I have visited France many times as a tourist over the last thirty+ years but this was the first time I came with a mission to learn the French language and way of life. I have always had a feeling of well-being when I arrive in France – all of my senses are awakened: there’s nothing like the warm toasty smell of baguettes baking or the feel of fine French linen, and just listening to the French speak makes me feel romantic! Plus, you’ve never known the true meaning of ‘pairing’ until you take a sip of a good Chablis after a bite of an aged Comté cheese. But my sense that is stimulated the most is sight – everywhere I look in France I see beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I find the way the French dress, how they present their homes, stores, gardens and villages is truly beautiful. I know many other countries also present their towns with pride and dress with care but there’s something about the French style and language that just resonates with me – from the pastel wooden shutters matching the lavender pots on the doorstep to the scarf casually slung over the shoulder that matches the colourful suede shoes to the way they gift box every éclair and the butcher lovingly wraps your cordon bleu.  

I wanted to understand if this was all put on for tourists as most towns I had visited were touristy – or if all French people devoted their lives to grace and beauty. So as we lived on and off in rural France for about six months in 2024, (three months in Spring from April to June and three months in late summer/autumn from August to October) I practiced being a flaneur and wandered aimlessly through towns, villages and countryside observing French life.  We stayed on isolated country properties, in tiny rural villages and in a few more established regional towns from 1-8 weeks at a time, sometimes minding people’s pets, sometimes just staying in houses via home exchange programs. We walked all the local tracks, shopped at local markets, ate and drank at the tiny tabacs or cafes, attended local fetes and events, and tried to embrace French ways as much as possible. The overarching sense about life in France that I came away with was that quality, not quantity, is most valued in France. Life doesn’t revolve around how much money you earn, how big your home is or vast your view or what label you are wearing, driving or carrying (as long as its French!). In France it really is about enjoying the best of every morsel, moment and minute and about truly embracing a Joie de vivre.

I observed life in France through the lens of an Australian who lives in a suburb of a large metropolitan city (Melbourne) so not only was I viewing another country’s way of living but also how they lived in regional and rural regions of France. Here are my observations of what I found amusing, curious, confounding and enlightening – I hope I do not offend anyone – these are merely my observations and my views, thoughts and reflections on my time living in rural and regional France. I hope you enjoy this little insight into life in a different culture and country.

Celebrating history and connecting with community

• Every piece of countryside that has at least one building has a name (usually the name of the family that owns the dwelling/land).
• If there are more than about a dozen buildings/houses then there’s a church with a great big spire or some impressive feature that seems totally out of scale to the town and a Marie (town hall) where local bans (marriages) are still posted alongside a “Carte Cadastrale”, (map of the commune,) along with all sorts of other details on the history of the village, what’s going on and when.
• If there’s a church and a Marie then there is also the minimum of two shops: a Tabac (serves as a bar, coffee shop, betting and smoking shop) and a hairdresser (or two or three…). The slightly bigger communes add a boulangerie (bakery) then if a bit bigger still a boucherie-epicerie (butcher-delicatessen) and a little grocery store and a bricolage (hardware store).
• They preserve their rural villages lovingly and showcase them for all to enjoy. They keep buildings and shutters/doors well painted (usually in sympatico colours), fill pots with flowers and hang them from light posts, or balconies, or line them up around squares and along bridges and provide pretty, painted signs identifying traditional shops, sites of interest and historical homes.
• Most communes also have an old lavoir – a public washhouse, which might be a collection of stones or a more sophisticated covered structure depending on its age and upkeep by the town. These were the old ‘water-cooler’ equivalent for the towns to share news as they washed their vêtements.
• The newer version of the lavoir are the communal washing stops – If it’s a while between towns you‘ll find a car park near an intersection of country roads with a big crucifix with Jesus watching over a couple of washing machines and dryers and a pizza vending machine. Doesn’t have the same charm as the old lavoirs but the communal shared resource approach is common to both.

• The French love their history and celebrate important dates and events at every chance. The big wars, revolutions and religious events over the centuries are remembered and celebrated. We were constantly reminded how well-trodden France is and couldn’t help but reflect on that for 9,000 years (from 9^th to the 18^th century) while all these monumental castles, fortes and lands were being built up, fought over, torn down and rebuilt our indigenous people were quietly living alongside each other in relative peace in Australia.  
• Remnants of the old fortifications and castles can be found in most reasonable sized villages and towns (5,000 pop +). There are random ramparts, crumbling portes, donjohns (watchtowers) and sometimes an intact fortified castle and keep in the centre of town. Some have been restored and are now a tourist attraction, others are used for municipal offices are museums or art galleries and others are crumbling reminders that connect the past with the present day.
• The French love the Arts. Local villages hold dances, art and photography exhibitions, craft workshops, small theatre groups and performances throughout the year.
• Sports and activities are another big one with organised course et randonnes (run/walks), triathlons, bike tours and horse-riding events scheduled every month on rotation throughout the region.

Discovering the delights of village markets, food and wine  

• Many shops and restaurants in the smaller villages have closed (we can’t work out if the covid pandemic was the death knell or people moving to cities for work ?) and in their place are vending machines. The most common is the baguette vending machine (we presume they get stocked up each morning by the nearest boulangerie?) and the pizza vending machine (which we think has frozen pizzas inside that you can buy frozen or pay a little more for the machine to heat it ready to eat). We also saw an épicerie vending machine stuffed with baguettes, sandwiches and salads (we presume it was stocked daily?) and we have heard there are oyster vending machines in the south that serve a box of oysters with a fresh lemon to squeeze on top!
• These vending machines are an anomaly as from what we saw the French love nothing more than buying their food fresh from local markets. They are very loyal to French products and will happily pay twice as much for a French product rather than buy the cheaper one from another country.
• The vending machines are also odd as shopping at markets or stores is an important point of connection for people in rural towns. No purchase is made without a lengthy exchange on family and village life. This happens even at the supermarket where we would wait patiently while the cashier had a good long chat to their customers before turning to (eventually) serve us.
• The markets are a weekly ritual in the communes and villages with each town having at least a visit from a van or two each week. We stayed in one little village for 7 weeks that had no boucherie or fromagerie or creperie so every Thursday two boucherie-epicerie vans, two cheese and dairy vans and two crepe vans plus a few fruit and vegetable stalls came to town to sell their local goods. Once a month a furniture stall was added with armchairs and beds too!
• There are also a lot of Brocantes (flea markets) and the biggest of all was La Guerche market which has been running every Tuesday morning in La Guerche-de-Bretagne since 1121 and even has a saying equivalent to our “It has everything including the kitchen sink” which is “You can find everything there, just like in La Guerche.” We visited in September and can attests that every type of household and garden item, clothing, hardware, food and drink was on offer!

• Most country people grow their own veggies. And as we walked down narrow lanes we could see huge pumpkins, marrows, and rows of asparagus or strawberries sprouting and communal herb gardens in the local park are common too.
• Many people also keep hens and goats for personal use.
• In wine country (which is most of France) it’s not uncommon to see a few vines in the front or backyard of each house. The French are so proud of their wine and only sell and consume the local varieties from their appellation. We drove along a couple of the famous wine routes and called in to chateaus to learn about the terroir, appellations and grape varieties they produced.
• Bread is baked twice a day and should be eaten the day it is bought as it has no preservatives. There’s nothing better than the smell of croissants or baguettes baking fresh – except eating it while they are still hot – and we saw many people nibbling on their baguettes as they carried them home. Interestingly, they don’t serve butter with baguettes at restaurants, you have to ask for it. In my opinion the butter is almost as good as the bread! We saw people take their fresh baguettes into the Tabac and tear of pieces to enjoy with their glass of beer or wine on many occasions.
• The French love a good bargain and, kudos to them, they love to recycle everything. There are central depots dotted all over town for recycling paper, tin, plastic and glass household rubbish (only waste is collected in wheely bins once a fortnight). But they also have collection points for homewares and clothing and little vintage shops or ‘friperies’ (secondhand clothes shops) in the little villages where you can find some very nice items for very little! I also saw an entire floor of the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann store in Paris is dedicated to the (Re)Store which sells accessible luxury, second-hand pieces.

• A sense of pride is taken with everything in the country from keeping the front of your house neat to dressing well.  There’s no tracky-dacks and pola-fleece here. The men and women wear shirts and trousers with jackets, whether in the fields or at the Tabac and if going to the market they will always have a scarf and matching leather shoes and bag.
• Sundays are sacred ‘do-nothing’ days in rural France – and indeed in almost all of France (except the biggest cities where you will find bidg department stores and restaurants will open for a few hours). If you arrive in a village or town on a Sunday you’d better come prepared with your own food, drink and entertainment as nothing is open. This frustrated us at first but we learnt to pre-plan and came to enjoy our Sundays for walking, reading, eating in.
• 12 – 2pm is sacred lunch-two-hours everywhere in regional France. Like on Sundays, everything shuts for people to sit down and enjoy a leisurely meal together. School children eat a cooked 3 course meal in the school hall/cafeteria, shop keepers go home or gather at a local bistro (if home is too far away) office and factory workers take a walk, picnic or dine at a tabac or bistro. Once again this seemed quite bizarre to us at first as we prefer to eat a baguette on the run as we explore our surrounds, but we learnt to incorporate this into our day – making sure we arrived in any town by 10am for 2 hours of shopping-sight-seeing or after 3pm. We also discovered the schedules for many boulangeries are 8am – 1pm and then 3 or 4pm to 7pm. So each day is really two days – the part before lunch when you do your morning shop, work, learn then the part after lunch where you do another 4 hours of shop, work, learn.
• The French are very polite and you must greet everyone with a ‘Bonjour’ every time you enter a store, café or Tabac. It’s quite common for people to say Bonsoir to the whole restaurant as they enter – particularly if you’re in a little local village. We were also always greeted on our walking tracks and usually with Bonjour Mesdames, Monsiuers.

Driving – and surviving the French country roads

• While Australian country roads are dominated by utes the vehicle of choice in the french countryside is a tractor! We’ve even seen them parked outside the pharmacy or boulangerie. The tractors – and their tyres-  are ginormous with some rivalling our mining machinery in size. They drive at quite a clip through tiny villages streets and we often had to back up to let them through.
• We enjoyed taking all the small country roads to get from A to B rather than the toll roads and were amazed by how many chateaus there were dotted across the countryside! Ancient stone moulins (windmills) also featured heavily and stood in stark contrast to the clean white towering wind turbines, that line up like giant white herons marching across the hilltops.
• There were many signs highlighting what is either in the area you are passing through or what is coming up ahead and towns proudly display any ‘labels’ they have been awarded as you enter. We loved stopping off at the Villes Fleuries, un Cité of character or Les Beaux villages.
• We also liked the way they marked the village you were leaving with a cross through the towns name as you drove past the town boundary. If there was a dispute going on in the town between the farmers and the council they would turn the town name upside down (to signify that the difficult conditions made them feel like they were walking on their heads).

• The country roads are rated by numbers and letters and D stands for departmental road and the more numbers that come after the D the smaller it is. Many of the roads we took were D-4 numbers and only one car wide so you have to take it easy and look out for Farmer Jean-Pierre on his way to or from work on his gigantic tractor with pitchforks carrying bales of hay out front! It can be hard to pull over to pass as there are often irrigation ditches on each side of the narrow road, so we’ve had to reverse on more than one occasion!
• Our iPhone Maps has a bit of a sense of humour and over the months has taken us down some pretty tiny, hairy, steep and dwindle-into-nothing roads!  We’ve driven through farmers’ fields, up 25% gradient roads, down old river tracks and around in circles getting lost as we follow our “aussie” navigators instructions to turn left at “Rooey- dee- Hewitt-dee-Mayo” (Rue de huit de Mayo) or “take the exit to Angers” (which is supposed to be pronounced as Anshz but or Aussie gal always said Angers as in angry…)
• When the narrow roads passed through towns there were arrows indicating who must give way to who as there’s not enough room to pass as the walls of the houses or shops go right to the edge of the road (our car side mirrors almost brush their shutters or doors). We couldn’t figure out why they build their houses right at the front of the property in the villages – even new builds had the doorstep almost on the road and then a big garden out the back.

• Filling up for fuel in the country requires a fair bit of planning. Firstly the prices vary greatly so when you spot a good price just grab it. Secondly, if you’re a foreigner you need to have a credit card as you can’t use debit or travel cards as the pump. Almost all stations are unmanned and require pre-payment. You need to have $300 of available credit on your card which they pre-authorise then they only take what you pumped out at the end.  
• The crops seem to be mostly corn, sunflowers and wheat and every bit of land is cropped and tilled. The whole town permeates with the aroma of a freshly fertilised field and when the rain comes it is particularly strong!
• The animals are mostly cows and look très chic in their golden-toffee coats dotted across the Derwent green fields. Interestingly, they seem to sit down a lot (unlike our standing-cows at home). In the Loire Valley and on Corsica there were also a lot of horses which are either pets that they ride along the old rail trails or beautiful thoroughbreds for racing or eventing on the many racetracks and cross country fields in this area.