Would you rather?

I've made a fun quiz. My auntie Hilary gave me a book when I was a kid called Would you Rather. It had dilemmas like "would you rather have breakfast in a hot air balloon, lunch in a castle, or tea on the river?"

So to help me decide about France vs England, I've made myself and you a more grown up quiz called, "would you take?"

1) 90% of the time the sky is blue, but you have to use a translation app every time you send a text.

2) Childcare in school holidays is only 12 euros a day, but you can never use grandparents for childcare.

3) It's warm enough to swim in the sea 6 months of the year, but you live in a wild fire zone.

4) You get almost free university, but no 12 grand tax free, and you have to pay 26% tax on everything you earn and wages are not high.

5) You go skiing in the mountains at least one day a year, but you never see your mum on her birthday.

6) Good wine is very affordable, but you have to drink UHT milk.  

If you would answer yes to most of these, you should move to France. 

I left the last blog on a bit of a cliff hanger and I'm sure some people reading this want me to just hurry up and make a decision about France or England, and stop chatting on about it. 

So tiny recap: 

We had an offer on the house accepted in mid June, but they said they don't want to sign until mid July. Then we asked for a date and they said, "before or after 24th July" which is not mid July! Then on the 23rd we said, "are we signing tomorrow then?" and they said, "how about the first week in August?' So then we decided to say our offer will expire on the 3rd August. Which was a bit of a risk because they could have just said, "stop pressurising us, we don't want to sell." I get the feeling they're not 100% sure they want to sell and we're not 100% sure we want to buy, so we're playing this weird game of chicken.

I said to Dan that buying a house without a job is like announcing you're pregnant after a one night stand. People want to celebrate with you but really were all thinking, "is this a good idea? I hope it all works out in the end." 

Anyway they got back to us and said we can sign before the 3rd of August and we can do it digitally, because we'll be in England. After we've signed there's then 10 days where you can still "abort" with no consequences. After that you have to pay 10% of the purchase price to the other side. Which is kind of a good rule, because when we once tried to buy a house in the UK the woman pulled out 3 days before we were due to move, for no good reason, which in my analogy is just like aborting a full term baby.

On a lighter note... we went camping and it was fun. After cancelling our Italy holiday we just wanted cheap fun, so we got a tent and went to a campsite that we'd already been to before. I'm not someone that normally repeats holidays, and I did once try to argue that people who go on holiday to the same place every single year are the worst kinds of people. But it was really comforting in all the chaos to just go back to the same little family run campsite where the kids can be free range. They had a pool, trampoline, table tennis, boules and one little pizza restaurant.

Eric made friends with all the kids. He was playing card games with the Dutch kids and they were communicating in English and then he was playing table tennis with the French kids and chatting in French. He is really good at making friends with anyone.

We also made friends with a Dutch guy who lives in Turkey and is a pilot. I like that about camping, it's really sad that in everyday life loads of people must be doing their washing up at the same time, all lonely in their separate houses, when you could be doing it outside in the sun while meeting other people.

We went to some gorgeous places, they colour of the water was so beautiful. I need to paint a room that colour in our new house.

 

 

We got told off taking this photo, because we didn't know but footpaths are closed in some departments, because of being on a high alert fire risk. This sort of fake policeman dressed as a boy scout said he could of fined us 135 euros. He also said we could walk on footpaths on the other side of the river because that was a different department that wasn't on such a high fire risk. Which seems a bit mad.

We got into jumping off rocks, and we saw people doing some mad jumps way higher and more risky than we did.

 

a crazy man who just ran off the highest bit.

 

 

On the way back we staying one night in Aix which was really pretty and we also stopped off at Nimes where Percy had recently been for a 3 day school trip so he was our tour guide.

I've been busy preparing art for my exhibition. Here's my newest little painting:  

If you're free on the 29th of August please come! Here's the details:

It's only on for that one night, but you can buy prints or products such as bags or phone cases or beach towels from my website at any time: My website!

Thanks for reading. x