Oh, but I love this book about expat life in Provence! It’s beautifully written, thoroughly entertaining and sums up the expat experience superbly. The writing sparkles with enjoyment and humour, although the author’s not above giving gentle digs where they’re due. After all, the French do have their little, incomprehensible ways when it comes to, well, quite a lot of things!

Through a series of sips – vignettes of the author’s part-time expat lifestyle in France – we discover American Keith Van Sickle’s adopted corner of Europe and how he gets on in it. There’s never a dull moment. We share the thrills and frustrations as Keith and Val grapple with French living, attempt to communicate and, zut alors, try to actually get things done. And we mustn’t forget their dog too.

From the jolly, lively and excellent cover to the last page, this book keeps you riveted and provides plenty of chuckles. I do hope there’ll be some sequels as this is an author I want to keep on reading.

So that you can see what I mean, here’s a guest post from Keith

Guest Post

My wife Val and I have had plenty of mishaps living in France, like the time I tried to donate blood. After filling out a long and complex form, I had to have a private interview with a doctor. He didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak much French. After a few minutes of struggling to interview me, he slammed my file shut and announced that I would not be allowed to donate blood due to “insufficient command of the French language.”

And then there were the vocabulary mix-ups. Many words are the same in French and English, like nation and danger. If we don’t know a word in French, sometimes we just fake it by using the English word with a French accent.

It works most of the time but you have to be careful because some words exist in both languages and have entirely different meanings. These are the infamous faux amis, or “false friends.” Ask Val about the time she shocked people by talking about preservatives in food. Oops, preservative means “condom.”

We love France and spend part of every year there. It started when we wanted to live abroad but couldn’t find expat assignments. So we invented our own. We quit our jobs, became consultants and moved to France to follow our dream.

Oh, and we didn’t speak French.

The French have a reputation for being hard to get to know, especially for those who don’t speak their language, so we worried about how we would be received. And it was tough at first, trying to learn the language and meet people.

But despite our various misadventures, we slowly settled in. We mastered the local rules for greeting people (two kisses in certain towns and three in others.) We experienced the ridiculous security procedures surrounding the purchase of a simple $20 beard trimmer. We learned the language well enough that Val blushed when a famous chef called her “young and delicious like the fava beans of springtime.”

And we made friends! That really helped us feel comfortable in our new home. It can take a while, but once a French person welcomes you into their life, you are friends forever.

Now Val and I split our time between Provence and California. Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have said, “Every man has two countries – his own and France.” Maybe he was on to something.

I’ve written about our life in France in my book One Sip at a Time: Learning to Live in Provence, available from Amazon.

Keith Van Sickle

on Tour

November 6-17

with

One Sip at a Time:
Learning to Live in Provence

(travel memoir)

Release date: January 28, 2017
at Dresher Publishing

ISBN: 978-0998312002
192 pages

Author’s page | Goodreads

SYNOPSIS

Can a two-career couple really pick up stakes and move to Provence?

Keith and Val had a dream – to live in Provence, the land of brilliant sunlight, charming hilltop villages and the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean. But there were two problems: they weren’t French speakers and they had full-time jobs. So they came up with a plan…

Follow their adventures (and misadventures) as they quit their jobs, become consultants and split their time between two countries. Laugh along as they build a life in Provence, slowly mastering a new language and making friends with the locals over long meals and just a bit too much wine.

If you’ve ever dreamed of changing gears and learning what joie de vivre is really all about, you won’t want to miss this delightful book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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