A Fevered Panic
Is it too late to change our minds?
Recently I told you about the horrible sinus infection I had when we arrived in France. When I woke up in our (extremely hot) hotel room the day after we arrived, I felt like I had traveled with the baggage underneath the plane. I didn’t want to walk around our new city or run out to eat French food. I found trying to speak French exhausting; I couldn’t think quickly enough, like my brain was clogged with honey. All I wanted to do was lay in bed and be waited upon like a duchess dying of TB.
As Roberto mentioned, we were staying by the train station, which is nowhere near as rough as the area near the Gare du Nord in Paris or as ugly as the area around Penn Station in New York, but this area in Montpellier doesn’t have the same charm as the neighborhood where our apartment would be. When I finally stumbled outside, I was sad and disappointed that I wasn’t as energized by the city as I had been in November.
Which made me start to panic. Had we acted too quickly? What did we really know about Montpellier? We had more or less opened an atlas and blindly pointed a finger. We hadn’t even visited our second and third top choices! What if Bordeaux were better? What if Lyon held the answer to all our retirement dreams? What if we were just charmed by France because it was new to us and within a few years it will feel as unremarkable as Houston?
I said nothing to Roberto about my my fever-filled panic. In fact, when he reads this blog it will be the first he hears about it. Fear like this can be contagious, and we were closing on the apartment within days. I knew that I was depressed because I didn’t feel well, and when you don’t feel well not even twenty flavors of gelato will cheer you up.
A few things happened. One was that when Roberto complained to the manager of our hotel about the Sub-Saharan temperature of our room, the manager came up and told us we had the heat on. Tee hee. Aren’t we cute Americans? The room became liveable.
Next, we did our final walk through of our apartment before the closing, and I loved it as much as I had the first time we saw it (although, I confess, it did seem a little smaller than I had remembered).
After we signed the documents and got the keys, I expected a feeling of joy that was like a thunderbolt, but I was too dazed from the time change, steroids, antibiotics and Sudafed. I’d say it took another two weeks for me to look around and think, “Holy shit. Look what we did! This is amazing.”
I will say that being unwell at the beginning of this trip has made me think a lot about living here as actual retired people with inevitable health problems. A big part of our joy here comes from walking around and exploring the city. What happens if one of us becomes immobile? We have a lot less space here than we do in Austin. If one or both of us can’t leave the apartment due to injury, illness, or another lockdown, will we kill each other?
Which leads me to one of our biggest challenges: how will we make friends here? I won’t worry about being stuck at home if we have a community, but we all know that as we get older making friends becomes more challenging. Here are my theories as to why:
At our age most people already have their friends and groups and don’t need more.
As we get older, we are more finicky about what we like be it food, entertainment, or people.
People are busy and can’t spend the long hours needed to create deep friendships. Think of the hundreds of hours we had to kill in high school and college that we spent talking to new people. Nowadays, I’m lucky to have a coffee once a month with a friend.
We’re all tired and secretly (or not so secretly) thrilled when people cancel plans.
Fortunately, we’ve managed to do a bit of socializing this month. We went out of town for a few days and visited my dear friend Peter. Peter is British, and he and I went to theater school together in Paris in 1997. He and his partner Simon also live in the Occitanie region of France, but whereas we live in the Languedoc-Rousillion part of the region, they are in the Midi-Pyrénées. They reside in a tiny hamlet called Arjac, northeast of Toulouse. It was an easy three hour train ride and then another hour in the car with Peter.
Their life in Arjac is a great example of a different way to create a life in France. They bought a beautiful old farm in 2007, and they’ve slowly renovated the buildings and turned it into an AirBnB that sleeps up to 20 people. They also converted a barn into a performance space where they host regular concerts and theater workshops.
Roberto and I decided last year we were too high strung for that kind of big renovation project, but I’ve watched Peter and Simon turn their property into a dream destination, and the AirBnB funds most of their living costs!
When we returned to Montpellier, our agent Agnès invited us to her home for aperos, which means drinks and/or appetizers which could last anywhere from one to five hours. We had read that it took many rendez-vous of coffees and dinners before the French would have you over, so the invitation was a welcome surprise.
We were nervous about what to take. Arriving with wine to a French person’s house felt intimidating, but Roberto went to a local wine store and received guidance from a saleswoman who spoke (a little) English. We also took some decadent cookies we discovered one afternoon at Cookies Par Marie.
We also didn’t know what to wear. Should we be casual? Dressy? We were taking the tram and then walking ten minutes, so we’d have to wear comfortable shoes. (Roberto’s shoes are always comfy and good for walking, which I find infinitely annoying). He ended up wearing a very casual suit, and I wore black pants and a linen blouse. Our hostess opened the door wearing a jumpsuit, no makeup, and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, as casual as if we were old friends. What a relief.
She quickly opened the wine we brought (it was delicious) and we sat on the patio with her and her roommate and ate from a tray full of salty snacks. The big bonus was the kitten, Moon, that she and her daughter had just rescued from une poubelle (a trashcan)!
Our next exciting outing was with a couple we met through friends of friends. The wife is French and the husband is Irish, and they, too, have decided to retire in Montpellier. (No names or pictures. We can’t have them scared away by you people.)
They’ve been here a year and a half, so they can teach us a lot. We invited them to a cocktail bar recommended to us by Agnés called Aperture. We learned that the couple spent five years deciding which city in France to call home, so they were stunned we had picked Montpellier after only one visit. Luckily I was past my feverish week of pure panic and didn’t shout, “You’re right! We’re insane! Would you like to buy an apartment half-off??!”
We like them very much and hope to force them to be our friends, which I’ve decided is our best strategy—pure aggression. It’s SO American. Wish us luck.
I had so much to fill you in on, I didn’t have a chance to tell you about not having power for three days. I’ll let Roberto tell you all about it in the next post.
Jusqu’à la prochaine fois (until next time),
Carolyn & Roberto
😀force them to be your friends ❤️