The Tesar's go to Paris!

This website is for our many friends and family with whom we would dearly like to stay in touch over the coming year while we are away. Alas, cognizant of our well-established inadequacies in sending you emails, notes, birthday cards, etc. in a timely manner (recall the Christmas letters you routinely receive from us in February), we are now directing you to this less personal, but hopefully more current place to get caught up on our news. I will try to keep the nauseatingly gushing descriptions of Paris as a backdrop for our wonderful children to a minimum (blah, blah, blah, it's so beautiful here, blah, blah, first day of school photos under the Eiffel Tower, blah, blah, sigh, parks even more lovely in the rain, blah, blah, blah) and keep it as a "just the facts, ma'am" account of our experiences of living in France. Let's face it, middle-aged parents and their teen-age kids ain't great photo material, and I ain't no Hemingway, so feel free to skip the boring bits. I will also do my best to avoid sprinkling the prose with little French twists of phrase (I only know about 100 words anyway, so my pathetic attempts at this are tres trist indeed.)

4 August 2011

So with that, let me begin our first posting. We are still in Ann Arbor, attempting to select what goes and what stays, scurrying to doctor and dentist appointments, etc. Joe and I are already confronting the challenges of opening a bank account, figuring out how to pay the rent, securing cell phones and internet accounts. It will all work out in the end, but not without a bit of frustration once we get there, to be sure. The apartment is fully furnished but rented with the interior sight unseen, so no doubt some surprises await on that front as well. All of the transition costs of a typical family move, with the additional excitement of a foreign language thrown in. Two weeks until departure...