Driving in France: what you need to know

Driving in France: what you need to know This article covers driving in France: paperwork, insurance, and how to obtain it. Buying a car. In case of accident. Items you are required to have in the car. If you are British, you may want to follow this link for regulations post-Brexit. DRIVER'S LICENSE: Generally speaking (because there are of course exceptions, this IS France) if you are in France for over a year and your driver's license is not European, French law requires you to have valid French driving papers for driving in France. This one year period starts on the date of your first carte de séjour. Etudiant status is one of the exceptions; as a student you can drive with your foreign license for the duration of your studies. Some US states and other countries allow an exchange of licenses, other states and countries do not and you'll be required to pass the French exam to obtain the French license. Keep in mind an exchange must be done within the one year grace …
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Bill & Rosa’s Book Room

What is Bill & Rosa's Book Room ? 

First of all, for us, a Book Room is a comfortable place to spend some time. Think of it as the reading lounge on the ocean liners of yore with a western bent. Our maître-mots are

Read, Write, Relax. Buy, Borrow, Donate.

Bill & Rosa's Book Room has several aspects. It is first a USED BOOK SHOP and a LENDING LIBRARY. There are many novels of all genres for sale plus non-fiction, biographies, history, some poetry, cookbooks, cats, books on Paris or France, memoirs and children's books. Most books are in English, but also in French and even a few bilingual. Prices start at just 2€.

The 500 volume lending library has four sections :

The Sylvie and Henry Noullet Library: novels mostly in English Bill and Rosa's Library of the American West includes no…
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Hints and Hindsights – FFFFFF. F to the sixth power.

Hints and Hindsights. FFFFFF. F to the sixth power.

The six Fs. Fascinating, Fun Facts and Figures about France and French.

They come in handy more often than you’d think: during lulls in parties, as intros or outros to speeches, when you need to prove to some arrogant twit that at least some foreigners know there’s a world beyond Main Street and a timeline that precedes 1776. But let’s not get too arrogant ourselves - even for the most cultivated among us, some of these are real jaw-droppers:

-> When was the last guillotining in France? No, it was not during the 1793 Reign of Terror. It took place in Marseille on September 10, 1977 (that’s nineteen seventy-seven!) to end the life of Tunisian immigrant Hamida Djandoubi, convicted of having tortured and murdered his 21-year-old his former girlfriend, Elisabeth Bousquet. (France abolished the death penalty in 1981.)…

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Recycle, Please don’t just throw everything in the garbage

Zero waste

There's a Zero waste boutique in Paris, 3 rue Charles Nodier 75018, which proposes ateliers, information, products and ideas for moving your day to day towards zero waste. The association Zero waste France which runs the boutique has all kinds of different campaigns to reduce waste most of them are initiatives to not use containers or distribute flyers in the first place. The association is also a great place to volunteer or make monetary a contribution.

But sometimes we have waste, we have to get rid of things no longer useful to us. So here's some ideas as to how to clean up and clean out by sending things you are don't with to either proper disposal facilities or recycle and pass them on to others who just might find your garage to be just what they need.

Please don’t just throw everything in the garbage - recycle

Some items need a few minutes reflection for proper waster disposal and to recycle. For example according…

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Paris Quotes (France, La Seine …)

Paris Quotes (France, La Seine too) To be Parisian is not to have been born in Paris, but to be reborn there. — Sacha Guitry ... here's what Paris is: it is a giant reference work, a city which you can consult like an encyclopaedia: whatever page you open gives you a complete list of information that is richer than that offered by any other city. Take the shops... in Paris there are cheese shops where hundreds of cheeses, all of them different, are displayed, each labelled with its own name, cheeses covered in ash, cheeses covered in walnuts: a kind of museum or Louvre of cheese... Above all this is a triumph of the spirit of classification and nomenclature. So if tomorrow I start writing about cheese, I can go out and consult Paris like an enormous cheese encyclopaedia. -- Italo Calvino in Hermit in Paris Two days and three endless nights later we arrived in Paris... Paris looked much bigger than Bordeaux, but much uglier. The bread tasted flat. Everything, even the sun…
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Learn French! Bear! Espèces d’ours!

Bear! Espèces d'ours! After being charged by an adult male grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park and shouting "Bear!" John and Lisa (read the Yellowstone press release here and listen to John tell the story here) were amused to return to Paris to find an exhibition entitled The World of Bears or  Espèces d'ours! at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. So they trotted right over to see what the museum had to say about bears. It turns out there are 8 species of bears in the world. The grizzly bear John and Lisa encountered, called Ursus arctos horribilis in scientific nomenclature, is a subspecies of the brown bear. It is also less commonly known as the silvertip bear. Scientists generally do not use the name grizzly bear but call it the North American brown bear to distinguish it from the European or Asian brown bear. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark called it "grisley". They were notoriously bad spellers and perhaps meant grizzly in reference to lighter tips …
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American author in Paris Jake Lamar

This is the second part of our interview with American author in Paris Jake Lamar, his editor calls him the most French of the Americans. Here's how he does his craft.

For part one of American author in Paris see this link

Q: Do you have a writing routine, or any quirky routines while you write?

A: Music is first and foremost. I kept my bachelor’s apartment after I met my wife. I met her in 1996, at that time I had a small studio apartment in Montmartre, after we moved in together I kept that apartment as my office. I have a separate place where I work. We live in the 18th arrondissement together, but my office is about 5-7 minutes away. When I’m there, I’m in my sacred work space. I usually start work in the afternoon. I haven’t been able to have a regular writing pattern for years. Back in the 90s, I had a generous grant and back then, writers could live from publisher’s advances, but those days are over. During my fi…

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