Featured : Aux Cinq Coins du Monde

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Say La Vie has been selected to be featured on Aux 5 Coins du Monde, a site featuring interviews with francophone expats located all over the world. Each week, interviewees submit pictures from their coin (corner), and readers attempt to guess the location.

My picture of the Etang de Choisel (that I wish was higher quality!) was added on Friday, and someone has already managed to guess correctly. Later this week, there will be an article following up with hilights from my expat experience. This is a great site to check out (unfortunately, only available in French), but I’ll post some English translations from my interview this week. I would encourage everyone to check it out!

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Home sweet maison

This weekend was full of moving, settling in, and rearranging furniture multiple times. We even had the chance to hang a few pictures (which somehow required a power drill). As promised, here are some pictures from the new place!

And if we have a new house clearly Jojo needs a new house as well. We’ll be sending it outside once the weather shapes up.

Winter lite

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Finally we had some sun this weekend! Rain and clouds every day can get depressing, but it’s unbelieveable that the temperature rarely drops below 40 degrees.

Remember this time last year when Max and I visited the Etang de Choisel? The path around the pond this time around was packed with strolling families with children and dogs enjoying some quality sun exposure.

profiter – to take advantage of, to enjoy

Je profite du soleil.

Château la Ferrière

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This past weekend, our company hosted a retreat at the Ferrière. It was a great chance to bring see employees based all over France. During the day, we attended workshops and meetings. In the evening, the hotel provided a delicious dinner while we participated in a trivia contest. We enjoyed a dj, open bar, and dancing until around 3, but I hear the party continued without us until 5 am!

La Foire de Béré

Our Bretagne winter is well under way… not too chilly, but rain and gray skies almost every day. So I’m enjoying adding pictures and posts from earlier in the year.

The Foire de Béré is the annual harvest fair held in Chateaubriant in early September. It’s considered one of the oldest continuous fairs in France, dating back to the year 1050. I found the event very similar to typical American fairs, with the same livestock and crop competitions, farm supply stands, and plenty of snack foods and carnival rides. We spent a lot of time browsing clothing stalls, and our friend Jean-Charles managed to win a stuffed Tigger from a claw machine!

Design Progress

Max and his team of assistants (though I prefer to call them minions) have busy producing 3D images of the new office building, set to open by May 2014. The boss has been taking a lot of employee input into consideration. One level of the new building is going to feature a workout space, cafeteria, and recreation room with pool and foosball.

Work in Progress

Ever since our original move-in, I’ve been trying to make our apartment feel more like home (which home? Reading? Sweet Tea, Florida? Brighton?). Lately, my efforts have been focused on the most important room in French homes – the dining room.

Here’s the latest (more Ikea! more plants! sometimes clean!):

And here’s how it looked in February (we had oranges!):