August.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The bank wasn’t about to reject our mortgage simply because someone wanted a month at the beach. But when you’re an American trying to buy a centuries-old château in rural France, and every day feels like another chance for something to fall apart, it certainly felt that way at the time.

We submitted our mortgage application in July, feeling optimistic and confident. When we’d bought a house before (in the U.S.), the process had gone smoothly, without any major hiccups. We knew there would be paperwork, a few phone calls, maybe a delay or two, and then finally, the answer.

Instead, August arrived.

Our mortgage broker disappeared, as did the realtor and the sellers. Every person at the bank who had ever replied to an email seemed to disappear. The local bakery closed. The little boutique down the street closed. Handwritten signs began appearing in shop windows announcing that everyone would be back in September.

Our mortgage application wasn’t denied, but it was significantly delayed. I pictured it sitting in a folder somewhere, wearing sunglasses, happily shelved and getting some much-needed R&R.

At first, I found the whole thing maddening. Americans are taught that momentum is everything. That if something stops moving, you push harder. You send another email, you leave another voicemail, you send another text message. You “circle back” and “follow up.” We have an entire vocabulary dedicated to refusing to let anything sit still.

France, meanwhile, looked at my increasingly frantic follow-up emails and simply continued sending me those polite automated replies saying “We’ll see you in September.”

The French have a word that doesn’t translate neatly into English: la rentrée. You’ll often hear it translated loosely as “back to school,” but that barely scratches the surface. School is certainly part of it, but so is work. Parliament resumes, concert seasons begin, new books are released, builders return, cafés buzz again. It’s less “the end of summer” than the reopening of an entire country.

The closest comparison I can think of is New Year’s Day. Except, instead of making ambitious resolutions after a late night in December, France does it after a month of sunshine, long lunches, family gatherings, and actual rest.

The first time I really noticed la rentrée wasn’t because someone had explained it to me. It was because we walked into E.Leclerc (a major French supermarket chain) to buy school supplies for our kids, and the place looked like Christmas for office supplies.

Entire aisles had transformed into monuments to BIC, Maped, and Pelikan. Colored pencils in packs of twelve, eighteen, twenty-four. Felt tips, highlighters, chalk. Parents stood in little clusters comparing lists (which are long). Children examined pencil cases with the seriousness of architects selecting materials for a cathedral.

In France, schools don’t simply ask for “school supplies.” They issue what reads like a diplomatic agreement, and ours ran to a full page:

• One erasable blue pen, Frixion type

• Ballpoints in green, red, and black (no four-color pen)

• One sharpener, simple, with a reservoir

• One box of white chalk

• One black ardoise, the small slate you’d assume went out with the Third Republic, and one cloth to clean it

• One 30cm ruler, rigid. Not metal, and not plastic that bends

• One A4 display folder, forty sleeves maximum

• One compass and one set square

• One dictionary: Robert Junior, ages 8 to 11. Not the pocket edition

The four-color pen (crayon 4 couleurs) is arguably one of the most beloved objects in French stationery, and it has been specifically, individually barred. I have no idea what happened in France’s educational history to justify such a consistently firm stance against four-color pens, but somewhere there’s a first-grade teacher with stories.

There’s also a note about the snack box - fruit, compote, and dried fruit will be accepted in the morning. Nothing else is listed, because nothing else is up for discussion.

And then, at the bottom, under its own heading: pour la classe du dehors (for the outdoor class). A small backpack, a pair of boots, a cap, and clothing appropriate to the weather. Yes, the kids have outside class here, rain or shine. It’s wonderful.

Lastly, you’re required to write your child’s name on every single item. Every glue stick, every folder, and every single pen and colored pencil - all 50 or so of them.

The lists made me laugh (and cry a little, because it’s a lot to translate and not everything is a direct or simple translation), but they also made me realize something I’d been missing, which was that this shopping was to be experienced as a celebrated ritual rather than just another trip to the store.

Every family in the store was preparing for the same beginning, and everyone was participating in the same collective reset. And it wasn’t rushed or chaotic. It felt…ceremonial.

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Back home in the U.S., September often felt like the continuation of a race that had never really stopped. Summer ended, schedules exploded, and everyone lurched into fall already tired.

But here, September feels different. People return from August with stories instead of burnout. The conversations are about where everyone went, what they cooked, who they saw, how tan the kids got, whether the tomatoes did well this year (those are literally the things we talked about when catching up with the parents on the kids’ first day back to school last week).

There’s an energy to it that I don’t think I fully appreciated until we’d lived here long enough to experience both sides of it. August is considered part of real life, and it isn’t treated like an interruption, which changes what comes after it.

This week our coffee table and buffets disappeared beneath stacks of notebooks, fresh pencils, little glue sticks, and rulers that were, thankfully, rigid enough to satisfy the French educational system. We carefully packed everything into their backpacks before school started, and they were excited in the way only children with brand-new supplies can be.

I wrote their names on all of it, including every pencil and pen. Even on the black ones, where you couldn’t even see the sharpie. Just following the French directions.

Our mortgage was approved in November, by the way. Everybody came back to work in September. It still took until November.

C’est la vie,
Kamille

I’m Kamille, and I write about our family’s life in rural France, where we are slowly repairing a small 17th-century château. Two free posts a month, plus two more and the renovation diary for paid subscribers.

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American parents, what’s on your list this year?

We had been living here at our new home in rural France for a few months when a neighbor stopped me near the gate and asked what we had planned for the day. “We’re going to Nantes,” I said. “To go to Ikea.”

She nodded, and then asked how many nights we’d be staying.

I told her we were going for the day. Drive down, get some dishes and an armchair, drive back before dinner. She looked at me in much the same way you’d look at someone who had just announced they were flying to Denver for a sandwich.

Nantes is an hour and a half away.

I have thought about that conversation more than she will ever know, and before it becomes the kind of post where an American moves abroad and announces that France has solved traffic, let me say clearly that it has not. Paris has traffic. Lyon has traffic. There are French people sitting on the périphérique at this exact moment having a much worse morning than I am, and if you live somewhere rural in America you probably already have most of what I’m about to describe. I’m also not here to tell anyone that their commute is a moral failing. Plenty of people love the drive! It can be optimized or ameliorated with podcasts, great music, or even a breathing meditation. Not automatically bad.

What I’m noticing is smaller than a country. It’s the 30 kilometers around my house, and what those 30 kilometers have done to my idea of ‘far.’

If you’re new here, I’m Kamille. I write about the culture shocks, the neighbors, and the ongoing project of becoming a local in rural France. Two free essays a month, no charge, no pressure.

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In Los Angeles we had several commutes, and it was considered normal. There was the commute to work, the commute to school, the commute to the good grocery store (which was a different store from the near grocery store and required more forethought). There was a commute to the pediatrician, a commute to a 4-year-old’s birthday party in Pasadena on a Saturday morning, a commute to a work thing we didn’t want to attend and then a second, worse commute home from it at 9pm.

None of this registered as unusual. It was just…the tax. You paid it in 20-minute increments, eight or nine times a week, and you got very good at podcasts, and you developed opinions about surface streets that you would defend at a dinner party.

Here, my kids’ school is 6 minutes away. So is the pharmacy with the green cross that blinks the temperature at you. So is La Poste. So is the boulangerie, and the small supermarket, and the garden store where a man once explained fruit tree pruning to me for about 11 minutes while I nodded along (with the confidence of someone understanding approximately one word in four).

6 minutes. All of it. And I don’t have to leave early for any of it. There is really no version of this drive that goes badly.

For anything bigger we go to the nearest proper city, which is 20 minutes away and which I now describe, out loud, to other adults, as far. Yes, 20 minutes. In Los Angeles that was the drive to grab a decent taco. Here I hear myself say “well, it’s a bit of a trek” and I don’t even flinch.

And the 20 minutes isn’t spent in traffic, because there isn’t any. There’s one roundabout that occasionally contains three cars. The rest is stone farmhouses with their shutters half closed, a field of sheep, a stretch where somebody’s cows graze in the sun (looking healthier than most American humans), and then the road dips and the whole valley opens out, and I have, at least twice, nearly driven into a hedge admiring it.

Yes, that’s what really gets me. Not just that the drive is short, but that the drive is nice.

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Which brings me back to the neighbor at the gate.

An hour and a half is not a commute here. C’est loin. It’s a trip, and a trip gets an overnight bag. It gets discussed beforehand and reported on afterward, at length, to people who ask. If you’re going to hand over three hours of your one life to a car, the French position seems to be that you should get a hotel and a very good dinner out of it, and not just, for example, a washable cover armchair named ROCKSJÖN.

We still do the long drives now and then, for the thing you can’t get nearby, though far less often. And I’ve noticed we’ve gone a bit soft about it. On a trip to Paris this spring, we hit real traffic coming in (true gridlock), and we did all the correct things (a podcast, then music, then the tense silence of two people not saying anything about the traffic), and I could feel my shoulders climbing toward my ears.

That level of traffic used to be a regular Tuesday, and we’d absorbed it so completely that I would have told you, with total sincerity, that it didn’t bother me. Looking back now, I can say that it did bother me, but the difference is that I’d just never had anything to hold it up against.

Happy to have that now. :)

How to Commute Like a French Person (Without Moving to France)

Now, I realize there are few things less useful than the woman who moved abroad and came home with recommendations for everybody. The French people I know who do have long commutes are not ‘enlightened’ about it. They complain (they’re good at that), and then they go and eat lunch for two hours.

It was the geography that did most of the work for us, but something smaller shifted alongside it. We stopped treating the car as dead time to be survived at maximum speed. Nobody needs to move to a hamlet in France with a blinking pharmacy cross to do that, and I wouldn’t offer it as a traffic strategy anyway. These are free, and they work on a freeway anywhere.

Stop letting every podcast be about becoming a better version of yourself. You do not need to arrive at the office having optimized anything. There are people out there making beautiful hour-long shows about mushrooms, shipwrecks, the history of a single word, birds. Choose the birds sometimes.

Try sound instead of talking. Rain, or a forest at 4am recorded by someone with excellent equipment (and questionable sleep habits). It’s strange for about four minutes and then it’s just calming.

Build the playlist before you leave, and put things on it you’ve never heard. Turn the drive into a small act of discovery rather than a rerun. Maybe start with 10 unknown songs, and ask your friends or work colleagues for recommendations. No skipping for the first 30 seconds.

Take the pretty way when you can spare the extra eight minutes. Now, obviously don’t do this every time. Some days you need the freeway and a bad mood, and that’s a legitimate use of an afternoon. But the road past the reservoir exists, and Google Maps will never once suggest it to you.

And every so often, let a long drive be an actual trip. Pick the far thing, the aquarium two hours out, the town you’ve been meaning to see for six years, and give it the gift of an overnight bag and the good dinner. Let it be an occasion sometimes instead of an errand.

The French would never drive three hours for some Ikea dishes, and after three years here I’ve come around to thinking they might be right (though I would like it noted that the armchair has held up beautifully).

À bientôt,
Kamille

Once Upon a Castle is where I write about all of it: the neighbors, the language disasters, the small daily collisions between the life we left and the one we’re building in the French countryside. Free subscribers get two essays a month. Paid subscribers get two more, plus the Castle Diaries, which is the unglamorous working archive of restoring a château without fluent French, a contractor network, or any relevant experience whatsoever.

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There’s a little sign that starts going up on doors around here in the third week of July. Fermé or fermeture annuelle. Some are printed, though most are handwritten and taped up crooked, with a reopening date in September that reads a bit more like a wish than a commitment. The boulangerie, the pharmacy, the dry cleaner, the bookshop, the little grocer, the man who was supposed to be building our pool. Gone, all of them, and all around the same time, like the whole country picked a date and I’m the only one who was out of the loop.

The first summer, I didn’t really get it. Now, I know to duck.

We found out the hard way last August, when we were in escrow on the château and trying to get a loan out of a French bank. I’d finally gotten one to take us seriously. Finally! They asked for documents and I would fire every one back within the hour of each request, aggressively American about the whole thing, and then asked when I might hear something.

“Well,” she said, “I’m off on vacation the first two weeks of August. But once I’m back, I can review the file.”

“Okay! No problem!” I said, with a forced smile I had to assemble from spare parts.

I waited, and then followed up mid-month, once she was back (all sun-kissed and refreshed). She told me she’d reviewed the file, but there was just one thing - she now had to bring it to her boss, who was, as of that week, off for the second two weeks of August. So, earliest reply would be the first week of September, probably.

I did the American thing and assumed there had to be a workaround. Some colleague standing in. Perhaps even just one other human being at that bank with a functioning email who was not, at that particular moment, on a beach.

“Everyone is on vacation in August,” she told me, kindly and with a hint of sympathy.

And that was that. Even the bank empties out, and apparently nobody stays behind to keep an eye on things while it does. It delayed the purchase of our forever home by about a month, and we waited it out like the obedient foreigners we are (eventually they said yes, and we got the castle. Ultimately a happy ending).

This year I went looking for a cleaner for the coach house. We’d just finished it and put it up on Airbnb, and I needed someone dependable for the changeovers between guests. Found a local company that does exactly this (cleaners just for gîtes), called them about August, and still somehow managed to be surprised.

“Well, most of them are on vacation in August.”

So August is the month everyone in France wants to come stay at your place, and also the month you can’t find a single soul to clean it, because the people who’d clean it are off being somebody else’s guests.

The pool has been its own saga. The heatwave really did slow things down, I’ll give it that. But the deeper problem was the calendar. It was supposed to be finished by the end of July, which felt safe right up until I remembered what July is followed by. A couple of small delays (which every project has), and there we were in August. August barely counts as a month on the work calendar here. It’s more of a...rumor. Nobody would be building a pool in August. Nobody builds anything in August. It’s the sort of thing every French person already knows and every American has to work out eventually.

July is the really fun part, actually. That’s the month when you keep running into your neighbors and everyone is buzzing with pre-trip energy, dying to tell you where they’re headed and for how long, and there’s a real chance you’ll be handed a phone and walked through the entire Airbnb they’ve booked, room by room. Then, the country takes a breath at the end of July and holds it, and comes back in September with fuller cups and more relaxed shoulders.

One person on holiday is one person on holiday. Sixty-some million of them at once is a different thing, and you can actually feel the energy of it, this drop in the collective blood pressure. The striving and the hustling just stop (so does the bank, apparently).

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The part I kind of love is that everyone is in on it, and nobody apologizes for taking the time. Nobody sneaks it, or pretends it’s a few sick days. It’s expected, employers included, and the law itself is on vacation’s side.

By law, French workers get five weeks of paid vacation, and it doesn’t stop at offering it. The law also makes you take a big continuous chunk in summer, somewhere between May and October. You are, on paper, legally required to relax. Imagine that! Back home (in the U.S.) there’s no such law. None. Zero required paid days off, and the average American takes around eleven days off (and even feels it’s a triumph using nine of them).

For us, the sweet surprise has been the magical vibes of a French summer.

I remember first discovering something different about the light here. It does not quit in the evenings. Still going at 9/9:30pm, and it’s very hard to send anyone to bed while this gorgeous light is putting on a performance. We don’t have the fancy summer camps I’d probably have defaulted to in California, so the kids have just been with us, all day, all summer, and it’s turned into one of my favorite stretches of the whole year. Family is coming this month to spend their holiday here, which means a lot of long dinners outside and, if the pool people ever resurface, a pool.

We even took a trip, which we hadn’t planned to do. Just a small one, to Brittany, eating our way through restaurants and swimming in the pool of the place we rented and making new friends who were visiting from across the world, all while getting a little sunburned. We almost didn’t go, because we’ve been so far down the renovation hole that a trip felt indulgent, almost irresponsible. And then not going started to feel wrong, which turned out to be the best peer pressure I’ve ever caved to. When in France.

The summer evenings we mostly spend on simple things. A bit of fishing in the river (results pending), walks in the forest, board games, long dinners outside. Some nights we just read out loud and draw at the table until 10pm, which is almost certainly bad parenting, and which the kids have loved more than most things we’ve actually planned for them.

The dry cleaner is still shut and I have no idea where the pool guy went, but I’m focusing instead on the relaxed shoulders and the light and the long dinners.

À bientôt,
Kamille

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A few weeks ago I made a phone call that rattled me, and not for any of the reasons a phone call usually rattles a person.

We still own a small property in California, which we rent out as a vacation rental. The glass in one of the windows had cracked, so I looked up a local glass company and dialed the number, already bracing. I don’t know what I was bracing for. I think my body just braces now before phone calls, out of habit.

A woman answered. She was warm and clear. She called me honey, with a little Southern curl. She understood the problem before I even finished describing it. She told me what it would cost, when they could come (an actual date and time), and what I needed to do, which was nothing. The whole thing took four minutes. I hung up and stared at Sean and said, out loud, with the astonishment of a woman who has seen a miracle: “Wow. That was so easy.”

And then I sat with the strangeness of that. Because there was a version of me, three years ago, who would have made that exact phone call and thought absolutely nothing of it. Booking a glass repair was not, back then, a candidate for the highlight of my week.

This is what France has done to me. It has made a competent phone call feel like Christmas morning.

Now don’t worry, this isn’t a sad post.

This is not the one where the American abroad tallies up everything she gave up and dabs at her eyes with a linen napkin she bought at a local brocante. And it’s also not the one where everything is bluebells and warm baguettes and I pretend the hard parts don’t exist.

They do.

The life we chose here is, in a lot of concrete and unglamorous ways, harder than the one we left. I am saying that out here because the pretty photos don’t. But it’s a choose-your-hard situation. Every life is hard somewhere. You just get to pick where.

We picked here. Let me show you the math.

The things that America made easy

America is, among many other things, a masterpiece of convenience, and I did not fully appreciate this until I no longer had it.

In America, the world comes to your door. Amazon arrives the same day, sometimes before you’ve fully changed out of your pajamas. Whole Foods delivers your groceries while you’re on a call. You can buy anything, in bulk, in a single trip, and it will keep for weeks, because a strawberry in America has been engineered to endure.

You can call a company and a pleasant person will answer and solve your problem in your own language and it will cost you four minutes.

You can, in short, live at a certain speed. The systems are built for it. The websites work. The customer service exists. The whole country hums along on the assumption that your time is precious and should not be wasted, and there is something quite wonderful about that, something I miss more than I expected to.

We gave the convenience up knowingly. But that easy phone call had one more thing going for it I haven't mentioned: it was in English. Which brings me to the part of this life that's hard for reasons we brought on ourselves.

The language (which is entirely our fault)

Here is the thing nobody likes to admit about moving to a country whose language you do not speak: it is your fault, and it stays your fault.

We could fix this. We could! We could, in theory, sit down and master the damn language and remove 90% of the friction from our daily lives. That we have not fully done so is fully on us. In our defense, we have been mildly busy: raising two small children, being our own bosses, building a new life, and now renovating a château (which is not, in fact, easy peasy lemon squeezy). But the language is the big one, and it puts us at a disadvantage.

For a long time, every phone call here was a miniature torture session. Fumbling, misunderstanding, the panic of realizing the person on the other end has asked you a question and is now waiting. My greatest rhetorical achievement in French for most of our first year was begging people, in broken conditional tense, to please just send me an email. The French phone call is its own genre of humbling, and I have starred in many episodes.

So when that woman at the California glass company answered the phone and simply helped me, in a language I could fully understand, my whole nervous system didn’t know what to do with itself.

But somewhere along the way, without noticing, I got braver. I now pick up the phone and dial a French number knowing it will likely be a small train wreck, and I do it anyway. That’s new. The old me needed things to be easy in order to do them. This me has made peace with the wreck. And we’ve improved with the language, probably more than we give ourselves credit for. It’s still not easy. but I’ve stopped needing it to be.

If you’re new here: I’m Kamille, an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband Sean and our two kids. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the life, the renovation, and the ongoing education of two Americans who thought they knew what they were getting into. Subscribe to follow along.

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Which brings me to the part I don’t usually get into: the actual trade, the one the pretty photos don’t show. What we gave up and what we got. The money, the exhaustion, the extravagant Christmas caroling costume I once pumped breast milk under in a parked car, why my berries now stage a full science experiment on the counter, and the reason we’d choose this hard all over again.

The rest is for paid subscribers.

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It’s the Fourteenth of July again.

I first wrote this one last Bastille Day, back when roughly twenty people were reading Once Upon a Castle, and I’m fairly sure half of them were related to me. It remains one of my favorite things I’ve written here, and almost nobody saw it. So today I’m setting the table again, with a lot more chairs.

Here’s what a decade of American Fourths taught me, and what one holiday on a French beach undid.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I lived in Venice Beach, California, a place where the Fourth of July arrived each year like a sunburned tidal wave of shirtless barbecues, frat-party energy, cheap beer, and more than a few loud declarations of independence. Rooftop parties blasted music. Roman candles were launched with questionable aim. Someone always ended up doing something patriotic and deeply ill-advised on a skateboard or electric scooter. It was loud, it was lawless, and it was about as subtle as a bald eagle crashing through a Monster Energy ad. Unmistakably American.

I used to brace for it every year. The endless fireworks, the gridlocked beach traffic, the terrified dogs, the babies (mine included) waking up screaming at 2am from yet another illegal explosion launched off a neighbor’s rooftop. And the day-after cleanup, which looked like a Bud Light commercial had detonated on the sidewalk.

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Enter: le Quatorze Juillet

Here in France, the national holiday is Bastille Day, or le Quatorze Juillet, as it’s actually called by the French. It commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 and the symbolic start of the French Revolution. Think of it as France’s version of the Fourth, only with fewer flags and considerably less shouting.

Each year, we spend it in Étretat, a stunning town on the northern coast famous for its cliffs and much less famous for its complete lack of drunk people yelling “FREEDOM!” into the night. And during our first trip there, the contrast just about knocked me over.

Start with the tone. It’s the national holiday, and nobody is dressed in French flag garb. Not one tricolor outfit, unless it happened by accident. No red-white-and-blue face paint, no truck flags, no themed sunglasses. I think we were the only people even attempting to color-coordinate (American habits die hard).

That doesn’t mean the French aren’t proud. Oh, they are. They are deeply proud to be French. They just don’t yell about it. They don’t chant it. They don’t need to. The evidence is in the lifestyle, the UNESCO-recognized cuisine, the vacation policy, the universal healthcare, and the fact that people all over the world will climb over each other to photograph a single croissant on a tiny Parisian café table. France doesn’t have to shout to prove the point.

We started that Bastille Day with an early-morning adventure, using the low tide to slip through a secret cave to a hidden beach on the far side of the cliffs. It was surreal and magical. Definitely an experience we won’t forget.

After that, a slow lunch, a hike to the top of the opposite cliff, a wander through gardens strung with art installations, ice cream, and a long lingering dinner. Then we joined the crowds gathering on the beach, not for a rave, but to watch the fireworks unfold across the sky and down into the ocean.

And when it ended?

Nothing. No chaos. No rogue fireworks. No one drunkenly lighting off M-80s at midnight. Just quiet. We went to bed. The children stayed asleep. The dogs stayed calm. Nobody’s car alarm went off. It was, hand to heart, the best night’s sleep I have ever had on a national holiday.

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As for the Fourth of July, we kept that one small too. We stayed home at our French farmhouse, made homemade red, white, and blue ice cream (vanilla, raspberry, and blueberry, if you’re curious), and lit a few sparklers with new neighbor friends. No flags. No frat boys. A little nostalgia, a few smiles, and an enormous sense of relief.

It’s not that I don’t love America. I do, probably more than I realized before I had this much distance from it. I just don’t miss the noise, or the 2am explosions, or waking up to a lawn that looked like the aftermath of a beer commercial.

Today it happens again. The sky over some French beach will fill up, everyone will watch, and then the whole town will simply go home and go to bed. So will we. Not a single dog will lose its mind.

Merci et à bientôt ✨
-Kamille

If you’re new here: I’m an American writer restoring a 17th-century château in rural France with my husband and two kids, and Once Upon a Castle is where the whole muddy, magical story lives. Two free essays a month, four per month for paid subscribers. Pull up a chair.

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Restack this if it made you feel something (that’s genuinely how new readers find this little corner of the internet). Or share it with someone who:

• Still has mild PTSD from rogue neighborhood fireworks

• Has always wondered what Bastille Day is actually like

• Thinks patriotism could use a rebrand

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P.S. Paid subscribers get four posts a month, including Castle Diaries, the renovation journal I keep from inside the walls. And next week’s paid post is a little more personal: why we chose a life harder than the one we left, on purpose.

At my daughter’s dance performance last month, I spent most of it watching her watch the teacher.

Not the choreography. Not whether she hit the counts or kept the beat. Her face. She kept her eyes locked on the teacher at the front almost the entire time, the way you’d watch a magician you were determined to catch in the act.

The other little girls did what small children do at a recital, which is roughly forty percent dancing and sixty percent scanning the audience for their parents, waving, adjusting their tutus, occasionally forgetting there was a routine happening at all. My daughter was somewhere else. She was studying.

I’ve seen the same thing in my kids’ jiu jitsu class. Both of them. There’s a moment in every class where the instructor kneels down to demonstrate a move, and I can find my two children in the group without trying, because they’re the only ones with their eyes glued to his hands. The other kids fidget, whisper, pick at the mat. Mine watch like there’s going to be a test.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to convince you that my kids are gifted and the rest are hopeless. The other children get the moves. They're bright, they're quick, they pick it all up fine. They're just doing it with their ears, catching the instructor's words while their eyes drift off, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do when the words happen to be your own language. That's the shortcut my two didn't have for a long time. Nobody ever handed them the option to look away.

We moved to France when they were two and four years old. Ten days after we landed, both of them started at an all-French school, where not one person, teacher or child, spoke English. I would love to tell you this was a gentle, carefully phased, expert-approved decision. It was not. It was the deep end. We threw them in, and then I drove home and spent the afternoon fairly certain I had broken them.

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When you're very small and dropped into a room where you understand nothing, you can't coast. You can't half-listen and catch up later, because there is no later, there's only the next thing you also don't understand. So they did the one thing still available to them. They watched. If they couldn't follow the words, they read everything else instead: the hands, the faces, where the other children were heading, how loud a voice got and why. They turned their eyes up to full volume, because sight was the only sense that still worked.

Their French is excellent now. Better than mine, a sentence I say with a completely straight face (and a small internal scream).

But the watching never switched off. It's in them now, the way a first language gets into your bones. So my children read people frighteningly well. Well beyond what their ages should allow.

During the heat wave last week, Sean was low. The garden was taking a beating, it was too hot to do the outdoor work he actually loves, and he was discouraged in the way that’s specific to him, which is to say invisibly. My husband does not announce his moods. He doesn’t complain. Whether it’s a virus or something heavier that’s settled on him for a while, you have to know him for years to catch it, and even then you mostly miss it. I have missed it plenty of times myself.

At dinner, I caught our son watching him. Not saying anything. Just watching, the same way he watches the jiu jitsu instructor. Later, brushing his teeth, he turned to me and said, “Daddy’s sad about something. I can see it in his face.”

He was right. Of course he was right. He had read it off a man who gives almost nothing away, across a dinner table, at five years old.

It isn’t only with Sean. They clock it in strangers, in teachers, in their family members over a grainy video call. They catch a shift in someone’s face before a word has been said about what’s wrong. They’re working off hand gestures and posture and the exact volume of a sentence, the whole channel of information the rest of us mostly stopped reading the moment we could rely on words to do it for us.

I didn’t give them this. I couldn’t have if I’d sat down and tried. It’s the accidental souvenir of a French village school and parents who made a big decision in a bit of a panic and then panicked some more in the car afterward.

Sometimes now I catch myself at the edge of a class, watching them watch, and I think about the version of me from three years ago, white-knuckling the steering wheel, convinced she’d ruined everything. She’d be relieved. She’d also, I think, be a little annoyed that the thing she agonized over for months went and turned out fine without her.

We're an American family raising two kids in a small château in rural France, and I write it all down here twice a month, free. The renovation, the forest, the chickens, and the slightly reckless decisions like this one. If you'd like the next one to find you, come along.

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And I understand the question, because I asked it too, quite obsessively, for about a year before we moved. I had spreadsheets. I had tabs open comparing the prices of butter, gas, and housing. (The butter situation alone could be its own post, but I’ll spare you.) I wanted someone to just tell me the number, similar to the way you want a doctor to give you a diagnosis instead of “let’s run some tests.”

Here’s the honest answer, the one nobody gave me, and the one I’ve now lived inside for long enough to trust: it depends entirely on what you’re buying.

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Because France will silently bankrupt you on some things and then hand you others, the big things, the things that actually shape a life, for a fraction of what they’d cost back home in the U.S. And once you understand which bucket is which, the whole picture flips.

Let me show you what I mean. We’ll start with the part nobody warns you about, which made me slightly cranky for the first six months.

The Small Things Will Get You

Stuff is expensive here. Things. Objects.

If you want to order something off the internet - a lamp, a standing mixer, a Dyson vacuum - you will pay for it, and then you will pay again. France has real import duties and shipping costs that make the casual Amazon-it-by-Tuesday lifestyle expensive and, frankly, a little embarrassing. The thing arrives, you do the mental currency conversion, and you feel like a person who has made a poor decision.

In Los Angeles, I could fill a cart with eleven things I didn’t need at 11pm and have them at my doorstep before I’d had a chance to regret it. Here, that same impulse comes with a tax (a literal one), plus a shipping fee that sometimes costs more than the item. Furniture shipped in, electronics, the random household whatever, a lot of it runs higher than the American equivalent.

And it isn’t only objects. Gas will make your eyes water, priced by the liter (which softens the blow right up until you do the math and realize you’re paying close to double what you did in the States). The autoroutes come with tolls that really stack up over a long drive. Driving here is not the cheap part.

But you also don’t have to drive nearly as much, because the trains actually work. They’re fast, clean (enough), frequent, and they go everywhere, big cities a couple of hours apart, tiny villages on a sleepy regional line, the whole country stitched together by rail. The thing America typically priced as either a luxury or an impossibility is, here, just the slightly boring way everyone gets around.

For about a month I had minor tantrums about the prices of the things. And then I started to suspect it might be doing me a favor.

Because the friction can actually be helpful. The system is gently, bureaucratically discouraging me from buying eleven things I don’t need at 11pm, and it turns out I don’t actually miss the eleven things. (Well, most of them.)

But then there’s the part that makes even the things bucket more complicated than “France is pricier,” and it’s the part the spreadsheet version of me never accounted for.

Unless You Buy Them the French Way

France solved the expensive-objects problem about two hundred years ago, and the solution is that the entire country is one enormous, rotating, gorgeous secondhand sale.

The brocantes. The vide-greniers (literally “empty-the-attics,” which is the most charming possible name for a yard sale and tells you everything about how the French feel about clutter). Nearly every weekend, in nearly every region, people lay out the contents of their grandmother’s house on folding tables in a field, or in front of the village church or castle, and you walk through it with a coffee, and you buy a hand-blown glass decanter for the price of a sandwich.

I once wrote about a chair. A beautiful, curved, vintage rush-seat chair I’d been admiring on the website of a very tasteful Los Angeles site selling French treasures, where it was listed at nearly $300. Months later, at a brocante forty minutes from our house here in France, I found a set of four of its nearly identical French cousins, propped around an old French table.

They were €25. For all four of them.

Sean carried them to the car with the rare smugness of a man whose wife had, for once, come home with a bargain. I let him revel in the smugness.

So the small-things bucket is real, but it has an escape hatch, and the escape hatch is more beautiful than the thing you were going to buy new. You just have to be willing to dig, to spend a little more time, to travel a bit, and to drive home with someone’s deceased grandmother’s chairs strapped to the roof.

Now. The big things. This is where it stops being close.

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What nobody warned me about were the small things. The ones you can’t find on a “Moving to France” checklist because they’re too specific, too odd, too subtly wonderful to make the official briefing.

About a month ago I wrote about ten small French things that still feel like magic, and you loved it, which tells me I'm not the only one collecting these. Here are ten more that snuck up on me, the ones too specific for the official briefing.

1. The eggs are not in the refrigerator. Anywhere.

The first time I reached for eggs at the grocery store and found them sitting on a regular shelf, room temperature, next to the flour, I assumed something had gone terribly wrong. A power outage. A forgetful stock boy. A French health-code situation I did not want to be a part of.

No. The eggs here just aren’t refrigerated, because they’re fresh enough and unwashed enough that they don’t need to be. We have our own chickens now, so most days this is a non-issue (the eggs come from approximately forty meters away). But every so often we hit a baking streak, or company arrives, and I find myself buying a carton off a warm shelf like a local (which I apparently am now).

2. You’re allowed to keep the bread that’s already going stale, and the moldy berry is your problem.

In Los Angeles, we did Whole Foods deliveries for a while. Once I opened a carton of raspberries and found exactly one with a spot of mold on it. I reported it (to Amazon, because that’s who we placed the orders through) and received a full refund for the entire carton. The whole thing took four minutes and felt like justice.

Here, the bread you buy in the morning is a rock by the day after tomorrow, because there’s nothing in it pretending otherwise. You buy it, you eat it same day or the next, that’s the arrangement. And the berries? I once carried a half-moldy carton of blueberries up to the man at the boutique organic shop here in our little French village, pointed at the offending berries, and waited for my apology.

He looked at me, and then looked at the berries. “Oui, c’est normal,” he said. Yes. Normal. Toss the bad ones, eat the rest with your lunch, why are we still talking, madame?

I’ll get there.

3. The pharmacy is where you go to be taken care of, not just to pick up your meds.

Early on, my son had a cold, so I did what any prepared American does: I googled the French equivalent of Tylenol Cold, marched into the pharmacy, and asked for Doliprane like I was ordering at a drive-through.

The pharmacist did not hand me a box. She asked - what was it for? A cold. What were the symptoms? I listed them. How old was my son? I told her. Then she went off down the aisles and came back with three different things, one for each symptom, and walked me through every one in a low, calm voice that made the whole exchange feel less like a transaction and more like a small ASMR consultation. A saline spray for his nose. An herbal cough thing. Liquid Doliprane for the fever.

And the boxes are small. Five to seven days’ worth, because the assumption is that you will get better. No Costco bottle of 500 tablets. France gives you a little, because a little is what a passing thing requires. They do this with food too, among other things.

4. The stone walls are the air conditioning.

Our first canicule (the gloriously medieval-sounding French word for heat wave), I panicked and ordered one of those ugly portable A/C units off Amazon, the kind with the elephant-trunk tube you wedge out a window. The temperature climbed into the 90s. We ran errands, came home sweaty and braced, and I walked through the door of our 300-year-old farmhouse fully prepared to crank the thing to maximum.

It was cold inside. Truly cold. I asked Sean if he’d turned the unit on before we left. He hadn’t. We checked. It wasn’t on.

The walls are that thick. They just hold the cool the way they’ve held it for three centuries. (Winter is a different conversation, and we survive it, barely.) Just last week I stepped into the coach house we’re getting ready to rent, it was 91 degrees outside, and within a few minutes I was putting on a wool sweater. In June. Inside.

5. In autumn, the men with guns are a scheduled event.

We arrived in August. By September, a text came from our landlord: Don’t walk in the forest today. It’s La Chasse. Shortly after, gunshots. I called, mildly alarmed, and learned that a group was hunting wild boar on the property, which is both a sport and a public service here, since the boar are everywhere and they destroy crops and agricultural land.

Later I looked outside and saw several men in full orange regalia, hats and vests and serious faces, with hunting dogs, parked directly next to our car. La Chasse is its own institution, taken very seriously by the people who do it, down to the last button of the costume. When La Chasse is on, you stay inside, you don’t wander into the trees, and you certainly don’t interrupt. Nobody warns you that “stay out of the forest, the hunt is on” will become a normal autumn text in your phone, right between the school schedule and the boulangerie hours.

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6. The cow manure is a love language.

We live surrounded by fields and pastures. Before we moved, I really wondered how I’d feel about that, and I’ll be honest: sometimes, depending on the season and which way the wind is going, you smell it. The manure. Spread across the crops.

But here’s what I didn’t understand until I’d spent a few seasons downwind. None of this is waste. The manure goes back into the soil to grow the enriched feed for the animals, around and around, and the whole countryside runs on these small exchanges. The farmer comes and mows your field and keeps the hay to feed his horses through winter. Someone brings their sheep to graze a neighbor’s overgrown patch, and now the sheep are fed and the field is mowed and no money changed hands. Farming here isn’t the industrial machine I knew of from back home. It’s family-owned, everywhere you look, deeply respected, and woven into daily life without a single strange connotation attached. So yes. Sometimes it smells. I’ve made my peace, and then some.

7. Cheese is dessert, and I owe my mother’s friend an apology.

When I was about eleven, a friend of my mother’s took me to a fancy restaurant for my birthday. At dessert she said, “Oh, I’ll order,” and proceeded to order a cheese log. A cheese log. I was a child raised on orange cheddar and string cheese, sitting there having pictured a slice of New York cheesecake or, at minimum, a fancy cookie, and instead a wheel of cheese arrived to mark the happy end of our meal. I was devastated. I remember it vividly, the betrayal of it.

Well, I get it now. In France, cheese is sometimes the treat, the thing you close the night with, treasured enough to stand in for the sweet. I still love a crème brûlée. But every so often it's a small thrill to end the night the way that once horrified me at 11. The cheese log finally has my full respect. It just took twenty-some years and moving to France.

8. The dark stays dark, and you can see everything.

I knew the countryside would be dark, with no light pollution, and the whole sky alight with stars each night - the type of dark where you tip your head back standing at your own front door.

What’s specifically different here, at least in our village, is that the streetlights run on a timer. In the depths of winter they don’t come on until 8:30 in the morning, which means you can stand outside at 8:15, in a village, under a full sky of stars, waiting for the school bus.

I don't know why they're set that way. Energy savings, maybe, or nobody's bothered to change them since 1994. Whatever the reason, it buys you a few more minutes of stars before the day starts, and it makes the school run feel faintly like a night mission.

9. The property has a night shift, and we’re not on it.

Some of this isn't French so much as rural, and I know that. A remote corner of the world with enough trees and dark will hand you wildlife wherever you are. But I came from Los Angeles, where the wildlife was coyotes eating small dogs and a raccoon that once held our trash cans hostage. So when the night-vision camera we set up out of pure curiosity gives back a full parade of magical woodland creatures (foxes, deer, badgers who look exactly as ridiculous and adorable as you'd hope, owls, rabbits going about their rabbit business at 3am), I take it personally, as a gift.

And then there are the things that simply grow here without anyone’s permission. There’s a cherry tree down by the river that I’m about 98% certain no one planted, and it’s strong as ever, tall and entirely self-made. We didn’t put any of this here. It was here. We’re just lucky enough to get to watch it, and now care for it.

10. Going from vous to tu is a graduation, and you don’t get to set the date.

This one undid me a little. French has two words for “you,” the formal vous and the familiar tu, and when we arrived I was baffled by the whole system. When do you switch? How do you know? Is there a ceremony?

What I’ve learned is that the switch means something, especially for us (the obvious outsiders). Moving from vous to tu tells you exactly where you stand in someone’s life, how much warmth, how much familiarity, how much you’ve slowly become part of things. We almost never make the jump ourselves, because we still don’t feel qualified to know the moment. But when someone does it to us, it lands like an achievement. Like a door opening.

It can happen with anyone, and faster than you’d think. We brought our former postman, Olivier, a fresh pain au chocolat from the kitchen now and then in our first months, and stopped to chat whenever he came by, and within weeks we were on tu. And just after we moved into the château, a neighbor we’d never met came to the door to tell us when we’d be coming to her house for our introductory visit (also not optional, also wonderful). The next time we saw her, she told us to use tu.

We did. We do.

À bientu,
Kamille

This is the free side of the château: the eggs, the stars, the man unbothered by my blueberries. There's also a paid side, where I go deeper into the renovation itself, what's breaking, what it costs, what we've found behind the walls. Either way, I'm glad you're here. Subscribe free below, or upgrade if you want the whole unfiltered story.

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Some are funny. Some are not. Most are about things I'd never thought of as American at all, until the question itself made it obvious that everywhere else, people simply do it differently.

Here are some of them.

If you’re new here, welcome. I’m Kamille, an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband and two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I write it all down. What you’re reading is partly free.

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The birthday party

For our daughter’s first birthday party in France, we went full American. We bought the wine, ready for the French parents. We cleaned the house (which mostly meant moving every visible pile into one room and closing the door on it). We set up extra chairs. We laid out enough food for a small wedding, because “birthday snacks” in the American dialect means a full dinner lightly disguised as crackers. We were ready for fifteen adults plus their children. We were so ready.

The first family arrived. The parents stayed in the car. They waved. The child got out, walked up to the door alone, and the parents drove away.

I decided it was a fluke. A scheduling thing. Then the second family did the same thing. Then the third. By the fourth I had stopped opening wine. By the sixth I was standing in my kitchen in front of three trays of charcuterie I had spent a morning assembling, doing the math. Did they coordinate this? Did we do something? Is our French worse than we feared? Have we offended a grandmother we haven’t met yet?

We found out that day that, in France, parents do not attend other people’s children’s birthday parties. The party is for the children. This is not a charming way of putting it. It is the literal job description.

When I explained the American version later, my French friends asked (in the tone of people conjugating a difficult verb), but where do the parents go when they’re at the party? Are they with the children? Yes. The whole time? Yes. They considered this. And they eat? Yes. The children’s food? Yes. And the cakes? Yes. One of them looked at her husband and said something I’m fairly sure was the poor things.

We were the poor things. Nobody had told us.

The smile

Sean has a wonderful smile. I say this objectively as his wife and somewhat less objectively as the woman who married him partly for it. He smiles at cashiers. At neighbors. At the man at the déchetterie who weighs our garden waste. At dogs. In America this is so unremarkable that the only way to stand out would be to stop.

A few months in, a French friend pulled me aside, glanced around once, and dropped her voice to the register reserved for things you're not certain you should say. My husband wanted me to ask you something, she said. He’s been wondering - why does Sean smile all the time? She searched for the word. Is he…making fun of us?

No! I said. Sean is just American.

I said it like it cleared everything up. It cleared nothing up. She nodded politely and did not believe me. Later a different friend, who had clearly been drafting this conversation for weeks, explained the local physics. Smiling at strangers reads one of two ways here. Either as weak, in which case the merchant charges you more, or as smug, in which case people assume you know something they don’t and are enjoying it.

You should smile less, she told Sean, kindly, the way you’d mention he had spinach in his teeth. It’s my New Year’s resolution, he replied.

He has not smiled less. He smiles at exactly the same rate. The only thing that’s changed is that we now serve it with a small side of explanation from time to time.

We should grab coffee

A French mother at the school gates told me she’d spent a semester in Los Angeles in her twenties. She talked about the Getty. She talked about the Santa Monica Pier. Then, with a confusion that had survived two decades fully intact, she said: but I couldn’t make friends. Everyone was friendly. Everyone said let’s grab coffee sometime. I never heard from a single one of them again. Is that normal?

Yes, I said. I’m sorry, but yes.

I want to defend us, because we do mean it. We genuinely want to grab the coffee. The problem is the coffee has to be scheduled three weeks out, and by week three the calendar has Tetris-ed itself into a shape where the coffee is losing to a deadline, a school pickup, and a dentist appointment. So the coffee gets bumped. The coffee always gets bumped. We should really do that soon becomes next time you’re in town becomes a like on an Instagram post six years later.

It’s a strange way to be friendly, she said, and she was right, and she was being friendly while she said it.

The drugstore

Same woman, same conversation, one more. My host family sent me to the pharmacy, she said. They sent me to a place called CVS.

I waited, because I could feel it coming.

It was not a pharmacy. There was medicine, yes. But also lawn chairs. Toys. A wall of things for your hair. A refrigerator of sandwiches. A refrigerator of beer. The pharmacist was at the very back, behind a counter, like she was in witness protection. I had to walk through the whole store to find her. I felt like I had wandered into the wrong building.

The French pharmacy is a genuinely different category of object. It is small and bright and almost whispery. A green cross outside, a pharmacist inside, and maybe forty-five carefully chosen items on the shelves, every one of them medical, most of them recommended to you personally after three pointed questions about your symptoms. You do not buy a lawn chair there. You do not browse. You describe what’s wrong, you’re told what to take, you pay, you leave. The whole thing takes four minutes and has a strange dignity to it.

The American CVS, by comparison, is a fever dream. I had stopped noticing this. I'd stopped noticing it so completely that the first time I walked into a French pharmacy, calm and bright and the size of a living room, I was the one who felt like I'd walked into the wrong building.

The scheduling thing

I’ll spare you the full version of this one, because I’ve already written a whole essay about how French appointments arrive pre-decided. I'll only say that when Sean, freshly landed and still half in California, sent a French acquaintance his Calendly link, the man wrote back, having apparently registered the link as a decorative element, with one line: I am available Friday at 14h00. That was the email. No slot to select, no buffer, no acknowledgment that any link had been sent (he clearly had not viewed it). He had named a time he would be free, on the assumption that Sean, if also free, would appear, and if not, would say so. He was, of course, completely right. We had brought a small piece of American scheduling infrastructure to a country that examined it, found it unnecessary, and returned it to sender.

These are the easy ones. The ones I can tell at a dinner and everyone laughs, including me, because nobody at the table has to defend the American version. The drugstore is the drugstore. The smile is a lot. We can all agree.

There’s another category. These come later, after the kids are in bed and the wine has been refilled and the conversation has drifted somewhere that, in America, you'd have been raised to steer it away from at a dinner party. They’re asked more carefully. Lower voices. They’re the ones where my friends actually want to understand, and where I don’t always have a good answer, and where I’ve heard myself start to explain my whole country and stop halfway through because I’d lost the thread of it myself.

Those are below.

The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. It’s the half where the questions get harder and I get more honest: the one about my children’s schools that I answered faster than I meant to, the dinner where a French couple put down their forks, and the single question I have never been able to answer. Paid subscribers also get two extra essays like this each month, plus Castle Diaries, where I document the renovation in real time. If you’ve been on the fence, this is a good one to climb down on.

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We take the train a lot here. France makes it easy to: the TGV will fling you across the country at three hundred kilometers an hour while you eat a sandwich, and the regional lines connect even the small villages, and the whole thing is, by American standards, quite civilized.

I like the train, and I want to clarify that because what follows is three stories in which the train and I were not on speaking terms. All three are true. I have recovered from exactly none of them.

The Time the Train Left With My Husband On It

We were coming back from Strasbourg, where we’d been visiting my sister and her husband. We had a system. We always have a system, seasoned travelers we be. I would take the kids and the backpacks and duffel bags and get off at one door. Sean would go to where the big suitcases were stored and get off by that door. We had rehearsed this. We were professionals.

The train pulled into our stop. I got off with the kids. We stood on the platform. We waited.

It was a crowded day, where what seemed like the entire population of eastern France apparently also needed to disembark at exactly our station, and the crowd coming off Sean’s door was thick and slow, a river of people and luggage inching toward the platform. I watched the door. I watched the river of people. I watched the river keep flowing, and flowing, and then I watched the door close.

I would like to tell you I handled this with dignity. I did not. I left my children and our bags on the platform and I ran. I ran to the train and I started banging on the door with both hands as it began, slowly, to move. I was yelling. I’d like to say I was calling out, but I was yelling (screaming?), the way you yell in a film right before the credits, when the lover is being carried away on the train and the music swells. There was a SNCF worker on the platform and I was yelling at him too, that my husband was on the train, my husband was still on the train, in the tone of a woman reporting a kidnapping.

By now my kids had registered the situation. The train was leaving with their father visible inside it, and they were sobbing. A kind woman materialized to comfort them, which I only noticed later, because at the time I was fully occupied delivering my grievances to the SNCF worker, who looked at me with enormous gentleness and said, “Je suis désolé. The train has to leave on time.”

The train has to leave on time. In France, that is a point of pride, and the schedule does not bend for one American family. The train left on time. My husband was on it.

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I called Sean. He was somewhere past the platform, and he explained between breaths that he had really tried, he had pushed toward the door yelling that his family was outside, that he had to get off, but everyone had their own bags and their own stops and their own agendas, and you cannot exactly leave two large suitcases on a departing train to go chase your wife. He had not made it. The doors had won.

So we made a new plan. I took a breath, redistributed the bags across both shoulders, and decided that for the next few hours I was going to be the kind of person who has this handled. The train's final stop was about an hour up the line. Sean would ride to the end, then ride the whole thing back, and I would collect him that night from the bus station near our village. Fine. Solvable. Except now I had every soft bag we owned, because Sean had only the rolling suitcases, which meant I layered myself in backpacks and duffels like a pack animal, like a donkey at the start of a long journey, and I herded two tear-streaked children into the station.

They were hungry. They had to pee. And I learned something I had managed to avoid learning for years, which is that I almost never travel alone with both kids, and there is a reason for that, and the reason is logistics. There is no older sibling to “just watch them for a second” while you buy a snack. There is just you, and two small people, and a quantity of luggage that requires its own postal code, and a daughter who needs the bathroom on the far side of the station.

I could not get all of us and all of the bags into a single station bathroom. It was physically impossible. So I did the thing every parenting instinct I own screams against: I scanned the little waiting area for the most trustworthy human available, identified an older woman calmly reading a newspaper, and asked her if she could watch my son for two minutes while I took my daughter to the toilet. She said bien sûr, of course, with the warmth of someone who has watched many children for many strangers. I speed-walked my daughter across the station with my heart going like a hummingbird, and it was fine. It was completely fine. He was exactly where I left him, with the nice newspaper woman, unbothered.

Then we went to the parking garage, and I discovered that Sean had the long-term parking ticket in his pocket. On the train. Heading the wrong direction.

So I did what any reasonable woman with two traumatized children and seven bags would do, which is squat near the garage exit like a raccoon until some innocent person walked out, and then lunge for the closing gate to slip us inside. I want you to picture this - four backpacks (two on my back, two on my front), three duffels looped around my neck and shoulders, two children with tear-streaked faces, one mother performing a heist on a parking structure. We found the car, which felt like a small miracle. We got to the exit, pressed the help intercom, explained the situation to a disembodied French voice, and were eventually released into the night.

I drove the kids the hour home. I fed them. And later that night, we drove out together and picked up their father from the bus station, returned to us by the same rail system that had taken him, only slower.

Everyone was safe. Everyone was fed. My children now know that their mother will, if pressed, break into a parking garage.

The Time I Walked the Entire Length of a Train. Twice.

You’d think I’d have learned to respect the train after that. I had not learned. I had merely become arrogant.

We were heading to Paris to catch a flight to California for a family visit, which meant we were traveling with the luggage of people who will be gone three weeks. Sean had already studied the platform and identified the exact spot where our specific train car would stop. He was confident. I was confident in his confidence.

I should explain something about French train cars, which is that they are labeled the way state secrets are labeled. The car number lives on a small digital screen that you can only read if you are standing directly in front of it at an angle known to physicists, and even then it’s faded, and the seat numbers inside are the same, hidden in tiny print in inconvenient places. Most trains have eight cars, with car 1 at one end and car 8 at the other, but which end is which depends entirely on the direction the train pulled into the station, so you have to check every single time, and the checking is exactly as easy as I have just described.

But again, Sean was confident. Our seats were in car 8, and we were standing where car 8 would open. The train arrived. The doors opened. We got on.

Sean went off immediately to find a luggage rack big enough for our suitcases. I took, as always, the backpacks and the duffels and the children, and we went to find our seats. There was a woman in one of our seats. This happens constantly. I smiled, showed her my ticket, explained politely that she was in my seat.

She looked at the ticket and said, kindly, “No. This isn’t your seat. You’re supposed to be in car 8. This is car 2.”

My heart sank to somewhere around my shoes. I called Sean and told him to start moving toward the opposite end of the train with the giant suitcases. And then I began the long march. The kids and I set off through every car, the entire length of the train, in the heat, in the crowd, while people were still settling in and stowing their bags, which meant that every car we entered required a small crowd of strangers to sigh and move their things out of the aisle so that this sweating American woman and her two grumpy children could pass. Between every car is an automatic connecting door that opens for roughly two seconds before closing, so the choreography was: hold the door open with one outstretched arm, send both kids through, let it close, reopen it, send myself through. Repeat eight times. It took almost twenty minutes.

We reached the very last car, the absolute opposite end. I found our seats. There were people in all four of them.

I pulled out my ticket again. I showed it to a woman. And she said, with great pity, “Yes, but you’re supposed to be in car 8. This is car 2.”

Wait. What?

I told her, no, this could not be car 2, car 2 was at the other end, I had personally just walked the entire length of France to get here. She looked at me in a way you look at someone who has had a small break with reality and told me, gently, that I had it backwards. Untrusting now, betrayed by the universe, I asked three other people around us. All three said the same thing. We were standing in car 2. Car 8 was at the far end. The end I had just come from.

I wanted to sob. If I had been alone I would have given myself permission. Instead I told the children we were going on another adventure, in the voice of a woman who has fully left her body, and I called Sean, who was on his own equally cursed journey somewhere in the middle of the train with the suitcases, by this point so far away he may as well have been in a different country.

We turned around and walked all the way back. And do you know who we passed on the return trip? The first woman. The one who had been sitting in my actual seat. The one who told me the exact wrong information. She saw me coming and called out, “Oh, désolée! I was wrong!”

I could not look at her. I could not.

The strangers in the cars, who had been mildly annoyed to move their bags for us the first time, were now deeply annoyed and also visibly confused, watching the same family promenade past in the opposite direction. What is happening with these people? Is this a traveling rail family? Do they simply enjoy this? Is the journey itself the destination for them?

But what I cannot stay mad about is the fact that it is confusing, and there really was a giant number “2” displayed inside our actual car 8, except it didn’t refer to the car at all. It was a number for something else, maybe the stop, maybe a code known only to SNCF and God. I had no one to blame but my own credulity. She was wrong and confident, and I’d taken her confidence as fact and walked a marathon on it.

What I learned, I learned permanently: trust, yes. Be open, yes. But verify. I took one stranger’s certainty and treated it as gospel, and it cost me forty minutes and most of my will to live. I have not made that mistake since.

The Time I Got Shushed in First Class

We bought first-class tickets once. The price difference for this particular route was about twenty euros total, and we decided to treat ourselves.

I should manage expectations: first class on these trains is not a different planet. It’s usually upstairs, with a slightly nicer view and slightly bigger seats. The ride was going to be almost four hours, so we settled in for the long haul and deployed the full arsenal to occupy the kids: coloring books, activity books, stickers, drawing pads, pens, snacks, drinks. The children were being, by any honest measure, lovely. They colored. They talked quietly to each other. My daughter hummed her favorite song under her breath while she drew.

Then I heard a shush.

I heard it once and didn’t place it. I heard it twice. By the third time I started turning around, because it had begun to dawn on me that the shushing was directed at us, which made no sense, because we were not loud people, we were a coloring family with a quietly humming child. I looked behind me. A young woman with a book, radiating irritation.

“Are you shushing my kids?” I said, irritated right back.

“I’m trying to read,” she said.

“They’re children,” I said.

I mean, come on. Are two small children supposed to maintain silence for a four-hour train ride? That is not a reasonable expectation in any country, and anyone who has ever had a child, French or American, knows it. After our little exchange the shushing stopped, but it was replaced by an upgrade: enormous, theatrical, full-bodied sighs every single time one of my children made a sound, including speaking.

We’ve since pieced together what happened. There’s an unspoken expectation in first class that it stay quiet, almost library-quiet, which we just did not know, because the first couple of times we’d ridden up there, there had been other families around us making exactly the same amount of human noise, and it had been completely fine. The difference this time was that there were no other families in our car. We were the only source of sound on the entire upper deck of this car, which made us the protagonists of one woman’s ruined afternoon. (Quiet in public is a genuine French value, and it's a hill I've already chosen not to die on elsewhere.)

So we made a decision, and it has held. We ride second class now. We have accepted that we are second-class people, and second class comes with a freedom first class does not: the freedom to speak, and hum, and exist, at the volume of a normal family, with no one nearby paying twenty extra euros for the right to be furious about it.

What I’d Actually Tell You Before You Get on a French Train

If you take nothing else from my suffering, take these. They are the field guide I wish someone had handed me before any of the above.

Split your luggage with the kids in mind, not the bags. Our old system put one parent with the rolling suitcases and the other with the kids and all the soft bags. It works right up until something goes sideways and the parent with the kids is also wearing four backpacks and three duffels. Whoever has the children should carry the least, because the children are the load. Everything else can be dropped, dragged, or abandoned. The children cannot.

Check which end car 1 is on. Every single time. The car you board depends on the direction the train entered the station, and the numbering reverses accordingly. The little digital screens are nearly impossible to read, so confirm before you commit, and do not start walking the length of the train on a stranger’s confident say-so. Ask three people first. I learned that one the long way.

Build in real platform buffer, and have a “if we get separated” plan. Trains stop briefly and leave exactly on time, on purpose, as a point of national pride. If your family is splitting between doors, agree in advance on what happens if someone doesn’t make it off: who goes where, who has the car key, who has the parking ticket. Especially the parking ticket. And keep your phones charged, because when it falls apart, and occasionally it will, the only thing that saves you is reaching the person on the wrong end of the train immediately.

If you’re traveling with young kids, skip first class. Pocket the twenty euros. First class carries a ‘quiet’ expectation that your humming, coloring, perfectly normal children will violate the moment your car happens to be empty of other families. Second class is louder, cheaper, and far more forgiving of the fact that you brought human children onto a train.

Pack the entertainment arsenal regardless. Coloring books, stickers, snacks, drawing pads. It may not stop a stranger from sighing at you, but it will keep your kids happy for hours, and a happy kid is the difference between a long ride and a long ride you’ll be writing about for years.

The train is still my favorite way to travel in France. I just check the car number four times now, and I never let Sean carry the parking ticket.

À bientôt,
Kamille

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There’s a distinction nobody warned me about before we moved here, and it took about six months of living in France to notice it, and another six to understand why it mattered.

America, in my experience, is nice. Aggressively, exhaustingly nice. “Love your dress!” “We should totally get together soon!” “Oh my gosh, your house is amazing.” The social currency of niceness is abundant and widely circulated, and most of it costs nothing and means approximately nothing, and everyone knows this, and we all participate anyway because the alternative is standing in awkward silence at a party, and we’d rather die.

France is not nice.

France will let you walk around with spinach in your teeth. Except, no, wait. That’s exactly wrong. France is the one that tells you about the spinach.

That’s the distinction. Nice is staying quiet so nobody feels uncomfortable, while kind is saying the thing, because the person deserves to know.

I didn’t fully understand this until France showed me what the other option looks like.

Before any of that, though, there was the avocado.

A few months after we moved here, I was at the weekly outdoor market, doing what I had done in every Whole Foods produce section for the previous decade: gently squeezing an avocado to see if it was ready. A man working the stand crossed the entire distance between us in approximately two seconds.

“Madame,” he said. “Non. S’il vous plaît.“

My French at the time was the kind of French that could understand a stern correction faster than it could understand anything else. I froze, mortified, with the avocado still in my hand.

“Ne touchez pas les avocats. Si tout le monde les touche, ils vont tous pourrir.“ Don’t touch the avocados. If everyone touches them, they all go bad.

I thought: how rude.

I was, briefly, the American who had decided the French market vendor was being unnecessarily aggressive about a piece of fruit. I put the avocado back. I considered leaving. I started workshopping the story I’d tell about this later.

Then he said, more gently: “Madame, c’est pour quand, l’avocat? Aujourd’hui? Demain? Le week-end? Je vais vous donner le bon.“

When would you like to eat it? Today? Tomorrow? This weekend? I will give you the correct one.

I stood there for a moment.

He was, of course, right. The system in front of me was better than the system I had brought with me. He knew his avocados. He had been ripening them for a living for probably longer than I’d been alive. And his logic was actually unanswerable: if every person who walked into the market that day squeezed every avocado looking for the ripe one, every avocado would arrive at its eventual buyer bruised, half-handled, and carrying the fingerprints of a dozen strangers. The American produce-paw is not a quality-control method. It’s just a slow communal degradation of food, performed with great confidence.

He, on the other hand, had a system. He asked when I wanted to eat the avocado, and he gave me the avocado for that day.

It was perfect.

I told Sean I had been corrected at the market and that the correction had been deserved. He said he was sure that would never happen to him.

A few weeks later, Sean was at the grocery store buying honey.

He was in line at the checkout, holding a jar of perfectly reasonable organic (bio) honey, when an older woman behind him looked at it, looked at him, and said: “Oh, non. Vous ne devriez pas acheter ce miel.“

Sean, who had not asked for an opinion on his honey, blinked.

“That’s not the local honey,” she continued, in the tone of someone correcting a small but important error. “The best honey is over there.” She pointed. Then, before he could respond, she reached out, took him gently by the arm, and said: “Venez. Je vais vous montrer.“ Come. I will show you.

She took him out of line and walked him across the grocery store. To a different aisle. She located the correct honey. She handed it to him. And then, because she had his attention now, she told him about the man who made it. Where he lived. The village. How long he’d been keeping bees. The fact that he loved his bees, which she said with the seriousness of someone reporting a medical diagnosis. She did not know Sean. But she had decided, on the basis of approximately four seconds of observing a stranger’s honey selection, that this required intervention.

Sean came home with the correct honey and a slightly stunned expression.

In America, a stranger commenting on your grocery cart is grounds for calling a manager. In France, it’s a public service. She wasn’t being nice. Nice would have been letting him buy the wrong honey and saying nothing, sparing them both the awkwardness. She was being kind. Sean was about to walk out of a French supermarket with subpar honey, and she had the information that could prevent it, and she gave it to him with both hands. Possibly literally.

That was strangers.

Then there were the people who actually knew us.

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But every so often I'll be doing something completely ordinary, buying bread, walking past a house with a name on a small stone plaque, picking up the kids, and I'll have to physically stop and remind myself this is the regular Tuesday now.

It’s the small things that do it. This post is a list of ten of those things. The ones that don’t make it into the moved-to-France-and-everything-changed essays because they sound too tiny to mention. But they are not too tiny. They are, in fact, why I'm still here.

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1. Bonjour. Always. First. Before anything else.

There is a scene at the opening of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast where Belle walks through her little French village and everyone is popping out of windows and doorways calling bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, BONJOUR! at each other in a kind of escalating chorus, while she winds through them with her nose in a book. There goes the baker with his tray, like always...

That was not an exaggeration. That is my life now. I am basically Belle.

I may not have her innocent youth, and I am not in love with a hairy beast (well, kind of). But I do often have my nose stuck in a book (or my ear stuck in an audiobook, or my eyes…stuck in a Kindle? The phrase has not modernized well), and I am sometimes regarded by the locals as a little odd. To be fair, this is mostly for my Americanness rather than my bookworminess. The bookworm part they actually approve of.

You do not walk into a French shop and ask where the lentils are. You walk into a French shop, you make eye contact with whoever is closest, you say bonjour, and then you ask where the lentils are. If you skip the bonjour, the lentils will not be found. Sometimes the lentils will, in a dignified way, never have existed.

This applies everywhere. The bakery. The waiting room at the doctor. The school office. The post office. The hardware store at 4:55 on a Friday when everyone is already mentally on the weekend. You acknowledge the person before you ask the person for anything. Every time.

I love this so much I have started doing it back in the United States, where it makes me look mildly unhinged. A Whole Foods cashier in California once thanked me with the wary tone of someone politely declining a religious pamphlet.

The kid version of this is even better. At our village school, every child at pickup walks up to the teacher at the door, says au revoir, and is sent off by name. It takes about four seconds per child. Multiply that by every school day, from age three, and you start to understand why French teenagers behave the way they do. (I wrote about that part here.)

2. The bread. Just…chef’s kiss

I am not talking about a loaf of square bread sealed in plastic with the structural integrity of upholstery foam. I am talking about a round boule that you ask the boulangère to slice for you (tranchée, s’il vous plaît) and that she slides through a small machine in the back without breaking stride. I am talking about a baguette that you carry home under your arm and that is meaningfully shorter by the time you walk through the door, because you cannot help yourself, and neither can your children.

A friend of ours came to visit last fall. She’s diabetic and wears a continuous glucose monitor (one of those small white discs that lives on the back of your arm and tattles in real time). She ate baguette with us at lunch on her first day, the way you do, and then she pulled out her phone and just stared at it. Her glucose had barely moved. She told me it had never not moved like that in her 60 years of life. We sat there at the kitchen table looking at her phone like it was a magic eight-ball.

I cannot fully explain this. The bread is older. The flours are different. The whole supply chain is built around the boulangerie down the street rather than a factory in another time zone. Whatever the reason, here’s the lived experience: I eat bread every day, I do not feel like a bloated goat, I have not been visited by guilt in approximately two and a half years, and I would like to formally apologize to every premium loaf I dismissed for most of my adult life.

The boulangerie is the heart of the village. You go in the morning. You greet everyone. You leave with something warm. You are slightly more of a person than you were five minutes ago.

3. The friendliness (yes, really).

I know. I know what you’ve heard. I heard it too, for thirty-some years, and then I moved here and the rumor turned out to be mostly about Paris in August, mostly about waiters who simply do not feel they owe you a performance, and mostly leftover from a feud the French and the British have been running since before the invention of central heating.

What I have actually found, in our village and the ones around it: pharmacists who walk me through every obscure tincture like I’m a beloved cousin, teachers who do not care that I butcher chèvre chaud, neighbors who knocked on the door with a duck. I wrote a whole piece about this when we’d been in our current village for three months, and the short version of it is: if you say bonjour first and you try a little, you will be astonished how warm a country with a reputation for froideur can be.

4. La brocante. The whole attitude toward old things.

A brocante is a flea market, but calling it that is like calling a wedding a party. It misses what’s actually happening.

What’s happening is an entire culture that has decided, collectively, that old things are not embarrassing. A chipped Limoges plate is better than the new plate. An embroidered linen sheet with someone else’s grandmother’s initials in the corner is the sheet you want. The little brass bell, the dented copper pot, the silver fork with a slight twist in the tines from a hundred years of being washed by hand. All of it has value, because it has lived. It has history.

We bought a croquet set at a brocante last spring. It is one hundred and fifty years old. Some of the mallets have hairline cracks. One or two of the balls are missing entirely. We played with it on the lawn on Easter Sunday, with gaps mowed into the grass, and I have rarely been happier with a purchase in my life.

In America, it often felt like old was “a problem to be solved,” in furniture and in faces. Here in France, old is the feature.

Here is the other thing, which I did not fully grasp until I started living here.

When we lived in Los Angeles, I used to scroll through shops like Elsie Green and Amber Interiors and Olive Ateliers the way other people scroll through Zillow. I would look at a single wooden farm table for $4,200 and feel a kind of yearning that was not entirely healthy. I assumed the prices were the prices. I assumed this is what beautiful old French things cost.

They are not the prices. Let me show you an example.

Here is an oak dining chair currently listed on Olive Ateliers for $295.

Here is its near-twin, which I bought at a brocante about forty minutes from our house, in a set of four, for €25 total (yes, for all four).

That math is correct. The chair I am sitting in right now to write this cost approximately six euros.

I do not say this to drag the shops. Those shops are doing the actual work — sourcing, restoring, shipping, photographing, listing, marketing, and absorbing the customs nightmare that is bringing antique European furniture into the United States. The markup is the price of that work, and it is fair. I have used those websites to dream for years. I will probably use them again when I am back in California visiting and I want to buy a friend something small and lovely (like a French candlestick).

But living here, the math is different. The same objects are just...around. In barns. On lawns. At Sunday markets where the seller is also eating a sandwich. Old, in France, is also affordable, which may be the most magical thing about it.

5. The naming of houses.

Drive five minutes outside any French village and you will pass small stone plaques set into walls, hand-painted signs on gates, brass letters above doorways. La Maison Neuve. Les Tilleuls. Le Petit Moulin. La Roseraie. The new house. The lindens. The little mill. The rose garden.

Every house has a name. Not a number (although it usually has one of those too, at least on paper). A name.

I cannot tell you how much this changes the experience of looking for someone’s address. You are not driving to 47 Rue de Whatever. You are driving to the little mill. You are looking, in the dusk, for a sign that says Les Tilleuls and a row of lime trees. You arrive somewhere and you know what it’s called and the place has, immediately, a story.

Our château has a name, and every time we use it on a piece of paperwork, the person on the other end smiles slightly. Ah oui. Très joli. They have already imagined the house, and maybe the stories.

6. L’apéro. The whole social grammar of it.

The apéro is what happens between the day is ending and dinner has begun. It is the engineered pause. The cultural decompression chamber.

It is also, structurally, a small party that breaks out approximately one hour before dinner, requires almost no advance planning, and is governed by rules that I am still learning. There is a bowl of olives. There is saucisson sliced thin. There is something to drink that is not water but also not a full glass of wine, a kir, maybe, or a pastis, or a small glass of something cold. There are two or three little crackers per person, which everyone eats slowly while standing or sitting near each other and talking about nothing of consequence.

It can be casual. It can be elegant. It can be a folding table in someone’s driveway. It can also, and this is the great risk, last three hours, accidentally become dinner, and end with someone going inside to get a tarte they had thought they were saving for tomorrow.

The first time we hosted neighbors for apéro I made the rookie American error of putting out approximately four times too much food. They ate it all and then we still had dinner. I have since learned restraint. (See item nine.)

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7. Les grandes vacances. The national exhale.

Every August, France closes.

I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean entire businesses tape a piece of paper to the door that says Fermé pour les vacances. Retour le 1er septembre. I mean the family bakery, the family butcher, the hardware store, the family dentist. I mean the doctor and sometimes also the replacement doctor. I mean the bank branch and the post office and the place that fixes the dishwasher.

Paris empties (of locals). The coast fills. Whole families decamp to the same seaside town or countryside house their grandparents went to, and they go there every year for the rest of their lives, and their children’s children will probably go there, too.

The first August I lived through this I thought it was insane. Where are the people. Why is my pharmacy closed. Who decided this. The second August I started planning around it. The third August I closed my own laptop on July 31st, looked at it for a long moment, and went outside.

Vacation in the American sense, this is not. It’s the thing your real life is arranged around. A national agreement, renewed annually, that for one month nobody is going to pretend anything is more important than lunch.

8. The culture of discretion.

This one took me the longest to see, because the absence of a thing is always harder to notice than the presence of one.

French elegance, the actual kind, has almost nothing to do with what you can afford and almost everything to do with what you choose not to do. You do not over-explain. You do not over-decorate. You do not over-praise. You do not over-display. Nobody walks into a room and announces what they paid for the thing they are wearing (unless it was a bargain, and in that case it’s time to brag). Nobody mentions the brand.

If something is beautiful, it does not need to announce itself.

I noticed this most clearly at a friend’s house, an old farmhouse with stone walls and beams the color of dark tea. The kitchen had one extraordinary copper pot hanging from a hook. One. Not seven. Not a pegboard arrangement curated for Instagram. One pot, very old, very loved, hanging exactly where it was used. I stood there looking at it for longer than was probably normal. That’s the whole move, I thought. Pick the one good thing. Hang it where you can see it. Stop there.

I am working on it.

9. The everyday petit.

The French add petit to almost everything. Un petit café. Un petit dessert. Une petite promenade. Un petit apéro. Une petite visite. Un petit moment.

It is not literal. The coffee is not measurably smaller. The dessert is, frequently, not small at all (for French standards). Petit is a softening. It is a way of telling the universe (and yourself) that whatever you are about to do is a small, manageable, charming thing rather than a large, complicated, time-consuming thing. It lowers the stakes. It makes everything more intimate. It makes you, almost imperceptibly, a slightly more relaxed person.

You are not going for a walk that will take an hour and require sunscreen and a water bottle and a charged phone. You are going for une petite promenade. You are not making dinner. You are putting together un petit dîner. You are not having people over for what will become an evening you have been secretly preparing for for three days. You are having them over for un petit apéro.

I now use petit in English, which sounds insane, and I will be doing it forever.

10. The old people, who are still in the village.

In our village, the older residents are everywhere. At the boulangerie at eight in the morning. On the bench outside the Mairie at eleven. At the café at twelve-thirty. Walking dogs. Playing petanque near the village square. Driving small cars at speeds that are technically legal. Watching everything.

They know everything. They know which house had the wedding in 1968. They know where the original well was on our property. They know which family planted banana trees in our potager. They know which corner of the field never freezes. This is the part of the deal you don’t read in advance. In a small French village, your house has a biography, and you are merely its current chapter.

I love this. I love it for them, for the visible, greeted, woven-in dignity of growing old somewhere that still has you in it. I love it for my children, who say bonjour to grandmothers at the boulangerie and have absorbed, in some preverbal way, that old people are not a separate species kept in a separate building. And I love it for me, because I would like, very much, to one day be the woman on the bench outside the Mairie, watching everything, telling some bewildered new American where her well used to be.

There are more, of course. There is the way the church bells still ring the hours and most of us no longer notice. There is the fact that you can buy four kinds of butter at the smallest village shop. There is the bonne soirée you say to absolutely everyone after about 6pm. There is the post office, which I dreaded for about six months before realizing the staff comes around the counter to help you use the self-service machine. The post office here is, somehow, pleasant.

I'll get to those. For now, the church bells just rang noon, and the bonjour-ing is about to start at the boulangerie without me.

Bonjour,
Kamille

If you’d like more of these (the small things that don’t make it into the bigger essays, the village rumors, the slow restoration of a 300-year-old building, the chickens, the bluebells, the brocante finds), I’d love to have you along. Free essays twice per month. A paid version for the readers who want the whole story. Either way, thank you for reading.

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Someone left a comment on one of my Substack Notes a few days ago that said Europe has always been behind the United States. In terms of being with the ‘times’.

I’ve seen versions of this comment before, sometimes about Europe broadly, sometimes about France specifically. The underlying claim is consistent. America is winning, the other side is trailing, and the difference between them is a question of speed.

I replied: I’d argue they’re not behind. They just picked a different finish line. The US is winning a race Europe opted out of running.

I’m going to narrow what I said in that reply. I cannot speak for Europe. I’ve never lived in Italy or Spain or Germany or anywhere else on the continent. What I can speak to is France. Rural France specifically. And the rest of this essay is about that, because that comment and my reply has been sitting in my head, and I think it’s the closest I’ve come to articulating something I’ve been trying to say for almost three years.

I am not an economist. I have no credentials to evaluate national systems. I am a writer who moved from Los Angeles to a small château in rural France with her husband and two children, almost three years ago now. What I can report on is what I’ve watched, what I’ve felt, and the slightly mortifying rearrangement of almost everything I thought I wanted.

Two finish lines

Here is what my American measuring stick used to measure: how much money we made, how impressive our jobs sounded at a dinner party, what cars we drove, what neighborhood we lived in, how many milestones our kids had hit early, whether we looked like we had it all figured out.

This wasn’t even conscious. Nobody in my life sat me down and said here are the metrics for success in the United States. Follow them blindly. I hadn’t really chosen the metrics. They were what everyone around me used, so I used them, too. I would have told you, with full sincerity, that I valued family and time and rest above all those things. I would have (thought I) meant it. I also would have continued to organize my Saturday around the playdate that would help my child get into the right preschool. The said values and the actual measuring stick were not the same.

My husband and I dreamed about cars. Specifically, we dreamed about a Tesla, or an Audi SUV hybrid, or a pretty BMW. The kind of car that would act as a signal at the school dropoff line. The signal was: see us? We are doing the thing. We are people who can afford this car.

We also dreamed about a house. A house in the right neighborhood, with the right number of bedrooms, near the right school, with the right finishes. We wanted to be on the upward trajectory we’d been raised to understand as the meaning of an adult life. Climb. Earn more. Buy the better version. Show up at the gathering looking like you’d ‘figured it out.’

Then we moved to France, and gradually, without permission, the measuring stick I’d been using started to register as a measuring stick rather than as reality. Which is the only way I know how to describe what’s happened in the last two and a half years.

If you’re new here, I’m an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband and two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the château, the renovation, and the ongoing reorganization of two Americans who thought they knew what they were doing. What you’re reading is free. Paid subscribers get six posts a month: two more essays like this one, two château renovation diary entries, and access to everything in the archive. Come stay a while.

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What the French seem to measure with

The first time I noticed something was off was at a hunting lunch. I was sitting next to an older gentleman, trying my best to converse in French, and at some point I asked a typical American question, which is whether he had any children.

He said yes. Then he told me about the four of them.

He told me where in France they each lived. He told me how beautiful each region was — what the landscapes looked like, what was particular about each town. He told me how many children each of them had. He told me about the beautiful grandchildren. The conversation went on for some time.

He did not tell me what any of them did for work.

This was not a man avoiding the topic because his children were struggling, or because he wasn’t proud of them. He was a well-to-do gentleman who used to live in Paris. If his children had been engineers or surgeons or executives, he could easily have led with that. He just didn’t. He was bragging, but he was bragging about the regions and the grandchildren. The professions did not come up because the professions were not, in his framing of the conversation, the point.

I have since had this experience several more times.

People I’ve met here, including people who own properties significantly grander than mine, drive cars that look like they’ve been driven for twenty years and probably have been. They wear clothes that are not new. Their houses are full of furniture that has been in their families for generations, not because they’re sentimental but because the furniture is fine and there’s no reason to replace it. They take their vacations seriously and at length. They eat well. They host. They walk after dinner because the light stays out until nine-thirty in summer and ending the evening early would feel wasteful.

It’s a different theory of what days are for.

The currency of flaunting here, when there is any flaunting at all, is experiences and moments. The last vacation, a particularly good cheese someone discovered, a wedding they just attended, a hike they took on Sunday, the new baby in the family. The moment that signals the life.

Paris is its own animal, and the wealthy in any country find ways to signal. But the ambient pressure to consume, the constant low-grade signal that you should be acquiring more and better, is genuinely lower out here. I can feel the absence of it in my body.

A reader of mine, Nataliya, put this more cleanly than I could in a comment on a different post. She wrote: America supports consumption. France supports life. She nailed in five words what I've been chewing on for almost three years.

What I want to tell you next is who this country actually treats as its kings, what I said when someone asked what I'd do with a windfall, and what my scoreboard looks like now that I've been keeping a different one for almost three years. Those three small observations are how the measuring stick stopped being an idea I was entertaining and became the way we live.

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There’s no “what works for you?” No choreographed back-and-forth where both parties pretend to have equally complex schedules and eventually land on something neither of them wanted in the first place. You get a time and a date, delivered with the laid-back authority of someone announcing the weather.

Bonjour,

Your appointment is Monday at 8h15.

Cordially,
French Person

RECEIPT:

You can try to move it, of course. But you’re basically asking for a big fat (French) favor.

If you're new here, I'm an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband and two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the château, the renovation, and the ongoing education of two Americans in rural France who thought they knew what they were getting into. What you're reading is free. Paid subscribers get four additional posts each month - two more essays about French culture and life from the inside, and two chateau renovation diary entries documenting the detailed renovation, in real time. Come stay a while.

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The email that contains your fate

The first few times this happened, I assumed I’d missed a polite French nuance. Surely “Your appointment is Thursday” meant “Would Thursday work for you?”

It did not.

“Your appointment is Thursday” means: your appointment is Thursday. If you can’t make it, you may attempt to renegotiate, but you should understand you’ve stepped into a universe where access is a privilege and the calendar belongs to the person behind the desk.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to stop reading this as rude and start reading it as something else entirely.

Why this is (a little bit) logical.

There’s a logic to it once you stop fighting it.

Work flexibility is baked into the culture here in a way it simply isn’t in America. A doctor’s appointment isn’t treated like an extravagant lifestyle choice requiring advance apology. You say, “I have an appointment” and the response is essentially: yes, of course, that’s life. Nobody asks you to schedule around your lunch break or find a time that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. You have an appointment. You go.

There’s also a different assumption about what counts as considerate. In America we think we’re being thoughtful by asking for availability - by opening up the calendar and letting the other person choose. Here, the thoughtfulness runs the other direction. I have solved the scheduling problem. Here is your slot. You’re welcome. The ten-email chain to find the perfect overlap of two calendars is not, here, considered a good use of anyone’s time. People would rather eat lunch.

The nerve.

When access is genuinely scarce (and in rural France, certain specialists and tradespeople are genuinely scarce), you take the slot you’re given, you show up, and you don’t perform pickiness you can’t afford.

The ‘we’re coming tomorrow’ people.

Then there’s the second phenomenon, which is adjacent but considerably more chaotic.

This one happens with tradespeople, particularly the ones you’ve been chasing for weeks. You email politely. You call, you text. You wait. You begin to wonder if you’ve been blocked for being the annoying American squeaky wheel. You make peace with the silence. You move on emotionally.

Then suddenly, out of the bleu:

Bonjour, nous venons demain. (Hello, we are coming tomorrow.)

No “does that work?” no preamble, no explanation of where they’ve been. Chasing them does nothing. What works, apparently, is giving up - at which point they sense the shift in energy and appear.

I spent a long time finding this infuriating. Now I see it as a variation on the same theme. The assigned appointment and the sudden "we're coming tomorrow" are cousins. Both are saying: here is when this is happening. Before, they weren’t confirming because they didn’t have availability. Now they do. And if you say "actually tomorrow doesn't work," you lose the slot, you lose the momentum, and you lose them - back into the silence from which they briefly, mysteriously emerged. So you clear your calendar and you say d’accord and you stop asking questions.

Our first exposure to all of this.

Our first real encounter with this energy happened before we’d even fully arrived.

We’d just flown in from Los Angeles with everything we owned, hauling a small mountain of luggage through the airport. We were waiting at oversized baggage for our two car seats. One came through. The other didn’t. We filed a claim at the counter. “When we find it, we will call you,” they said.

We went home, and waited. Three days passed without a word. On the fourth day I called them, sat on hold until I had mentally redecorated our entire kitchen, and eventually reached someone who confirmed: not found yet, sorry, we'll be in touch.

I hung up, dejected.

Less than an hour later, while we were having lunch in the garden, a van pulled up the drive. A man climbed out holding our missing car seat like he was delivering a prophecy. No warning. No tracking notification. No “would this afternoon work?” Just: here it is.

I stood in the garden blinking in the sunlight and said merci approximately eight times. Maybe more.

(merci. merci! MERCI. mer-ci. …merci. mErCi? merciiiiii.)

That was my first clue. Silence in France usually means something is still in motion somewhere. Then it shows up solved.

My inner project manager meets France.

In America, scheduling has taken on a vaguely moral dimension. Being organized means planning ahead. Caring means confirming. Professionalism means the rapid response and the Calendly link and the calendar invite with the Zoom link already embedded. The administration of things has become, somewhere along the way, the thing itself.

Here, the performance is optional. What matters is whether the thing actually gets done, and whether everyone gets to eat lunch and keep their weekend intact.

I’m not trying to romanticize chaos. It is a genuinely different operating system, with different assumptions baked in about what time is for and what counts as respect. It gets considerably easier to accept when you’re three glasses into a long lunch and nobody is doing that thing where they pretend to listen while secretly replying to an email under the table.

What we’re actually doing differently now.

A few things we’ve learned, for anyone navigating this:

If you get a slot, take it. Assume it’s the good one. Don’t hold out for something that fits better - in rural France, the next available might be months away and it will also arrive without warning.

Leave buffer in your calendar. If you stack your days like dominoes, France will knock them all over. Nothing important gets scheduled after a “we’re coming tomorrow” text.

Brace for the clumps. Nothing for weeks, then everyone appears on the same Tuesday. There’s no system for predicting it and no point pretending otherwise.

Keep your humor close. Not because everything is funny, but because it’s the cheapest coping mechanism available and it travels well.

The weird upside

What I didn’t expect was how much being assigned appointments would start to do something to me. Over time, being taken out of the negotiation has started to take me out of the performance of it, too. The constant managing of everyone’s time, the confirming and re-confirming, the anxiety of the unanswered message - a lot of that has simply stopped being part of my day. And I didn’t realize how much energy it had been taking until it wasn’t there anymore.

I still like knowing what day something is happening. I still like clarity. I’m not fully French and I’m not pretending otherwise.

But I am learning.

Even if the learning is happening, as most things here do, without my consent.

If you've lived somewhere that runs on this kind of scheduling logic - France or otherwise - drop it in the comments. The more unhinged the better.

À bientôt,
Kamille

Once Upon a Castle is where I write about this life - the château, the renovation, and what it actually looks like to trade everything familiar for something completely unknown. Free subscribers get two posts a month. Paid subscribers get six - two more essays like this one, two renovation diary entries from inside the walls, and access to everything in the archive.

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Every October, a small group of women would squeeze into my apartment in their witch hats for my annual ‘Witches Whimzy’ party. I’d crack the windows to let in the eighty degree October air and we’d stand around pretending, with varying levels of commitment, that fall was a thing that was happening. I’d set out an assortment of Whole Foods snacks on the kitchen counter - peanut butter filled pretzels, boo chips, Annie’s organic gummy bats, hummus with vegetables, Justin’s peanut butter cups, sometimes a frozen pizza thrown into the oven, then sliced into quarters. Sparkling apple cider. Popcorn.

It was nice. Easy, low-key. A gathering where nobody had to be ‘on’ or impress anyone. We sat on the floor or the sofa, grazed off paper plates, refilled our sparkling cider, talked about work. The next day I usually felt a bit flat - the low-grade aftermath of several hours of continuous snacking on a variety of processed foods that tasted fine in the moment and then sort of...sat there. Plus the inevitable crash after days of preparing for a party and then spending the party eating chips standing up.

That was the full extent of my hosting experience before we moved to France.

What happened next was, let’s say, an adjustment.

The cheese incident.

Our first proper French dinner party - not a casual gathering, a real one, twelve people around a long table, at a beautiful countryside chateau, courses arriving one at a time - was going fine until the cheese.

The board came around. My husband, trying to be polite and not take too much, cut himself a small slice of the 30-month aged Comté. He left a bit of the rind on the remaining block, which seemed reasonable. The board continued its way around the table.

When it got back to the host, she picked it up. Looked at it. Set it back down. Then looked around the table.

“Who cut the cheese like this?”

My husband, to his eternal credit, raised his hand immediately.

She looked at him with the patient but firm expression of someone about to correct a very basic error, possibly for the last time.

“You don’t mess with the cheese in France,” she said. “Let me teach you how to cut it.”

And she did. There are rules. Many rules. Specific, deeply held, non-negotiable rules about how to cut each type of cheese - rules that vary by whether the cheese is round, square, triangular, a wedge, a log, or a wheel. The governing principle, the one Sean had violated, is this: you always cut the rind away with your piece. You never leave excess rind on the shared block. The rind belongs to whoever takes the last piece, not to the communal cheese, and abandoning it there is considered, well, inconsiderate.

The host softened after delivering her verdict. She took pity on us. She gave us the full rundown, detail by detail, while the rest of the table either listened politely or pretended not to notice what was happening to the poor, naive Americans. Sean took it well - seventeen years as a teacher will do that to you, always open to a good lesson.

We did not know any of this before we moved here. We know it now. We will never forget it.

If you're new here, I'm an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband and two children. We moved from Los Angeles. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the life, the renovation, the cultural education, and everything France keeps teaching us that we didn't know we needed to learn. Paid subscribers get Castle Diaries, where I document the renovation in real time. Come stay a while.

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But I've been living in rural France for a couple of years now, with two children in the French school system and a husband who spent seventeen years teaching in Southern California. And the comparison that's been persistently forming in my head is worth writing down.

So that's what this is. A comparison. From the inside, from both sides, with as much honesty as I can manage.

Also: I am aware that neither Los Angeles nor rural France is representative of their entire countries. I’m a writer, not a researcher. And this is a personal essay. Not a policy paper.

With that established, here’s what we’ve noticed.

The tree incident.

Before we moved to France, our son was attending a preschool in Los Angeles. Not an expensive one by LA standards - about $1,000 a month for two to three half days a week (which tells you everything you need to know about LA standards).

It was a co-op model, meaning parents volunteered regularly in the classroom. Progressive approach: gentle parenting, child-led discovery, project-based play, no formal academics. Just playing, mostly outside. We actually liked it quite a bit.

Then there was the tree incident.

I was sitting at a little table outside with some children, art supplies scattered around. The kids were drawing. I picked up a crayon and drew a tree. A simple tree. Not a masterpiece. Just, a tree.

About thirty minutes later, one of the teachers held up my drawing and said, loudly: “Whose drawing is this?”

The other parent volunteer shook his head. I slowly raised my hand.

She walked over and explained that parents are asked not to make exceptional drawings in the classroom, as it discourages children.

“It makes them feel inferior,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

I want to be very clear: it was not an exceptional drawing. It was a tree drawn by someone who is not an artist, using a child’s crayon, in approximately ninety seconds.

This scene frequently pops up in my memories - partly because it was genuinely absurd. Partly because I understood, somewhere in the moment, that we had crossed a line I hadn’t known was there before - from thoughtful progressive education into something that had been pulled a bit further west than I was comfortable with. The instinct was right. The execution had gone somewhere strange.

What my husband saw in the classroom.

Sean taught in Southern California public schools for seventeen years, across different ages and districts. What he watched happen over that time was a slow, significant shift in the balance of authority between teachers and students.

It didn’t happen all at once. It happened through a series of lawsuits, policy changes, and cultural shifts that, taken individually, each made a certain kind of sense. Taken together, they produced classrooms where teachers had almost no practical authority and students knew it.

The paperwork required to formally report a student’s behavior became so extensive - unpaid hours outside the classroom, elaborate documentation, administrative processes that could take weeks - that most teachers simply stopped trying. Failing a student became nearly impossible. Not because students were passing, but because the administrative barriers were so high that districts found it easier to move students through than to hold them back. This kept graduation rates looking good on paper. It kept lawsuits at bay. It did not keep students learning.

He watched reading levels drop. Spelling levels drop. Basic math skills erode. He watched it happen year after year and felt increasingly powerless to address it.

We had friends visit us here in France - both still teaching in Southern California. They sat in our kitchen, exhausted, and told stories that would make your hair stand up. Teachers being reported to administration by parents for the crime of setting boundaries. Teachers facing termination threats for ‘disciplining’ (basically saying: “Please don’t do that thing again”) students who were genuinely disrupting other children’s ability to learn. A system so thoroughly inverted that the adults had less authority than the children they were supposed to be educating.

I am not saying French schools are perfect. I am saying it is not like that here.

On bubbles.

Here’s something I didn’t expect: moving to France showed me how thoroughly I had been living in a parenting bubble, among other bubbles.

Shortly after we arrived, we were having dinner with some friends who live in London - two parents, two kids, shared interests. I referenced a parenting book I’d read, the way you reference something everyone knows. They’d never heard of it. I was genuinely shocked. This book had been discussed by every parent I knew in Los Angeles. It had felt universal.

They mentioned a book that was popular in their circle. I’d never heard of it either.

It was a small moment that landed heavily. I had spent years absorbing a very specific parenting philosophy, in a very specific city, surrounded by people reading the same books and listening to the same podcasts and using the same language, and I had mistaken that bubble for the whole world.

The book they mentioned was The Danish Way of Parenting by Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Sandahl. I bought it immediately, as my first attempt to puncture the bubble. It was most excellent. Highly recommend.

The authority question, and the sixteen-year-old.

French teachers have authority. And I want to be clear about what I mean by that, because authority has become a loaded word lately, conjuring images of power without accountability, of rules without reason.

I don’t mean authoritarian. I mean authoritative. There’s a meaningful difference. Authoritarian is power for its own sake. Authoritative is the earned, calm, consistent presence that children actually need from adults - the kind where children listen not because they're afraid of consequences but because the adult in the room has established, through consistency and genuine care, that they are worth listening to. That’s what I’ve observed here. That’s what I mean.

This was a genuine culture shock for us at first. The communication style is more direct than we were used to - less cushioning, less hedging, less of the elaborate softening that Americans tend to wrap around anything that might be even slightly uncomfortable to hear. Teachers here say what they mean. Parents are told what they need to know. Nobody seems to find this rude. It just seems to be how adults talk to each other when they respect each other's time.

I wonder whether this has something to do with what we’ve observed in French teenagers generally. Because the teenagers here are different. Not all of them, not universally, not as a law of nature - but as a general pattern, what I’ve seen is young people who are comfortable around adults in a way that I suppose stopped feeling normal to me somewhere along the way in America.

We were invited to a neighbor’s house for a goûter shortly after we arrived - one of those gatherings where you’re welcomed into someone’s home and introduced to a room full of people who have all come specifically to meet you, which is its own whole thing and I’ve written about it elsewhere. Midway through the afternoon, the family’s sixteen-year-old grandson walked in.

He gave a cheerful bonjour to the entire room of adults. Then he bent down and gave each of my children - whom he had never met in his life - a kiss on the cheek.

I almost cried.

Not because it was sentimental, though it was. Because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a teenage boy walk into a room full of adults and be genuinely, uncomplicatedly present. No sulking. No performance of disinterest. No phone-as-shield. Just a kid who said hello to the adults and was kind to the small children and then sat down and participated in the conversation like a person.

What teenage boy, in my experience of American teenage boys, would consider that cool?

We’ve heard versions of this story from other expats, too. A British couple we know here had their teenage daughter’s French friends over one afternoon. They told us about it afterward with the slightly dazed energy of people describing something they’d witnessed but couldn’t fully explain.

The friends arrived and stood at the entryway. One by one, each of them said bonjour to both parents before walking into the house. Not a mumbled acknowledgment. An actual greeting, to each adult, individually, before entering. Like it was simply the cost of entry (because apparently here, it is).

Throughout the visit: please and thank you for everything. No entitlement about snacks or drinks. Offers to help. Zero expectation of being served. The parents kept looking at each other. They said they almost didn’t know how to act.

And that’s the ‘cool question.’ In America, we have spent decades organizing adolescent culture around the idea that coolness - which is essentially peer approval, which is essentially the opinion of other fourteen-year-olds - is the currency that matters. We have built schools and social structures and parenting philosophies around accommodating that currency rather than questioning it.

There’s a book called Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman - an American journalist who had children in Paris and spent years trying to figure out why French children behaved so differently from American ones. One of the things she found: French children are expected, from a young age, to say hello to adults they know. Not as a performance of politeness but as a genuine acknowledgment that other people exist and have their own feelings and needs. The idea being that children are not the center of the universe, that they have the ability to give as well as receive, and that learning to be present with adults is part of what growing up means.

It’s a rule so ingrained it becomes invisible. The teenagers at the door weren’t being exceptionally polite. They were just doing what French children do. The sixteen-year-old at the goûter wasn’t remarkable by local standards. He was just a normally raised French boy.

And that was perhaps the most surprising part. Not necessarily that it happened, but that it was considered normal.

We see this playing out in the most literal way imaginable at school pickup time for my pre-school-aged children. The teacher stands at the door as parents arrive, releasing the children one by one. Before a child is let go, they have to give a proper goodbye - au revoir, à demain, bon weekend, whatever is appropriate. The teacher holds onto them gently, just for a moment, until the child says it. Not aggressively. Not as punishment. Just as a simple, non-negotiable expectation: you say goodbye before you leave. Every day. To your teacher.

It takes about four seconds per child. It also teaches something that four seconds of anything rarely manages to teach: that the people around you deserve to be acknowledged when you leave them.

Multiply that by every school day, every year, from the age of three.

It’s a combination of things, probably - the schools, the family structure, the culture around mealtimes and conversation, the fact that adults here are still treated as adults worth knowing. But somewhere in that combination is a preschool teacher holding a child’s hand for four seconds, every single day, until it stops being a lesson and becomes just how you move through the world.

What I can tell you is what I saw in that room: a sixteen-year-old who walked in and made two small American children feel seen and welcomed, and walked out without making a big deal of it.

And a British couple, slightly knocked sideways in their own kitchen, watching a group of teenagers say please and thank you for everything and offer to help with the washing up.

If you’re new here: Once Upon a Castle is where I write about all of this. The château, the life, the cultural observations, and the ongoing education of two Americans in rural France. What you’re reading is free. Paid subscribers get Castle Diaries, where I document the renovation in real time. We’d love to have you along.

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The lunch situation.

If you’ve seen Michael Moore’s film Where to Invade Next, you may remember the sequence where he visits a French school cafeteria and watches children eat a four course lunch on real plates with real silverware. Then he shows them photographs of American school lunches. The children stare at the photos with the polite confusion of people being shown evidence of something they cannot explain.

The four course lunch is real. I can vouch for it. My children eat it every day.

My husband, as a teacher in California, ate lunch in about twelve minutes at his desk while grading papers. In France, the school lunch is long. An hour and a half, sometimes approaching two hours. The children eat a starter, a main course, a cheese course (because France considers cheese a non-negotiable component of a child’s lunch, which I have decided is correct), and a dessert. Many of the ingredients are organic and local. It says so on the weekly menu, which parents can view online.

This is not a fancy private school in Paris. This is a small rural French school in a town most maps don’t bother to label.

My husband used to tell parents in Los Angeles: if you want your child eating well, pack their lunch. School lunch is not an option.

Here in France, packing their lunch is not an option either, but for the opposite reason. In two years I have never once seen a parent send their child in with a packed lunch. It would be, frankly, weird. The only exception is field trips. The school lunch here isn't something you opt out of. It's just what lunch is. And it’s amazing.

The calendar.

Many French schools have no school on Wednesdays - ours included. It's not a universal rule across France (some schools run five days, others just have Wednesday afternoons free), but it's common enough that the four day week has come to feel completely normal to us. A mid-week break that lets everyone reset, lets teachers recover, and means children come back on Thursday actually ready to be taught rather than running on fumes.

Every six weeks, there are two weeks off - staggered by region across France so that not everyone is fighting for the same hotel rooms in the same week. We’ve loved these breaks. The regularity of rest built into the school year rather than tacked on at the end of it.

The school day starts at 8:45am and ends at 4:30pm, which is longer than most California schools but starts later, and that later start, it turns out, makes a meaningful difference in how rested everyone arrives.

And summers. Long, generous summers. School ends in late June or early July and starts back up in September. The full summer, properly observed.

I am aware this sounds like I’m describing a utopia. I want to be clear that there are still trade-offs. The school hours are slightly longer, on average The homework load, from what I’ve heard, gets significant as kids get older, which is similar to the U.S. The academic approach is traditional - teacher at the front, students in rows, considerable amounts of memorization. Child-led discovery is not the dominant pedagogy here. We’ll see how all of this looks as our children get older and I’ll report back as we go.

The college question.

I’m going to mention this briefly because it’s relevant to the broader picture, even though our kids are years away from it.

In the US, students at public in-state universities pay an average of $11,610 per year in tuition and fees, with out-of-state students paying $30,780. When you factor in housing, food, books, and other expenses, in-state students paid an average of $29,910 per year and out-of-state students paid $49,080. Private universities run considerably higher - with some approaching $100,000 for a single year of attendance.1

In France, tuition for EU citizens at public universities is approximately €175 EUR per year - roughly $182 USD. For non-EU citizens, tuition at the bachelor’s level runs around €2,850 per year, approximately $2,966.2

When I tell our French friends what college costs in America, they practically spit out their wine.

France can still revere education - can still treat a degree as something worth having and worth respecting - partly because a degree here doesn’t require twenty years of debt repayment to justify. The investment is real but proportional. The return is plausible. You can get a good education, not destroy your financial life in the process, and then go do the thing the education prepared you for. This is apparently a radical idea.

My husband and I both have master’s degrees. We value education. It’s genuinely nice to live somewhere that agrees with us about that, and also makes it structurally possible.

What I’d take from each.

I think about the U.S. preschool sometimes, including the parts that worked. The outdoor time. The play-based approach for young children. The gentleness. Those things were genuinely good and I’m glad our son had them.

I think the answer, as it usually is, lives somewhere in the middle. Children need play and discovery and the dignity of being trusted to figure things out. They also need adults who are respected and classrooms where learning is actually possible. These things are not mutually exclusive. Getting the balance right is the hard part, and I don’t think either country has fully cracked it.

What France seems to have done, at least in the small rural school where my children spend their days, is treat certain things as non-negotiable that have become negotiable elsewhere: food, rest, the authority and respect of teachers, the rhythm of the school year, the idea that lunch is not an obstacle between two periods of productivity but an actual event worth having properly. I'm not saying American schools don't care about these things. I'm saying that caring about them and being structurally set up to deliver them are two different things. And the structure here is different.

My kids are happy here. They’re learning. They’re eating cheese.

For now, that feels like enough.

Five things worth borrowing from the French school model, wherever you are:

Since I believe in being useful and you’ve read this far, here are things that require no visa application:

Protect the lunch. Even at home, even on weekends - make lunch an actual meal at an actual table. Not at the desk. Not in the car. Not optimized. Just lunch, eaten slowly, with other people if possible. The French are onto something here and it costs almost nothing to try it.

Build in the Wednesday. You probably can’t give your child Wednesdays off school, but you can build a mid-week reset into your family rhythm. A slower evening. A no after-school activities afternoon. Something that interrupts the forward momentum and lets everyone breathe before the second half of the week.

Take the holiday seriously. France builds rest into the calendar structurally. Most of us don’t have that luxury. But we can choose to treat the holidays we do have as actual rest rather than logistical challenges to manage efficiently. Two weeks where you genuinely stop is worth considerably more than two weeks where you work from the beach.

Reconsider the school lunch. If you’re packing your child’s lunch, make it real food. Maybe try adding in a different cheese each week. Not as performance or Instagram content, but because what children eat in the middle of the day affects how they feel and learn in the afternoon. The French approach this with the seriousness it deserves.

Let adults be adults. This one is harder and more contested and I offer it gently: there is something worth examining in a culture that has so thoroughly shifted authority away from teachers and toward students and parents that teachers can no longer do their jobs. Supporting teachers - actually supporting them, not just saying so - might be one of the more useful things any of us can do.

Once Upon a Castle is where I write about this life - the château, the renovation, the cultural observations, and everything France keeps teaching me that I didn’t know I needed to learn. Paid subscribers get Castle Diaries, where I document the renovation in real time. Come stay a while.

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À bientôt,
Kamille

If you’re new, start here:

When we came to view this château for the first time, we walked through the forest.

It was September. Fall was just beginning to make its case - that quality of light that turns everything slightly golden and slightly melancholy at the same time. The forest was pretty. Serene, with old trees, and full of the sort of magic that makes you lower your voice, like you don’t want to disturb whatever is living there with your human presence.

We walked through it for maybe twenty minutes. We liked it. We moved on to look at the plumbing situation, which was considerably less romantic.

Nobody mentioned the bluebells. Not in the listing, not the realtor, not the previous owners - who, to be fair, came once a year in summer and may genuinely have never seen what their own forest did in spring. Which is wild to me, but also: we bought a château we’d seen exactly twice, so I’m not throwing stones.

We bought the place. We moved in. We survived a winter I will describe elsewhere and at length.

And then spring arrived.

I want to be precise about what I saw when I walked into that forest for the first time after everything came up.

It was not “a lot of bluebells.” What I actually saw was more disorienting than that. The ground had just…become blue. All of it. Every direction, up the slope, around the trees, along the path, just blue and purple and more blue, and the light was coming through the canopy making everything glow slightly, and I stopped walking because my brain needed a second to catch up with my eyes.

It looked fake. In the way that things sometimes look so real and beautiful they loop back around to looking fake.

I stood there for a while. I don’t know how long. Long enough that Sean came to find me. He had a similar reaction. We stood there together not saying anything, which is not something we do very often, and it felt like the right response.

I wonder what else this place is hiding that we don’t know about yet. What shows up in July that nobody thought to mention. What the field looks like after a particular kind of rain. What color the trees are in October.

We’re going to find out. That’s the part nobody tells you about buying somewhere old - you’re not just buying what it is - you’re buying all the versions of it you haven’t met yet.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re an American family living in a small château in rural France, figuring it out one beautiful surprise at a time. What you’re reading is free. If you’d like to follow the whole story - the renovation, the decisions, the forest plans, and everything else we’re building here - subscribe below. We’d love to have you along.

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Easter in the Bluebells

Our first Easter at this château, we did the egg hunt here.

It started on the lawn in front of the château, the way these things usually do - baskets, anticipation, the energy of children who have been patient for approximately as long as they are physically capable of being patient. But then we followed a trail of eggs further out, up toward the hidden chapel, and then into the forest.

And that’s where the magic happened.

Brightly colored eggs hidden among bluebells. Children running through blue and purple, baskets swinging, finding things tucked at the base of trees and nestled into the slope where the flowers grow thickest. The light was doing something extraordinary that morning and the whole scene had an unreality to it - something you just have to be there for to appreciate it fully.

I was there. I wrote the whole day down if you want to read it. But the forest part was truly the highlight.

What the Kids Did

That same afternoon, the little ones decided the forest required costumes.

They went back inside and came back as a fairy and a wizard. I mean, obviously. The math is not complicated here. You are a kid. There is a forest. The forest is entirely blue and purple and looks like it was designed by someone obsessed with fairies. You have a costume. What else would you do?

They disappeared into the trees and I just stood there and watched them and had a feeling I don’t have a great word for. Not happiness exactly. Something slightly more angled than that. Wonder, maybe? It was partially a feeling of realizing that a decision you made - a big, terrifying, are-we-actually-doing-this decision - turned out to be right. Not right in a way you can prove with physical evidence. Just right in the way it feels when you’re standing in a bluebell forest in rural France watching your children fairy-frolic and you cannot locate a single thing you would change.

The château gave us that afternoon, and we’re still wondering how to show our gratitude.

What Happens When People Visit

When people have come to the château these past few weeks, we always take them through the forest.

Not because we planned to make it part of the tour. It just keeps happening naturally -we’re walking somewhere and we pass the entrance to the forest and it would feel wrong not to go in. So we do.

And every single time, the same thing happens. They walk in. They stop. They look around. And then this smile spreads across their face - the involuntary kind, that you can’t manufacture or perform, where it means something has genuinely surprised you in the best possible way.

It’s a miniature adventure every time. Five minutes, maybe ten. And people come out the other side slightly different than they went in. Lighter, maybe. More present. Like the forest gave them back a little piece of their childhood.

I never get tired of watching it happen.

What We’re Planning

We’re not planning to just have a forest and occasionally walk through it. We have ideas.

The trails are already there - worn into the ground by years of someone walking them, though we don’t know who or when - and we want to define them properly. Mark them, name them, make them feel intentional rather than accidental. The forest should be somewhere you go on purpose, and which path you take should feel like a choice you get to make.

We’re also working out a deal with a few neighbors who want to come clear the dead trees. They keep half of the wood (which is valuable apparently), and we keep the other half for our own firewood, and we get a healthier forest. I love this arrangement. There’s something about it that feels very correct, and less…transactional. Like the right way to do things. Trading rather than transacting. It makes me feel connected to the place in a way that just hiring someone wouldn’t.

Most of the invasive brambles will be removed. In their place: wild flowering garlic in the shaded corners where the bluebells don’t quite reach, lilacs along the path edges, things that want to be in a forest and will act accordingly.

And then there’s the thing I want to build in the middle of it…

A glass house. Small, multipurpose, probably impractical, definitely happening (someday). Somewhere to eat dinner when the weather is right, do yoga in the early morning, write, think, sit. I want to be inside something beautiful (and that keeps the majority of the bugs at bay) while the forest does what it does around me. I don’t know when this happens. I know it happens. Some ideas feel optional and some feel inevitable and this one has always felt inevitable.

The Evening Walks

The days are getting longer now. Dinner at seven, light until nine, and we’ve started walking in the forest after we eat.

All four of us, most nights. The bluebells are at their peak right now and the air in there smells - I keep trying to describe it and landing on the same words, which are: clean, and green, and slightly sweet, and like something that’s alive. It’s truly glorious.

My kids are planning a bluebell picnic. They have different opinions about the location, the route, and the menu, so that will need to be sorted. But they are treating this with the seriousness it deserves, which is considerable.

Sean had to basically force me to go on these walks, which I say with full awareness of how that sounds given that I live next to a bluebell forest in rural France. But after dinner there are teeth to brush and dishes and seventeen things that feel urgent and also I had mentally categorized “evening forest walk” as something that would involve more mud and bugs than magic. I was wrong. So, completely wrong.

I used to get to the end of the day and immediately start thinking about the next one. The walks have interrupted that somehow. The forest doesn't really allow you to be somewhere else while you're in it.

France is changing things. The forest is changing things. Slowly, without permission, without making a big announcement about it.

I’ll take it.

What This Taught Us About Buying a House

We viewed this place in September. At one point I thought: maybe we should come back in spring, see it when it’s really showing itself. Make sure.

We didn’t. We bought it anyway, in its more dormant season, on the strength of what it was when it wasn’t trying.

And then spring came and the forest showed us what it had been holding the whole time.

I think about what you miss if you only commit to things when they’re performing at their best. About what reveals itself when you stay. The bluebells were always there. We just had to be here in April to see them.

There will be more. Spring has barely started and this place has already surprised us more than once. I don’t know what’s coming next, but I’m just happy we’ll be here to see it.

If you’ve been reading along and enjoying the ride, thank you. This is the free version of what I write. For paid subscribers, Castle Diaries goes deeper: the renovation in real time, the decisions, the tradeoffs, the design details, and the ongoing beautiful mess of what we’re actually building here. If you’d like to be part of that, we’d genuinely love to have you.

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There’s a particular kind of fog that settles over a life when you’ve been living it long enough. Not a bad fog necessarily. Just the fog of familiarity - the way things stop being choices and start being ‘just how things are.’ The way the water stops being water and starts being the thing you swim in without noticing.

I lived in that fog for a long time. I didn’t know it was fog. I thought it was air.

And then we moved to France, and someone turned off the white noise.

I want to be careful here, because this is not that post. Not the one where an American moves abroad and returns with a list of everything wrong with the country she left. I have no interest in writing that post and you have no interest in reading it, and also it would be lazy and reductive and mostly untrue.

America is genuinely, specifically wonderful in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until I left. The optimism - that American conviction that things can be better and you can make them so - I miss it. The friendliness, the maximizing of holidays, the elaborate birthday parties, the shooting for the stars, the efficient systems, the great websites, the health consciousness, the sheer relentless ambition of the whole place. These are not small things. These are things other countries look at and genuinely admire.

But.

There are also things I didn’t know were American until I left. Things I thought were just human. Things I thought were just life. Things I thought everyone did because I had never once lived somewhere that didn’t do them.

That’s what this post is about.

The apologizing.

I noticed this one first, and I noticed it because France cured me of it quickly - not subtly, but through the social feedback of watching French people’s faces when I did it.

I apologize for everything. I apologized for asking questions. For taking up space in a conversation. For needing something. For existing, essentially, in the vicinity of another person who might conceivably be inconvenienced by my existence. I said sorry the way other people say ‘um’ - reflexively, constantly, as punctuation.

France does not do this. France considers excessive apologizing mildly suspicious, like you’re admitting fault for something before anyone has accused you of anything. The French state what they need, ask what they want to ask, and move on without performing remorse for the basic act of having needs.

I have been working on this for months. I am getting better. I still apologize when I drop things, which I’ve decided is acceptable because dropping things is genuinely my fault.

The yes.

America runs on yes. Yes I can help. Yes I’m available. Yes I’ll be there. Yes I can take that on. Yes no problem. Yes of course. Yes definitely. Yes yes yes.

I said yes to things I didn’t want to do for so long that I stopped being able to tell the difference between the things I wanted and the things I was pretending to want because the alternative was the discomfort of saying no.

France says no. Easily, cleanly, without the elaborate architecture of excuse and apology and alternative offering that Americans construct around a refusal. The French ‘Non’ is not rude. It’s just honest. And watching people deliver it with complete equanimity - no guilt, no fuss, no three-paragraph explanation - was one of the more revolutionary things this country has shown me.

I wrote a whole post about this. It’s worth reading if you’re a chronic yes person, which, if you’re American, statistically you probably are.

The rest of this post - the healthcare, the school lunches, the silence, what Europeans actually notice about us, and what I want to say clearly before I finish - is below for paid subscribers.

If you’ve been reading along and considering whether to join, this is a good moment. What comes next is the part I most wanted to write.

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When I lived in California, “yes” was practically a religion.

Say yes to opportunities.

Say yes to dinner.

Say yes to helping.

Say yes to the meeting that might lead to the other meeting that might lead to the thing.

Say yes because…you never know!

Say yes because if you say no, someone else will say yes and then they will be the person who gets the call.

Say yes because you are a woman and you would like to be liked and you would also like to not be punished for having boundaries.

In the music industry, this was less a philosophy and more a survival strategy. I grew up in a world where you don’t turn down gigs, you don’t turn down introductions, you don’t turn down the “quick coffee,” and you definitely don’t turn down the thing that might be “good for your career,” even if it’s clearly bad for your sleep, your nervous system, your marriage, your children, and your general desire to remain a pleasant person.

You say yes, and you figure out the rest later.

Then we moved to France and I realized…they are not doing that here.

Not the women. Not the men. Not the bakers. Not the mothers. Not the guy who repairs your heater and disappears for three weeks because it’s January and he has decided he is done with emails.

In France, “no” isn’t dramatic.

It’s matter-of-fact.

“Non, je ne peux pas.” No flinch, no guilt, no TED Talk.

If you’re new: I’m Kamille. American in rural France, restoring a château and documenting the cultural whiplash. Subscribe if you like smart stories with a little dirt on the hem.

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Our château is extremely French. It says “non” daily, and it has introduced us to a whole ecosystem of French people who also say non, just with more static on the phone.

In America, “no” can feel like a door slamming. It can feel personal, even when it’s not. It triggers the old familiar spiral: Am I being rude? Will they stop inviting me? Am I missing something important? Am I becoming irrelevant? Is my life shrinking because I stayed home and folded laundry?

In France, “no” is just…the answer.

And then everybody keeps living.

This is what I’ve been learning gradually, awkwardly, and with occasional setbacks, because I am still American and my yes reflex is strong.

But I’m evolving, and I think it’s making me saner.

The American yes: optimism, ambition, and a little panic

To be fair to us, Americans have reasons.

A lot of us were raised on the idea that you build your life through openness. Through taking chances. Through “putting yourself out there.” Through saying yes to the uncomfortable thing that might become the meaningful thing.

And sometimes that is true. Sometimes “yes” is how you find your people, your job, your dream, your exit ramp.

The issue isn’t “yes.” The issue is unfiltered yes. Automatic yes. Fear-based yes.

Yes because you’re terrified of missing out.

Yes because you’re terrified of being forgotten.

Yes because you’re terrified that your life will not become what you want unless you sprint toward it, breathless, always slightly behind.

I don’t think Americans are shallow or obsessed with status. I think we’re anxious. I think we’re trained, culturally and economically, to treat life like a treadmill. Stop running and you fall off.

And women, especially, are trained to say yes in a way that’s socially rewarded.

Yes, I can help.

Yes, I can come.

Yes, I can do that.

Yes, of course.

Yes, no problem.

Even when it is, in fact, a problem.

France has a different relationship with “no”

French women have a reputation: the pout, the shrug, the effortless confidence, the makeup that looks like it took thirty seconds but somehow outperforms the twenty-minute routine.

But that reputation comes from something real.

They are not afraid of boundaries. They are not afraid of displeasing someone a little. They are not afraid of being misunderstood. They are not afraid of being unavailable.

They don’t treat your invitation like a moral test, but rather, they treat it like a schedule.

And this seems to be woven into everything.

They protect weekends. They protect meals. They protect holidays like it’s their job (ironically). They protect their evenings. They protect their right to be a person, not a productivity machine.

And when they say no, they don’t perform guilt. They don’t soften it into a yes-shaped apology. They don’t try to compensate by offering three alternatives and a ten paragraph explanation.

They just…say no.

Or just…no, merci.

And then you both move on with your dignity intact.

A story about the yes reflex (and the trip I should have said no to)

Here is a perfect example of American yes brain.

Right before we moved to France, we were invited to go to Australia for the Women’s World Cup. With family. With friends. The kind of trip people describe as “once in a lifetime,” which is a persuasive sales pitch disguised as destiny.

The timing?

We could be getting back fromt his trip two days before we were meant to get on a plane to move to France.

Two. Days.

This should have been the easiest no in human history. We had a container being shipped across the ocean. We had packing. Paperwork. Life admin. Emotional stress. Two small children. A move that involved uprooting everything.

And yet, the FOMO found me anyway.

I said yes.

And yes, it was beautiful. There were special moments. We saw remarkable things. We have memories.

And also, it made everything harder. It made us more exhausted. It cost more money. It scrambled time zones. It added complexity to an already complex moment. It didn’t ruin our move, but it absolutely made it more stressful.

That trip taught me something I didn’t want to admit.

Sometimes the “once in a lifetime” thing is actually just a shiny distraction from the thing that is already your lifetime.

The French are better at knowing what’s worth protecting.

No is a skill and we are not trained to practice it

There was a period when my kids were toddlers when I encountered a modern parenting philosophy that said you should basically never say “no.”

Instead you should narrate consequences.

And honestly, I get the philosophy behind it. It’s thoughtful. It’s respectful. It’s trying to teach kids cause-and-effect instead of just training them to fear a word. The idea is: don’t just shut them down, show them what happens next. I actually like that. In theory, it’s elegant.

If they throw food: “If you drop that, I’ll have to pick it up.”

If they hit: “Ouch, that hurts me.”

If they sprint toward a road: “If you do that, you may die.” (Seems like an important detail.)

I tried to stop saying no. I really did.

It lasted about as long as my menstrual cycle.

And then I spoke to a psychologist who said something that stuck with me: If you never teach your children the word no, you never teach them to use it for themselves.

No to drugs. No to peer pressure. No to a relationship that drains them. No to the thing that looks fun but feels wrong.

No is a boundary word. It’s a self-respect word. It’s a safety word.

And it’s the same for adults.

If we never practice saying no, we start living in a way that makes us secretly resentful. We say yes and then feel depleted. We say yes and then feel trapped. We say yes and then feel like we’re watching our own life happen from the outside.

It turns out “yes” is not the opposite of “no.”

The opposite of “no” is self-abandonment.

The French “no” is not cold. But rather, it’s clean.

This is the part I want to be clear about, because this is not an “America bad, France good” post. I love Americans. I love American warmth and friendliness. I love optimism, and I love the “yes, and” way we can meet life with momentum instead of hesitation. I love the way Americans can talk to strangers and turn it into friendship.

But I also love the French clarity. And I think the clarity is what makes everything else possible.

When you protect your life, your yes becomes more meaningful.

When you say no, your yes starts to mean: I want to be here. Not: I can’t think of a polite way to escape. When you say no, you stop living like your calendar belongs to everyone else.

And that, frankly, is a form of power I’m interested in.

Paid subscribers: the “How to Say No Like a Frenchwoman” guide is below. Scripts you can copy/paste, plus the small practice that makes “no” feel normal instead of scary.

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There are two kinds of people who move abroad:

1. People who do it because they are brave.

2. People who do it because they are mildly unwell and romantic, and they mistake stress for ‘character building.’

We were, respectfully, the second kind.

If you’re new here: I’m Kamille. We left California for rural France and accidentally adopted a life that requires paperwork, patience, and a sense of humor. I write about the culture shocks, the small joys, and the very real chaos of restoring an old château while raising kids.

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My husband and I (with two little ones in tow) moved from California to France in 2023, and I’d love to tell you it was all linen dresses and crusty bread and me casually frolicking in the lavender fields.

It was also me standing in front of a printer, whispering “why” like it’s a prayer, because a form needed to be printed, signed, scanned, uploaded, re-printed (single-sided only), and then…mailed. To a building. With a door. In the year of our lord 2023.

But here’s the strange part.

Somewhere between the paperwork, the phone calls, and the feeling that I had become an unpaid intern for the French administrative state, something changed.

Moving abroad makes you feel invincible.

Not in a “nothing can hurt me” way. More in a “my nervous system has stopped pretending every minor inconvenience is a personal threat” way.

And that is a kind of superpower.

The myth: you move abroad and become a new person

The reality: you move abroad and become a new version of your old person.

You don’t wake up as a glowing, effortless European character who floats through markets holding a bouquet and a moral advantage.

You wake up as yourself, but now you also have to:

• interpret a school message written in French, using words you’ve never seen

• find the correct office for the correct document

• understand why the correct office is closed for lunch, and then closed on Wednesday, and then closed “exceptionally”

• spend hours scanning the supermarket aisles searching for the French equivalent of cream cheese

At first, it’s humiliating. Genuinely.

In the U.S., competence is invisible. You’re used to being able to do basic life tasks without a performance review.

You know how to:

• call the doctor

• understand the bill

• handle the contractor

• solve the problem with a website and two clicks

In France, you still solve the problem. But first you must prove you are worthy by enduring a small trial.

Often, the trial is a phone call (in rapid French, with no patience for your ‘elementary’ French). Or snail mail. Or faxing.

Why it changes you

Living abroad is like strength training, except the weights are: bureaucracy, social awkwardness, language mistakes you can’t take back, and the constant sensation that you’re missing a rule everyone else learned at birth.

At the beginning, you’re sore. Constantly. Spiritually.

Then you notice something: You’re not dying.

You’re just…uncomfortable. And once you realize you can survive discomfort, your brain stops treating it like an emergency.

You stop spending all your energy trying to avoid looking foolish. Because you already have looked foolish.

A lot.

And somehow you’re still standing. Still functioning. Still finding your way home. Still feeding your children. Still making friends. Still living an actual life.

That’s the invincible part.

Not perfection. Proof.

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The kids become little gladiators (in the nicest way)

I see this the most in our kids.

Starting school in a brand-new language with zero prior experience is not “cute.” It’s epic.

They had to walk into classrooms where they couldn’t understand the rules, the jokes, the songs, the instructions, or the emotional tone.

They had to become comfortable being beginners in public.

And the wild thing is, children can do this better than adults (as long as we don’t panic on their behalf).

Now they translate things for us sometimes. They pronounce words with a confident native accent.

They’ve learned that you can be new, confused, and still be okay.

Beginner Energy

Moving abroad forces you into a state that most adults avoid like the plague: beginner energy.

In the U.S., we spend a lot of our lives trying to appear competent. Even when we’re not. Especially when we’re not. We want to look like we’ve got it handled. We want to feel fluent in our lives.

And then you move to a place where you are not fluent in anything.

You are the person squinting at the school message. The person asking the same question three times. The person who smiles too much because you’re not sure what you just agreed to. The person who gets home and realizes you accidentally bought three kilograms of something you thought was flour and is absolutely not flour.

And the first instinct is to shrink. To apologize. To feel embarrassed. To avoid situations where you’ll look stupid.

But you can’t. Not if you want a life here.

So you learn to be a beginner without making it a character flaw.

You learn to separate your worth from your performance.

Also, inconveniently, the science is not on Team Comfort. Humans tend to be happiest when they’re growing which usually looks like struggle (with a better title). Not misery. Not burnout. Just the steady feeling of: I’m doing something hard, I’m getting better, and my life is expanding.

Moving abroad is basically that on hard mode. You’re collecting tiny wins all day long and eventually your brain starts to trust you again.

And once you do this, you become weirdly brave in other areas too. Not because you’ve “found yourself” or “reinvented your identity.”

Because you’ve stopped treating awkwardness like danger.

How France Accidentally Trained Us for a Château

We have no prior renovation experience. None. We did not grow up operating power tools or flipping houses.

And yet, we are renovating a French château.

Not because we’re naturally fearless, but because we’ve already trained for uncertainty.

We’ve already learned how to:

• be patient without falling apart

• ask for help without dying of shame

• do complicated things with imperfect language

• keep going when the system makes no sense

• and survive long stretches where progress is nearly invisible

Renovation is the same muscle. It’s not confidence so much as it is endurance.

(also, it’s paperwork).

How to borrow this “invincible” feeling even if you’re not moving abroad

If you want the strong-version-of-yourself benefits without relocating your entire life, here’s the real mechanism:

Do hard things on purpose. Small ones. Regularly.

Not to suffer. Not to prove something.

Just to remind your brain: “We can handle this.”

A few ways to practice:

1. Pick one weekly “hard thing”

   A phone call you’ve been avoiding. A form. A conversation. A task that makes you procrastinate.

2. Get comfortable being a beginner in public

   Take a class. Speak the language. Try the thing. Be bad at it. Live.

3. Build a tiny “friction ritual”

   In our house it’s basically: breathe, translate, laugh, try again.

   You can create your own version.

4. Keep a small list called “Evidence”

   Write down the moments you handled something that used to scare you.

   Your brain forgets. Make it remember.

Because the truth is: Invincibility isn’t a personality trait or something you’re born with.

It’s a receipt.

And moving abroad hands you a stack of them.

Not all of them are pretty. Some are printed, signed, scanned, re-printed, and then rejected for being double-sided.

But they add up.

And one day you realize that you’re not the same person you were before.

You’re stronger. Your kids are stronger. Your marriage is stronger (or at least more battle-tested). You’re less fragile around discomfort. You’re calmer under pressure.

And when the next big dream shows up, looking unreasonably large and mildly terrifying - like renovating a château - you don’t flinch the way you used to.

You just think:

Okay. We’ve done harder.

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À bientôt,
Kamille

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