Time to Cut Bait

I’d like to think that admitting defeat isn't giving up; it’s a strategic choice to stop wasting energy—and money—on something that isn't working. The goal is to move from a state of resistance (wishing things were different) to acceptance (understanding where you currently stand) allowing you to redirect your focus toward new, perhaps more attainable goals. Whenever it has been time for me to make this transition it has always been difficult for me. I tend to feel very bad about myself when I don’t finish the things I start. I try not to make big decisions without doing a lot of research, so when things don’t work as planned, it can be a devastating reminder of my flaws. And because I don’t like to admit them, it often means that I lock onto a plan like a pit bull and I won’t let go until it’s obvious that I have to or I will suffer serious consequences. Even if I hate a book I will read the damn thing until the last page. I know, it’s stupid. But what I am talking about here is more serious, and not admitting the problem has the potential to derail our entire France project.

It’s Nice. It just isn’t working for us. We’re frustrated and a little disappointed and we need to free ourselves from the mental exhaustion of trying to change the unchangeable.

I’d like to just leave it there and not get into the why, but that isn’t fair to you, the reader, nor is it helpful to anyone else contemplating their own move outside the US. So why isn’t a beautiful, sun-drenched, seaside city where we have what is essentially a brand new apartment nestled inside of a classic Italian 19th-century architectural design, in a perfectly central location, where everything is walkable, and we have access to the tram and the train system within mere minutes by foot, an international airport, and we have built relationships with our neighbors, who are now friends, and others in the expat community, no longer tenable? Even as I wrote these words I thought about myself what the F is wrong with you, man?

Sigh. But there are these niggling things that have begun to add up. None of them are a deal-breaker so to speak, but they are increasingly becoming sand in the gears. 

The first thing is funny and trivial, but also makes me so angry. There is dog shit everywhere. It’s just out of control. You may be thinking, “Well, yeah, it’s France,” and that used to be true, but even in Paris you just don’t see it as much. Here in Nice, it’s endemic. I have come to the conclusion that there a lot of older people here—I am older, so I mean very old—who need companionship and a large proportion of them have cute little Pomeranians, Frenchies, Dachshunds, or sometimes even bigger dogs. The size of the piles lets me know that they must have. If they bend over to pick up after little “Pierre” or “Le Bon Bon," there is a unfortunately high chance that they will fall and break a hip. So, they don’t bother. They just leave it alongside many other’s similar decisions. And that has somehow just become the acceptable culture here. It’s a dilemma. Of course, I want them to have their dogs, I love dogs, but I despise that I have to keep my head looking down on swivel like a mine sweeper everywhere I go or I will blow my leg off. The preserved shoe prints and bike tire molds tell me I’m not wrong. 

Second, it’s May now and the tourists have returned in full force. They really never actually leave, but once it heats up their numbers can climb to astronomical heights in just a matter of a week. The otherwise empty pebble beach becomes a carpet of limbs, and the occasional boob. Okay, tourists are everywhere in France, right? True. But the tourists here seem to be cut from the same coarse cloth. The group of four or five young friends walking shoulder to shoulder across the sidewalk or on the Promenade functioning as a human roadblock is maddening. You Seattle Ferry riders know what I am talking about. To make things even more annoying, the tourists have no concept of a line wherever they come from. I was at the supermarket waiting my turn to check out this week and two of them just walked up in front of all of us and tried to put their stuff on the conveyor. Not even the right direction, the outgoing conveyor. They are shocked and annoyed when they are told, often not very politely, to go to the back of the line. Their reaction: “Who, me? Get in line? Do you know what I am?” 

Then there are the smokers, who I have railed against before. Sitting outside on a terrace is one of the most European things you can do for fun. Having a coffee or an afternoon apéro while people watching is a French right of passage. When we first moved to France, I would just have to go inside straightaway to get away from the acrid poisonous clouds, but over time I have sort of gotten used to it I guess. Now I try to sit at tables on the edges of the terrace or I check the wind and sit downdraft so I don’t get blasted in the face. With the return of the tourists, we are the only people not smoking on the terrace. We are vastly outnumbered. A young tourist couple next to us the other day was enough to break my spirit. This young, pretty girl, had her vaping device in her right hand and a cigarette in her left. The older woman who was sitting in the next table over with the sagging chestnut skin like an old NFL football left outside in the Phoenix sun could have perhaps asked the girl to take a good look at her and then warned of her ultimate future state, but alas, it wasn’t happening. Perhaps she thought the girl had so many dragon-puffing days to look forward to.

What we’ve done, albeit inadvertently, is to move to Pier 39 in San Francisco, or to Pike Place Market in Seattle, or to one of the courts in Mission Beach in San Diego. It seems like a good idea when you first moving here, but after 18 months, it’s obvious that it was a mistake. It’s dirty, noisy, loud, crowded, full of tourist bars and restaurants with mostly mediocre food. 

Okay, none of these things are deal-breakers, but they begin to add up with a few other things that are deal-breakers for me. For one, it’s too hot for me here. I am a large, pale, redhead, with no business being at the beach. My dermatologist told me I am not allowed to go outside this summer here in Nice after 2:00 p.m. And, as I said, the food is a “B” at best, with a few notable exceptions (God, I’m such a food snob). There is no wine culture, unless you count oceans of pink rosé as a wine culture. It’s everything any big tourist location ends up being as it deals with millions of visitors each year. And that’s the heart of it: Nice is a place you go to on vacation, but not to live full-time. My neighbors and friends who read this are saying, “That’s bullshit.” I know they go to the beach, and they swim, and ride their bikes along the sea, and hike in the mountains, and do all of those things that make living here fantastic. That’s just not who we are. We knew that before we moved here, by the way. That didn’t seem to change our minds.

The straw that breaks this camel’s back, though, is the cost of it all. Nice is almost on par with the cost of living in Paris now. Many Americans, Canadians, Brits, and Australians are moving here instead of Paris. You might get a little more space for your money in Nice, but the reality is you are paying for the privilege of living here. We had planned to pay a lot less for rent and food when we moved from the US in 2024, but when we found this apartment near the top of our budget we just couldn’t pass on it. And then the strength of dollar begin to fall. It’s down about 22% overall since we got here and that has really hurt us. 

I began projecting how that might affect us in the long run, what it would do to our buying power as we get older, and then I had the unfortunate task of trying to convince my wife that we should probably cut our losses and find a cheaper place to live. I tried to find something less expensive here in Nice, but once I got the price where I wanted it, the square footage became laughably small. Just like Paris. You can imagine how that went down, coming from me, the master of moving, when I told Chien-hui that we should really move somewhere else in France. For months when I brought it up she told me flat out, “No.” I kept pressing. She didn’t leave me, surprisingly, and has eventually come around to the math. The annoyances that I listed above bother her just as much as they do me, but she is far more flexible than I am. But she has since developed her own list of deal-breakers. For her, you can also add that Nice isn’t really France. By that, I mean it’s kind of a vacationland that is a mix of Italy and France, where the common language is English since there are so many people from all over the world living or visiting here. For Chien-hui, that is a deal-breaker. She puts many hours a day into learning French and really wants to master the language. She wants to feel like she is living in France, and a huge part of that is being forced to improve our French. It just doesn’t happen here. Once you are past your Bonjours and they hear your accent, it’s straight to English. You can continue to speak French and they will answer you in English. One can’t fault them, either. They are tired of hearing the people butcher their language and believe it or not, the French are trying to be nice to you when they switch to English. They are proud of their bilingualism—I hope to be someday, too—and they figure, why struggle?

So, as you can plainly gather, we have concluded that we need to move from Nice. The bigger question has been to where? We briefly considered coming back to the states, but even a minor bit of napkin penciling quickly killed that plan. The cost of living in the USA when compared to France is just insane. Neither of us want to go back to working as we did before, nobody will hire me anyhow at this age and in this economy, and the cost of reacquiring cars, housing, insurance, healthcare, food, furniture, etc. Nope. Not going to happen. Besides we really like France. We still find it to be an absolutely beautiful country with interesting intelligent people, and I don’t know if I will ever get over the fact that they let us live here and give us health care. So where in France is the question.

In the past month we have been on short trips to Nantes, in the Central West, Bordeaux, in the South West, Avignon in Provence in the deep South, and Dijon, a small city in the Central East, looking for a city that will be our next home. Each place would potentially cut our rent by nearly 50%. Other criteria: proximity to a major wine region; still walkable with no need to buy a car; good weather; access to a TGV train (the speed train) or an airport, or both; and not too touristy, although that is hard to avoid in France. I think we would also like something that feels a bit more authentically French in terms of architecture and culture. As it turns out, we loved all four places.

Nantes really surprised us. It sits at the end of the Loire River at the edge of the Loire Valley wine region. It’s full of young people who are taking the city through a complete urban renewal. The once gritty town, and former slave shipping port, is now a city full of museums, modern architecture (the train station is fantastic) public art, parks. and oceans of green space, all along a beautiful wide river on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. Plus Chien-hui reached out to some people from Taiwan who welcomed us so warmly to their city and hung out with us and took us to cool restaurants and showed us around. We didn’t choose it because it rains so much there and everywhere we went people were only drinking beer. The wine shops that are found even in tiny villages in France were nowhere to be seen in Nantes. That wouldn’t work for me.

Bordeaux is well, Bordeaux. One of the world’s greatest wine regions surrounding the city itself for miles in every direction. Also sitting on a river, The Gironde, that flows out to the Atlantic Ocean. Bordeaux has an elegance and a cool factor. It’s known as the small Paris and that is well deserved. It’s chic, and the people living there are living the good life. The food is amazing, there are so many restaurants. We ate a Taiwanese restaurant called Bui Bui, which translates to “fat, fat” but really means happily chubby, so I knew I’d love it. The owner, Marco, greeted us so warmly and it turns out he has an unmatchable wine list and a cellar that he showed me. We drank some amazing wine to go with our bao and popcorn chicken. We also spent a day in St-Emilion, on the right bank about a half-hour from Bordeaux by train. We walked through the picture perfect town, had an amazing lunch and wondered through the vineyards before taking the train back to the city. We spent several days in Bordeaux looking at neighborhoods and talking to the locals. We also visited the Cité du Vin twice. Bordeaux capatured my heart, but I don’t think it had the same effect on Chien-hui. Ultimately, Bordeaux wasn’t going to reduce our expenses enough. It’s still pretty expensive even if not as expensive as Nice. And it rains there a lot, has very high humidity, and we learned that nobody uses air-conditioning in Bordeaux. Deal-breaker. 

Next was the Provençal city of Avignon, in the Rhône Valley wine area, near Chateaneuf-du-Pape. Avignon is a walled city where a series of Popes were installed for 70 years beginning in the 1300s when there was a schism and there were Popes in both France and Italy simultaneously. We had been there three times before and we were always impressed by its small but high-end shopping district, the famous theater scene, the great and very affordable wines, the huge indoor food hall, and being surrounded by so much history. The famous Papal Palace is there and is worth seeing, for sure. Plus the people seem to understand that it’s hot there and most of the apartments have air-conditioning. Our agent arranged an apartment viewing while we were there but the apartment was a swing and a miss. Up four flights of stairs, dark, broken tiles, missing all appliances, etc. After a couple of days we also begin to see the city a bit more clearly. It is the second most visited place in France after Paris. It gets more visitors than Mont Saint-Michele, the Eiffel Tower, or the Louvre. The theater season brings hundreds of thousands of fans to the city, as well. The fact that the city is walled compresses everyone into somewhat of a goldfish bowl and though it was only May, we felt it. Groups of gray-haired people following leaders with flags; Tourist trains traversing the city; Packed restaurants; Posters and flyers for theater shows posted everywhere creating a lot of visual pollution. The prices were right and the food hall was incredible, but we decided we wanted less tourists not more. We were sitting out at a cafe and struck up a conversation with an older gentleman who, coincidentally, said he lived in Dijon for 10 years when he was younger and he said we should really look there before we make any decisions.

So, we jumped on the train and headed back to Dijon, in the central east part of France. I say back because Dijon is almost where we almost moved before we were seduced by the sun on our last minute trip to Nice in 2024. Dijon is the largest city, although it is a medium-sized city at 160,000 people, in Burgundy. The wines from Burgundy are considered to be the finest in the world. I can’t really argue with that. It is the home of Bœuf Bourguignon, Coq au Vin, Escargot, Gougère, and Eggs en Meurette. This is the food one thinks of when they think of French food. The city itself is sophisticated, the architecture is Renaissance with cross timbered buildings and beautiful cathedrals mixed with modern buildings, a great teaching hospital, a modern tram system, and the city center is completely pedestrianized. There are parks, museums, elegant squares, beautiful shopping districts, and the best food hall in France. There is also the famous Gastronomy center. It’s only 90 minutes to Paris by train. The weather there will be far more seasonal and that is probably the biggest knock on the city. It will be more gray in the winter, but the cost of living is an amazing 50% less than Nice.

After visiting the other three cities we just knew Dijon was the right place. The air was clean, the city was green, and honestly, it felt like Seattle without the Sound. Once we were home we got our agency to begin the search. We found an apartment pretty quickly that is $1,000 less than what we pay now in Nice and is double the size. A classic French building with 12-foot ceilings, wood floors, French doors and windows, and a very large kitchen for me to cook in. There is even a room I can use as a painting studio. Moreover, Dijon is very French. There are only a few hundred Americans living in the region but they have formed expat groups that seem quite active. Our French will have to get better quickly because not so many people speak English there. I think Chien-hui is looking forward to attending language courses at the University of Bourgogne.

We will take the month of June to move our stuff, but it already looks like it will be a smooth transition. One of our neighbors in our building is going to move into our apartment here, so the landlord here was very pleased. I am hoping I got it right this time.

This blog post is getting long, so I will leave it there. I will sum up our time in Nice in a future post, but I will say now that it has been such a great place to land and get acclimated to this big country. 

Finally, the palette with 500 copies of my photobook, “Let’s Been There” is finally landing at the warehouse in Portland after the two month journey across the sea, and I will have it up for sale here on this website in the next week. I have sold a few copies locally already and everyone seems to really like it, so I hope you’ll consider buying a copy for yourself. I think it really beautiful.