The Adventure Ends

Well, it had to end some time. We had just hoped it would be under better circumstances. The two plus year meltdown in the telecommunications industry finally caught up with us and Lucent terminated our assignment contract and gave us 30 days to repatriate back to the USA where Steve would officially be laid off. Rats !! The boondoggle was over.

One one hand it will be nice to get back to our families and the comforts, ease, and service-oriented lifestyle of the US, but the worst part is leaving behind all the wonderful friends we have made. And we will miss France very much and the wonderful lifestyle in the South.

It has been a great experience and I think we accomplished everything we set out to do on this experience. We traveled extensively, though still managed to miss much of Europe, like Spain, Germany, and Austria. But we have seen and now know Provence like the back of our hands and we even got to make it to some exotic locales like Prague.

We are often asked what will we miss the most. That is very hard to answer. Generally, we thought the food in France was way overrated (though even the French say the food is much better in Lyon and Paris), but we will definitely miss getting our daily baguette, or stopping in the shop for some wonderful cheese, or picking up a very nice bottle of Bordeaux for $6. We will also greatly miss being so close to the beach and being able to head down to the coast whenever we wanted. We will greatly miss our Sunday strolls down the Croisette in Cannes, sailing with our friends on the Med, heading off to Monaco because we were bored, stopping for an espresso by the coast, or heading over to Italy whenever we fancied some really good food and Chianti. We will greatly miss all the activities and events that we loved so much like Carnival in Nice, the Firework festival in Cannes, and all the Christmas events. And we will miss hanging out with our friends, or trying new restaurants with friends, and girls night out, and the more tame boys nights out. We will miss the excitement of our boys coming home from school and actually speaking some French with us.

What won't we miss ? Well, to be honest, it will be a bit of a relief to not have to struggle with the language anymore. Though this is one area of disappointment for us. We really thought that after two years our French would be much better. But it is really quite possible to envelope yourself entirely in English while living in the South of France. All of our friends spoke English with us, and Steve's place of work used English as the language of business. We all promise to keep working on our French back in the US. I guess we won't miss some of the quirky French ways, like all the shops closing for lunch. But we really got used to that to the point that we didn't even think about it anymore. We even practiced and got good at that French shrug of the shoulders thing that they use to say "Oh well, what can I do". I'll remember to use that the next time my boss asks why the software is so late. I'm sure it will go over real well.

What about the US is nice to return to ? Well, besides family, it would just have to be the ease with which one can get through the day. The supermarket isn't crowded shoulder to shoulder with people (Take a Safeway the day before Thanksgiving, multiply it by 10, and it's still nowhere near as bad as the average day at the supermarket in France). There are actually parking spaces available at the shops ! Steve got an internet connection in 10 minutes instead of the 9 days it took in France. The openness and friendliness of the people in the US is also much appreciated now. We met parents the second day of Jeff being in school here whereas it took well over a year before meeting any French parents. And we can trust the postal service again. We had so many packages and letters that never arrived in France.

So, all in all, it was a wonderful experience that we would do over again at the drop of a hat. It was one of the best things we ever did. It is something which we are immensely proud of doing as we now understand how incredibly difficult it is for people to just pick up their lives and move to a place with a vastly different culture, lifestyle, and language. Yet we were able to overcome it and become firmly integrated into the scene to the point that we actually thought of not returning to the US. Vive la France !!

Updated Sat Dec 14, 2002 15:50 PST