Moving to the French Alps

When we first decided that we wanted to move to the French Alps, we knew there would be plenty of pitfalls ahead. We scoured and inwardly digested the various self-help books about buying French property, living and working in France and obviously the usual array of language books. In the end, we managed to locate, purchase and finance our new home with relative ease, but if we had just known a few extra facts the whole process would certainly have been less stressful, confusing and frustrating!

Firstly, we had no idea that French people (well certainly in the Rhone-Alpes region anyway) like to advertise their property for sale with more than one (often several) different estate agents, which is really confusing when you're trawling around looking for properties you may like to see. The problem is that, unless you are familiar with the area, the same property can look quite different when advertised by two or more different agents, and it's surprisingly easy to arrange duplicate viewings. Even the price is not always a tell-tale sign as it's not unusual for a seller to tell one estate agent he will accept a lower price but to "forget" to inform the others!

Secondly, forget about doing anything much on Sundays and Mondays, unless of course you're talking about leisure pursuits. It may well be different in some areas of France, and certainly in Paris, but there are very few shops open on a Sunday. On a Monday, the banks and lawyers offices are closed, but they are open on a Saturday to make up for it. If you don't know this in advance, and plan a trip from abroad, you may end up kicking your heels in frustration because you're there on the wrong days.