Paris preparations

This post by La Belette Rouge about her own "baby step" preparations getting ready for a move to France, got me thinking about how I prepared myself.

I had about 6 months advance notice to get myself ready for the big move. Some things that I did:

- Took a french conversation & grammar class at L'alliance Francaise in Washington, DC.
- Joined French Meetup
- Subscribed to every francophile blog I could find. A few of which are listed in the links on the side of this blog.
- Filled my iPod with podcasts in french to work on my comprehension. Some of my favorites are "BFM Gouts de Luxe" and "RFI Journal Francais Facile", both of which you can find for free on the iTunes music store.
- Listened to all of the back episodes of the Katia & KylieMac podcast to get a bit of a feel for being an expat in France. (Listening to all of the episodes is a bit more of a challenge now that they've hit episode 100, congrats girls!)
- Read a big stack of books on France, the French, and being a young expat. Some were more helpful than others.
- Started reading French news sites daily like Le Monde and 20 Minutes.
- I looked weekly on online classified and apartment hunting sites to get familiar with what was available: Craigslist, FUSAC, Particular a Particular
- Answered a lot of my questions on banking, taxes, living in France etc by reading Expatica.com

In my own preparations I was most concerned about improving my level of French (since that is so key to being able to function in daily life here) and then some navel-gazing to make sure I was mentally ready for all of the changes ahead. (Really trying to get through my head the fact that I will feel foreign, frustrated, overwhelmed, and sometimes lonely, and that it is normal and okay!)

Oh, and speaking of working on your french, I recently came across MangoLanguages.com, and really enjoyed using their free online language course. This site is better for beginners, so I was using it for Spanish & Portuguese, but I did some of their French lessons just for kicks and they were good too.