Cicero

I am an English citizen with an American husband we came here two years ago, and he did not need a long stay visa. What you need is a Titre de sejour which you have to apply for within eight days of arriving. You need scads of paperwork but that is normal and once you have it keep it safe as you may need it again. We found the process painless but we have wonderful women working at our Mairie. We took the paperwork there and they did the rest. We had a letter from the Prefecture which I thought was a receipt and didn't read properly. So after some months of silence we went to the Mairie to find the letter was actually telling us to make an appointment. Our friendly worker at the Marie explained what had happened and with no more ado we got the card. Somehow we managed to skip the interview and medical examination part. I doubt everyone will be as lucky. However if you want to move to France do it and don't worry.

It is the 2 September here in Brittany. French calendars have the school holidays on them and the dates for different regions. Our Primary School children will have an extra two hours a week after the normal school times which will give them an extra 12 days off and fit in with the summer holidays of the College and Lycee children. It is proposed that they use that time to do homework, a great help to me as homework is often accompanied by whining and complaining. Apart from testing my limited French.

We had a container load sent three years ago via Le Havre and another last year and we had no problems at all, apart from the shippers deciding we owed them more money and wouldn't release our goods until we paid. But we are here now and don't need to use them again.

I have friends here who are renting and they are paying between 600 and 700 euros a month. Both are in very nice houses. Kris

Thanks we will have to give it a try, I may wait until we have a carte vitale though. [:)] Kris

We did already pay and we paid for five hours of messing about. So I do think he owes us as far as coming back. My husband doesn't trust him now, he thinks he should have used a better compass and wants to buy one and do it himself. Kris[+o(]

I am hapy to have read this I was wondering what to do,as I can't see anyone phoning the American 800 number we have for our pets. Kris

I have fixed the problem by searching the network as opposed to searching the satelitte. Which is what we were doing before. However the channels are very unstable, and some times we can't get either ITV or BBC, even though we can get some other channels fine. Of course they are channels we don't want to watch, like QVC. If I knew what TP stood for we might try and seasrch that. We are getting our French channels with an ordinary aerial and they come in fine. The tech did know which way to point the dish as he told us and why we also have an aerial. We are inclining towards the box being unstable. Kris

Thanks for all the help. I will try and put in the channels manually, or get the tech to do it. Kris

No we have a fixed dish, and I have tried plugging in different frequencies and lost some of the channels we did get. so I put it back to the original. I have no idea what I am doing so didn't want to ruin the whole set up. When I run the automatic search it skips the BBC frequencies. I have tried just searching FTA and also ALL. It is getting somewhat frustrating. It seems that the signal isn't strong enough, although other people in the village have BBC without having spent an arm and a leg on getting a technician to put up the dish. If I could manually put in the frequencies it might help but that is beyond my understanding. Kris  

Anton, Thanks for the reply, I will access the link and try and printout pages. I am waiting for my desktop computer and printer to arrive.I also have the problem of not being able to print when I have the ADSL using the usb port. All this stuff is new to us and we lack the know how to solve the problems. We are in Dept. 22 near to Guingamp and St Brieuc, in St Nicolas du Pelem.The box is a Tonna SD 500. Thanks again for the help. Kris

We have finally arrived in France from California and thought we would like TV. We had the local television guy install a dish and an aerial. The French programmes come in great, but the dish will only let us have ITV 1-4, which is alright but we were rather hoping for BBC. He tried for hours but couldn't get it. He went back to the shop and couldn't get it there either. So now after spending a fortune we can't get  BBC TV or radio. Any ideas what he did wrong. If I find out I can tell him. Might even get a refund. We do get some other channels like the Travel channel and the shopping channel, but nothing good.This is all new to us, we are used to cable and a man comes with a box sets it up and we get loads of channels.[*-)] Kris