Scouting Out Possibilities in Pezenas

Tonight at the end of a long day of hectic work with erratic results,  I met the nicest people and our conversation was entirely in French, for TWO HOURS.  Yay, me!  (I am not sure my brain ever gets more tired than how it feels after say ½ hour of non-stop conversation in French — or any language I’m learning but far from mastered.)  In those situations, I keep looking around for the person who speaks better French than me.  In this case, I was all by my lonesome.

I had four appointments today.  First with a French woman (top left)  who’s lived 20 – 30 years in Australia, who’s very interested in this “community/enterprise/experiment” for people interested in retiring full or part-time in France and wants to first, try it out,  this whatever-I-am-doing that I have gotten myself involved in.    She thinks there are also many Australians who want that as well and we talked about making this a multi-national effort.  We’re exploring some sort of collaboration.

The first appointment went so well and she asked if she could tag along to the next appointment at 2 pm when I would meet some owners here in Pezenas who had expressed interest in the long stays.

Meanwhile, we had an hour to kill, so we

• Went into a real estate agent that we sort of randomly picked out and, surprisingly, the agents LOVED the idea (Longer staying clients getting a considerably lower price than the AirBnB price but somewhat higher than a permanent rental) Said they had multiple clients who only stay part of the year and who would be quite interested in some sort of arrangement like that.  They confirmed that rentals of 30 days or more should be SIGNIFICANTLY better than the AirBnB rates
  1. One of the agents is also starting a sort of Conciergerie/majordomo service where she basically is going solve whatever problem (locally) that you need solving (get a car, find a language teacher, etc.)
• Went together to repark my potentially new colleague’s car in the free parking lot I knew about…and discovered that I couldn’t find my OWN car and for a good ten minutes believed my rental car had truly been stolen. Pretty terrifying. Luckily, my possibly new colleague’s brain did not turn to mush as mine did.  I had (shockingly, for me) taken an earlier picture of my car and its license plate number. She helped me find the photo and then began calmly looking at license plates one by one.   Turns out I had parked it a few spaces away from where I remembered – not far – and the battery in the remote button on the key fob had died.  So I was looking wrong, and when I pressed the button, the sound that would have redirected me to a few spaces away, it didn’t sound.  I have rarely felt that happy….just to have my car not stolen.  The episode gave me an hour or two of positive glee.
• Met the proprietors at 2:00, who apparently had agreed to the meeting to explain to me that they were NOT interested in renting longer stays, period. They DEFINITELY would not consider lower than the nightly rates.   And, having sat down at the café table where we were, ordered coffee as we were talking, then blinked and looked at the sky when it came to pay.  Then showed us some pretty inferior-looking apartments on a street with a lot of traffic noise and insisted that they’d never rent them out, even in the dead of winter, for less than double what the real estate agents had told me were ‘going” rates.
• Scratched my head,   Then, as a palate cleanser, had my possible colleague take a picture of the both silly and lovely fountains at the head of one of the main squares in Pezenas.
• Took a nap. I’m pretty much past jet lag but it’s been 12 days and at about 4 pm, I nearly pass out, no matter what I am doing.  Maybe it’s jet lag.  Maybe it’s being 72.
• Got up, got ready to move tomorrow.  (Again!) and meet my 6 pm appointment, also owners.  These were just the best people  –and so very different from the first.  So friendly, and so open to different ways of working together.  They’ve JUST moved here (in July) having retired from Parisian jobs in July.  They’ve loved Pezenas forever, vacationing here often, and now have taken the plunge and bought property and lovingly furnished it.  They LOVE the idea of having guests that they can get to know and share their love of their adopted town.  They have a wonderful sense of style, in the apartments.  And the KITCHEN….OMG, a stove to die for.  What I like is that it isn’t just another modern, minimalist heavy-on-the-Ikea-sense-of-style place.   Very French, very stylish, and very comfortable.                         

• We said goodbye and that we hoped we’d see each other again, and I hope that is true. They are the kind of people you meet and consider, mildly, moving to Pezenas, because THEY love it so much and their love is contagious.