My French book shelf

Wednesday
This is something of an emergency blip, since I hadn’t taken anything during the day, and was looking around the house this evening for inspiration, and I decided to blip this shelf of books on France, some in French, some in English, since they represent a significant part of my life,. We lived in France for a total of 13 1/2 years, from 1986 - 1996, and then again from July 2013 - January 2017, and our youngest daughter was born there. Both periods were in the same area, in the Fontainebleau area, about an hour’s drive south of Paris. We went for Roger’s work which was with General Electric aero engines, and they had collaborative projects with the French company Snecma, based near Melun.
The beginning of our first period there in 1986 was a challenge, since Jen was just turning 3, and Philip was 6 months old! I had studied French throughout grammar school, and even for a year at university, but I was rather rusty! Roger on the other hand had given up French as soon as he could, thinking, what do I need to speak French for?!
However, R took it all in his stride and helped me to do the same. R and I had gone over previously to find a house, leaving the children in the care of the grandparents for a few days.We had an agent helping us, courtesy of the company. However, once we arrived, we couldn’t get into it straight away, so we had several weeks in a hotel, and a few weeks in the house of another GE employee who was away on vacation. Once we did get in, it was a beautiful house in a small village called Macherin, about ten minutes drive out of Fontainebleau. We lived there for six years, but then the landlady wanted to sell, so we had to find somewhere else. We had great difficulty finding somewhere at the time - places were either too big or too small, and when you did find somewhere good, they got snatched up very quickly, and this time we didn’t have any assistance - they assumed since we had been there six years we could manage on our own! We finally found somewhere, but we didn’t like it anywhere near as much as the first house, which we had grown very fond of. It was a weird modern design, ugly from the front - mainly concrete - it reminded me of a prison (!), but it did have big windows at the back, overlooking the large garden - though that was a lot of work to keep on top of!
I could go on, but it’s late and I need to get to bed! Maybe I’ll do a sequel sometime!