Moving to France From the UK, What They Don't Tell You!

the goat's cheeses that are called something beginning we see like quarter or something i bought the goat's cheeses for cotton i'm sure groton cotton is dog poo or something but anyway gonna have to get a selfie stick my arms are too short that's as far away as you can get sorry i was thinking one of the other things you don't see on the videos from france people sort of say oh you know what a wonderful life and living the dream and of course we mostly are i'm you know we are we're very lucky um us particularly because we have retired here so we don't need to find ways to earn money but there's been you know for the last at least couple of years people have had to really work hard to um work out how they're going to maintain their residency in france you know we all had to apply for residency cards and at the same time we'd already applied i'd already applied because i'm the organizer of paperwork um we had to apply for residency cards and i'd done um i'd already done our dossiers for naturalization um which wasn't easy um and i think a lot of people have buried their head in the sand and at the end of this month no at the end of next month september um if they haven't they've already had an extension if they've not had their um applications received they could lose lose their um permission to stay here which is really quite frightening for some people and i suppose some people just don't you know have their heads in the sand and just well there's some people that don't know it's thousands of thousands of people who've still not applied for residency we were very lucky not lucky but you know our dossiers were accepted and we were interviewed in june two years ago and in french and my french is not brilliant mark's french is okay but mine is good but um mine is not brilliant and we had to learn quite a bit of history from um a book called the levrey de citoyen history that i didn't do at school i hated history at school so i needed to know some kings and queens and the revolution and um what happened then and and what was the benefits of the revolution and various other things and to be honest i think i managed my way through it with a bit of humor and um the woman that interviewed me was really kind and really gentle and has sort of helped me um to find my way through and then we waited for him so the end of june 19 and we waited until august last year and i got an email that just went to my spam and it looks like a dodgy email and you look at it and you think god you know where's that come from but it had actually come from a person sitting in um the office somewhere saying you've now been naturalized and we found ourselves in the the journal uh official and and we are now lucky to have an english passport and a french passport and we can live here and we have freedom of movement which so many people have like my daughter has lost her freedom of movement and she lives here she lives 40 minutes from us and she has a 10-year residency card but she's not free to go and live in other countries as we used to be you know we used to be able to go and live in 27 other countries and dear old brexit put paid to that i know people don't want to look at brexit or probably don't want to watch stuff about brexit but i've noticed yeah i'm watching lots of blogs in france and none of them mention the difficulties that they might be going through of having to improve their residency if nothing else and [Music] and i think that's a shame because the reality here is it's not easy you need to know the language i see lots of blogs where i hear people speaking in english most of the time and i think have you learned french do you have you integrated are you why are you not speaking french with people which surprises me and i didn't really want to do a static video because i think they're really boring so i've been wandering around but um phil bought me this some oh a year ago at least but holding that out at a distance i'm finding really quite uncomfortable so i am doing a static video move on if you don't like it sorry so what did i say oh yeah so yes it it's not easy it's not plain sailing being here and you need to be able to adapt and integrate and if you um if you don't do that and you stick and keep yourselves in that um ex bubble and i hate the term expat because i'm not an expat i'm a migrant i migrated here i chose to live here i chose to change um from one country to another just like the refugees are choosing a new life because the la the life that they're leaving is is just really atrocious but again that's another subject that people don't mention don't want to talk about or maybe you don't want to hear about but i am i'm also a migrant not a refugee i haven't left a war-torn country to live here um but yeah it it was exciting it uh was it's an adventure it was a bloody adventure we um whenever we think that oh you know we've done that now that's good okay that's that stone that we've stepped over or we've climbed that rock and climbed over it that's fine um something else comes up so then you're having to discover a whole new way of doing something and what i've noticed and i'm hoping no french people watch this but what i've noticed is um many french people appear to make an assumption that you know because they know so there's like this cultural thing that whereas in the uk i think we're quite good at saying oh yeah um you you'll probably need to go and do that with that or um oh you have to see so and so for that or this is this is what this is the procedure you don't get that here there's an it seems to be an assumption that you you know and so many of the many of the um milestones is the wrong word stepping down is the wrong word but you can make it up you know what i mean many of those um milestones are um fraught with difficulties because you have to work out what you got to do for instance you know we had to find years ago we had to find the poly clinic for mark and poitier and find out now we know it well um we many years ago back in i don't know 2089 we had to find um the sea pam building cpam building in portland and when you go on the ring road around pottier you can see it and you go oh there it is there's the building there it is there it is and then it disappears and the closer you get to it you come off the ring road the closer you get it's disappeared and it's a big building and it's like it's it's it's moving or it's decided to move i mean obviously it hadn't but it was we often talk about that now you know whenever we're going somewhere and we're spotting a building and then it's gone and we go it's a cpan building again it's moving so yeah we had to go and you know work really hard because um some years back sarkozy um decided that um retrospectively that people that lived here that had moved here couldn't be part of the health system um so then we were happy to jump through hoops to try and make sure that we were part of the health system he changed his mind after several months just before we were about to sign up for health care the costly health care and then he changed his mind and didn't make it retrospective so luckily those of us that were here by a certain date and we had been we're given um we can be in the health system and the health system i have to say in our opinion and from what we've experienced is really good and really quick um i can get a deck i can get a doctor's appointment reasonably quickly i see my doctor he refers me for things i need referring to i don't pay any more because i have a an enduring um illness mark doesn't pay any more because he has an enduring illness so we don't pay for prescriptions we we pay um [Music] we pay for a mutual which is like a top-up so we pay that every month and i can't remember what it is now it's about 250 a month but out of that all our prescriptions we get refunded from it anyway we got re we get reimbursed any prescriptions we get reimbursed we're both using cpap machines that gets reimbursed we don't pay out from upfront for it but but all of that's paid for doctor's appointments are paid for and consultant pay appointments i pay for and then they get refunded dental appointments they get partially refunded so it's a very good system and it works really quickly where we are rurally i don't know how it is for people in the cities i'm gonna i'm gonna finish with the some of the negative stuff that i may have been mentioning and some of the good stuff just to say that my plan is that sometime this week i'm going to visit um our local brook aunt i've spoken to alex and he's happy for me to film there i'm going to go without mark because mark will get bored we normally go there when we want something and i don't have any needs for anything we have everything we could possibly want here and um but i will take you for a tour of our local brecon it's absolutely rampant with stuff there's rooms you can't really get into you know you'd you'd get into those rooms if there was something you thought might be in there that you want um but it is just jammed with stuff i see some of the comp videos on on youtube and they're all tidy and everything's laid out neatly and you know it's easy to be able to see in the recon i'm gonna take you to you know it's a squeeze to get around the um he uses lots of dresses and wardrobes and um glass cases and and whatever to store everything and to display everything and you know it's quite a squeeze to get around but anyway i'm sure some of you will enjoy it the other thing i'm planning is i watched chateau diaries and they were making um goats cheese goat's cheese tart that had a special name that i can't remember the name of now i hate goat cheese but the top look but it wasn't a tart actually it was a pie so it was a goat's cheese oh here it was goat's cheese a lump of honey and a cap full of a shot of whiskey topped with a pastry top so it was in a ramekin and i thought oh my god that looks just amazing well i know mark would like that so i bought today i did we picked up some shopping and i've got the goat's cheeses that are called something beginning we see like quarter or something i bought the goat's cheeses for cotton i'm sure grottan is dog poo or something but anyway cotton and um i bought him that and i bought mascarpone for me but which i can mix with yogurt to give some tart because actually mascarpone doesn't have a much taste and i'm gonna add yogurt to that and um so i'm gonna make two for me too for him but not today and i'm i'm done for today i think um so yeah and i might do it like this i might do it you know granny in the kitchen or something like that if you're lucky but it will be me and i am a granny i'm a nanny to my lovely grandchildren but um i don't think i can do the you know italian mama in the kitchen okay i'm gonna put these to send these up to dropbox which will take forever i really do need to go but i'm not going today but i really do need to go down to memoriam to upload stuff so hopefully there's some footage here that phil can put together that isn't too boring and i'm sorry it's static but i hope it's got some interesting things for you and i'm going to go down now and see what's going on because i can hear shredding going on okay bon soiree oh bon journey philip says to me you shouldn't have any silent moments in your vlog mum sorry about the silent moment but i know that he can edit that out i was just thinking to myself stephanie in um the chateau diaries has her own phillip who's her cameraman an editor i have my own philip who's my son but doesn't live here he lives in lincolnshire he does a very good job for me you

Channel: Kathy's Flog from France.

Views: 25,952

Keywords: moving to france, living in france, living in a different country, french life, french lifestyle, UK to France, moving from the UK to france, migrants in france, brexit, how did brexit change living abroad, the french life, livret de citoyen naturalisation, carte de sejour, language learning, the difficulties living in France, integrating, cultural differences France vs UK, France vs UK, Naturalisation, expat vloggers, Moving to France From the UK, What They Don't Tell You!

Id: g67oBKtyG7g

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021