La ville

We are living in Marseillan, France http://tinyurl.com/8y4l9pg.  Not quite sure how we ended up here except that we wanted to live in the region, and hoped to be: near the sea, in a town of between 5,000 and 25,000 people, somewhere not too touristy.  Marseillan seemed to fit the bill.  I don't think we could have chosen better.  I'll write more once we learn more about the town (and take some photos) but our first impressions of the are amazingly positive and absolutely everyone we have met has been so nice.  Here's a shout-out to the following people who have been just awesome and really helped our transition:

• The school liaison people at the Mairie.  I had been in email contact a couple of months back and they told me to come in on my arrival.  So we did.  They had everything I had emailed in already printed out, and signing up for school was just a matter of providing the documents.   Way easier than anything we've done in Canada.
• The School Prinicpal.  We turned up at the school, documents from the Mairie in hand, and he immediately gave us an hour of his time to register Joe and Andy in school and tell us everything about the school - it was so nice of him to do that without an appointment.
• The man at the sports centre.  Joe and I were walking around town and went to the sports centre.  A really nice man, looking every bit the PE teacher told us all about the sports Joe could sign up for if he wants to.
• The young man at the youth centre.  We popped into the youth centre and explained we were interested in activities and the nice young man behind the counter explained it was only for 13+, but then two days later he saw me waiting for the kids outside the school and gave us information for a trip to Montpellier.  It was exactly what we were looking for and he knew it.

There are a lot of other people who have been nice too - the lady at the Boulangerie who welcomes me each morning, but the people above really made our day because they had no reason to be kind, but were, and it made such a difference to us.  And what is even better is that we talked with all these people in French, in our kind of useless but earnest French, but in French nonetheless.