Americans Versus The French Bank

Or, how we learned never to ask "why."

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

Our introduction to the French economy and its traditions and peculiarities began even before we arrived in August 2014.

Not long after my wife had been accepted into a post-doctorate program in Toulouse, we flew there from our home in Oakland, California, for a week in July 2014 to search for an apartment and to begin running the French administrative gauntlet. Though we had a relocation agent to help us look for a place, my wife had spotted online a listing for a 4-bedroom apartment in the city center and so we passed by for a visit.

It was a lovely but antiquated apartment of about 200 square meters, making it about twice the size of our house in Oakland. The location was a dream, just 5 minutes by foot from the Marché des Carmes, one of the city’s main covered markets, and located in the Ozenne neighborhood that looked pretty much like it had been ordered straight out of some Hollywood director’s script about a quaint, old French town. Lined with the classic brick buildings that give Toulouse its nickname, “The Pink City” (La Ville Rose), the street passed a fountain with a statue of the goddess Diana and led to the medieval St. Etienne Cathedral whose bells would ring in our mornings for the years that followed.