Ep 84 - Navigating “Champêtre” with Kate Hill

The image of the French countryside is quite different from the reality, as Kate Hill, the American expat founder of the Relais de Camont Writers and Artists Residency, well knows. She’s spent the past few decades restoring and living in a 300-year-old French farmhouse, so she’s the perfect person to help distinguish the dream and the reality of French country living as we navigate champêtre.



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Credits 
Host: Emily Monaco. @Emily_in_France; Website: http://www.tomatokumato.com and http://www.emilymmonaco.com
Producer: Jennifer Geraghty. @jennyphoria; Website: http://jennyphoria.com

Music Credits 
Édith Piaf - La Vie en Rose (DeliFB Lofi Remix) 
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About Us 
From one Emily in Paris to another... just speaking French isn't enough to understand the intricacies of the locals, but it's definitely a good place to start. Famously defended by armed "immortals" of the Académie Française (no, we're not making this up) the French language is filled with clues that show interested outsiders what, exactly, makes the French tick. 

Each episode, listen in as Emily Monaco and an expert take a deep dive into a word that helps us gain a keener understanding of the French.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Navigating the French on Paris Underground Radio.
More great content and a bonus episode of Navigating the French,
please join us on Patreon.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hello and welcome to Navigating the French, the podcast where
each episode we take a look at a French word
and try and see what it tells us about French culture.
I'm your host, Emily Monaco. Today I'm joined by Kate Hill,
the American expat founder of the Jolle de Caerment writers
and artist residency in a three hundred year old French
farmhouse she restored herself.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
She's here to.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Delve into the reality of the French countryside as we
navigate Champet. I'm so excited to welcome Kate Hill to
the podcast. Kate, thank you so very much for joining
me today.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Oh I'm delighted to be here. I'm so glad we
get to.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Do this me too. So for anyone who's not familiar
with you, which I think is going to be a
rarity among my listeners, would it be possible for you
to share just a little bit about who you are
and kind of how you made your way to France.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
Okay, it's a long, long story. Condensed very briefly. I
was traveling in my early thirties pretty extensively around sailing
cooking as a chef. Traveled across Africa for almost a year,
and during that time hatched a plan to buy a
canal barge in Europe, and the upshot of that I

(01:30):
did buy canal barge in Holland, and with my friends
and partners at the time, we sailed it to France
and that's how I arrived in France in nineteen eighty
seven eighty eight, and I have never left. I continued
to travel, but it continued to come back, especially to
this part of the southwest where I live now. Very

(01:53):
quickly found this little ruin of a French farmhouse on
the canal, so I was able to park my boat
and have water, electricity and a place to work out of.
But it was some years before I restored the buildings,
the farmhouse and the barn to be able to actually
do live in it. So I lived on the bug
for twenty five years and then I moved into my

(02:15):
farmhouse and that's where I live now.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
And it's such an amazing sort of dream come true
for so many people, and anyone who wants to get
into the nitty gritty details. You have a fantastic substack
newsletter where you've been publishing sort of stories from the
decades that you've been in France. So I highly recommend
that to anybody who's listening. Will put a link to
that in the show notes. But that brings me to

(02:39):
the word that I brought you on here to discuss
with me, because you recently sort of I don't know
if the word is rebranded, but you started focusing on
this word champet, and champet unlike a lot of the
words that I've focused on on this podcast, is not
necessarily a word that a lot of Americans are familiar
with if they don't speak French. But it does have
a really important link to a concept that we think

(03:02):
about a lot in English, which is the sort of
French country lifestyle. And I think where the dream meets
the reality is something that you're very well versed in,
and so I'm excited to chat with you today. But
before we do that, I'd love for you to just
sort of explain to me a little bit about your
relationship with this word champetre and what that word really
means to you.

Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah, it was some long time ago when I came
across the word. I was looking even establishing a business,
a store, boutique or something, and I don't even know
where I first saw it, but the word champetre, which
was kind of a combinat it started out like champagne,
I thought, oh, that's a good thing. And compagna, which

(03:46):
is country a little bit more people are more non
French speakers might know Panda Campania's country style brad so,
but it had just enough vagueness that people angle phones
would necessarily know what it would mean. But it has
some residents, and certainly French people have a nostalgic attachment
to the word, but it's not a you don't see

(04:08):
it used very much in modern resources. So I kind
of latched onto the word for maybe twenty years and
never did anything. And this year, when I wrapped up
on my substack my year of writing a memoir basically,
which I called Finding France, and it was about me
learning to become a cook in France. I was already

(04:30):
an accomplished private chef and cook before I came to
France in my thirties, but I really had to learn
to start over again. So I wrapped that up in
August and September of this year, and I said, now
what am I going to do? How am I going
to go forward? And the word just sort of blossom
because I have a little painting and naive painting that

(04:51):
hangs on a wall right by my desk that is
to me, the essence of chempata and it has a
little cottage in a wood with animals and wild hairs
jumping and birds fine and shooting stars. It's like a
fantasy image of a French cottage. And the two things

(05:12):
kind of came together right away, and I said, that's
what I'm going to explore the depths of this word,
and through it explain about living a country life, a
French country life in southwest France, which is all I
ever talked about. This is my living.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Well, there's so much to say, and I think one
thing that really stood out to me in when you
were describing your relationship with this word and also all
of this sort of work that you've been channeling into
explaining and exploring what it is to live in the
French countryside, is that I think when people living in
urban centers and people living outside of France think about

(05:54):
the French country side. There's almost and I know I'm
borrowing this expression from the Italian, but there's almost this
like dulce Farnia and a kind of mindset of like, ah, yes,
I'm in the French countryside. I'm lying in my garden
with a glass of rose, and the actual reality of
living in the French countryside. I mean, you are a
very very busy person, and I think most people living

(06:14):
in the French countryside have to be very, very busy,
and it's kind of this encounter between that beauty of
just enjoying the countryside and also the fact that you
never run out of things that you have to do.
So I was wondering, you know, is that relaxation that
we imagine when you get when it comes to the
French countryside actually real for the people who live there,

(06:34):
or is that something that you only get if you
come as a tourist.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head.
I mean it's an ideal, the idea that you're doing
nothing in the French countryside, laying in a hammock back
to have a hammock hanging out in my park area
and now just to look at because I don't have
time to go sit out in there right now, And
it's an idea of yeah, you're going to just be

(06:59):
in the garden and flounce around in a you know,
linen dress and plot a few flowers. It's like nobody's
talking about the composts and the weeding and the slugs
and all the other hard work that goes into, you know,
creating those gardens. And I think that the romanticizing of

(07:20):
a French country life, and I am victim of that
as well as perpetrator as well, because I put a
romantic veil on everything is how I get through life,
and I do things because there'll be a good story sometimes,
and that like perpetuing that romance is a part of
who I am. But I also know the real story

(07:43):
behind is the daily not grind, but the daily attention
to details that produce the food we grow and eat,
the beautiful villages that were built a thousand years ago
that is still standing. I mean, it takes a lot
to maintain an old house and keep it from falling

(08:05):
down on the roof caving in. And there's there's a
lot of the behind the scenes that sometimes I think
people don't really want to know but they are curious,
and so I try to provide a look at that
as well as the outcome. So it's like seeing a
beautiful painting by one of my favorites like Bernade, and

(08:27):
seeing a beautiful painting of interior of a French dining room,
and then reading about his history as a person and
what it took to stay a painter and be a
you know, to live and live your life. Is that
it's like you have to it's to meet enriches the painting,

(08:47):
but it doesn't make it less beautiful or less romantic.
So I like to introduce those elements into what I
do and to what I write.

Speaker 2 (08:56):
And I loved what you said about even just for
yourself having to cling a little bit to that romance
of it, because I'm sure that you know when you
have a sewer tank that overflows, or a slug invasion
in your garden, like you have to deal with that
and then you have to very quickly forget that it
happened so that you can continue moving forward with other things.

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Right then you take a photograph of the beautiful flowers
in the vase that survived the slug invasion.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah, I think for a lot of visitors to the
French countryside, there are pieces of the sort of day
to day that they can find quite challenging that people
don't actually think about, Like, I know, there's always this
joke that goes around about Parisians who go to the
countryside and then get angry with the local farmer because
his rooster is crowing at five o'clock in the morning.
Are there any sort of elements of French country lifestyle

(09:45):
that it took you. I mean, I know you've been
there for a long time now, but that it took
you a while to kind of get used to things
that you didn't quite expect to be as challenging or
difficult or just different from what you were living with
before when you arrived.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
Yeah. Actually, just Sunday, I had a little one of
those moments love hate moments where I always say, the
thing you love about Friends is the thing you hate
about France. It's, you know, the two sides of the
same coin. And you know, holding onto traditions is very
important to everybody, including me as a culinary professional. I

(10:20):
want to keep those culinary traditions alive and support that.
And when I went out to the bakery on Sunday morning,
which I don't always do, but I did decide to
do that Sunday morning, and there were masses of cars
on my little country road and mostly men, a few
women in orange bright day gloves, hunting with the rifles broken,

(10:43):
and they were all standing and they were right around
where all our houses are. And so I just have
that moment of like, wait a minute, you guys, so
what are you doing? And I know there's a big
movement to try to support preserving the hunting traditions. I love,
I cook game. I'm not a against hunting, but I
felt they were just a little too close to my property.

(11:06):
Meaning I can't walk my dog on a Sunday morning
because she might get mistaken for, you know, a wild
boar or something. And so I have that kind of
love hay relationship with you know, my neighbors. It's like,
it's fine, but why can't you guys find someplace a
little bit more remote. But France isn't a wilderness. It's

(11:27):
this is an agricultural country, and in this part of France,
it's farms and houses and farmhouses and villages every few kilometers.
So you can't get away from everybody to you know,
go do your hunting business. So yeah, I know if
somebody offered me, you know, a haunch of venison, I

(11:47):
would smile and say messy. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
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(12:15):
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wherever you listen to podcasts Navigating the French. You'll be
right back after a word from our sponsors, and now
back to Navigating the French. I think one element of
sort of the food sourcing side of things in the
countryside that intrigues me a lot is that you see

(12:36):
in a lot of urban centers throughout the West, not
just in France, this sort of push to return as
close as possible to local sourcing, to sustainable sourcing. And
I think what I've found very interesting is that depending
on where you go in the French countryside, and I
don't know if this is true in your part of France,
it's actually quite difficult to get access to local food.

(12:56):
That often you'll have farmland as far as the eye
can see, and yet your only option for a bakery
is like a Marie Bleche chain or you know, you'll
have all of these hunters, like you said, nearby, but
most of your meat is going to come from the hypermarket.
Is that something that you've noticed happening in your region

(13:17):
as sort of industrialization of the food industry or is
it still fairly easy to get access to locally sourced
food where you are.

Speaker 3 (13:25):
Yeah, I think that I'm in a very privileged place here,
and I invite you to come down because yes, please,
this is one of the very special things about this
part of France. The department I'm in Nouvelle Aquitaine, which
is the region I'm in the Latte, your own department,
number forty seven, which is one of the most diverse

(13:45):
agricultural regions in France. So we grow more different things
and it is very easy. Am I shop almost exclusively
directly from the source or at the local markets, which
I hadn't realized for a lot of years how special
this was until you travel to Provence or you go

(14:08):
up north, and then you realize, oh, the way France
distributes its food is very centralized. Everything goes up toward Paris,
it's the hub, the national markets, the mean and go
to rungjs where everything gets redistributed back out to both
to the cities and to other places. But here, in

(14:30):
this very farming, working landscape, I can actually buy not
just at the farm, a farm shop on a farm,
a farm stand, not just like summertime, year round. And
of course our weekly markets in the villages and towns

(14:51):
are still a huge part of the Fabrica society here,
So going to I usually go to a Wednesday and
a Saturday market or a Sunday mark. I mean, there
are probably markets every day of the week. I could
drive too, and so I know the producers. I'm probably
eighty to ninety percent of the food I buy, I

(15:13):
know who grows it, with the exception of things like
bananas and pineapples, which I buy occasionally. You know, if
I'm buying apples, they're literally growing at the end of
my street. I'm buying them from the farmer at his shop.
If I'm buying pork and sausage. I'm getting it at
the market from the pig farmers who is forty minutes away,

(15:35):
and they process ducks, poultry, cheese, you know, other vegetables
and fruit. Of course, it's really an amazing resource and
treasure here, and it's something that as a tourist, and
this goes back to your point that people come, you know,
people go to Paris. It's one thing they didn't get
out to the countryside. They don't know how it works.

(15:57):
Well here it's pretty easy, although I still see people stumble,
you know, they'll go to the big one of the
big heaper markets and supermarkets and complain about the produce
being from South America, which is right in our daily
newspaper today about the protests the farmers are doing. But

(16:17):
they could turn and drive five minutes in the other
direction and buy all the same vegetables and the same
fruit growing on the or at the orchard where they're picking,
where they've just been picking and putting things together. So
it's just like you, people don't know the choice. The

(16:38):
markets become sort of folkloric and they go and they
look and they may buy some pastry, but they don't
really know about how to shop. And that's a lot
of what I've done over the last thirty years that
I've lived here, which is to teach people how to shop,
both in what my classes were about and also in writing.
And I still do that sort of I revisit that

(16:59):
all the time in my newsletter, which is, you know,
shopping is cooking. You have to know how to shop
before you.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
So what are a handful or you know one or
two of the tips that you would share for someone
who doesn't know how to shop when they come to
the French countryside.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
Well, I think it's sort of like going for a
kid and a toy store. You go in and your
everything is bling blink, it's colorful, and there's on you know,
the umbrellas and the stands and people looking rather you know,
berets or you know, people looking country like, and and
so they they feel like they're in a movie rather

(17:33):
than saying here's my shopping list. Like if I'm going
to shop and I'm going to make soup and I
need some carrots, well then I'm going to look for
a kind of carrot that I want for my soup.
I don't want like a little beautiful bouquet of ribbon bound.
I want some big what they call horse carrots, you know,
big fat carrots that I can leave hole and put

(17:56):
into a bullion for their flavor and they wouldn't fall apart.
So I to do kind of a walk around, and
I advise anybody to go and do that little first
walk through the market, just to get let the bling
get you over the first visions, and then start to
tune in on who's standing where. I always look to say,

(18:17):
it's not always the longest line, but it's like who's
in that line, and people who are looking for a
certain level of produce vegetables. I don't want something that
looks like it came from a boutique. I want to
look looks like it came from the farm. May still
have some dirt on it. At that point, then I'd say,

(18:38):
just pay attention to what people are buying in lying.
And that's how I learned to really shop and cook meat,
because until I came to France, I suppose, like a
lot of Americans, I had probably never really shopped in
butcher shop. I'd been supermarkets and ground beef and pork chops.
I didn't have much of a back ground in meat

(19:01):
buying or meat like roasting even and so coming to France,
and not just with butcher shops, but also in the markets,
the butchers that are there, I had to wait in
line and I would listen to what people were ordering,
watch what they were buying, and try and then I,
you know, as my French improved enough, I could ask
questions like how are you going to cook that? And

(19:23):
then everybody just starts to tell you their way, you know,
to cook it. And then I would take buy some
of it, and I'd go home and I would try something,
and I would come back the next week and they'd
say how was it? And the butcher would say, you
know what about this? I why you try this? And
so we entered into some kind of complicity, not just
with the vendors at the markets or the butchers and

(19:45):
the shops, but with the other customers too. When they
saw that I was interested, I was a young person
and I was born, they were interested in telling me
what their own experiences were. And it takes time. You
can't always see that on a holiday weekend, but it's
worth trying a little bit. You might as well take

(20:06):
the time, right, Yeah, it's something that's very important here
in this part of France. I think it's the number
one commodity. We have to sell a trade and barrow
and you know, bargain with is time. People do take
the time to spend at the table on you know,
to eat with their families, to take the weekends Sunday

(20:27):
is everything's closed. You just have to go along with what,
you know, what everybody's doing, because if it's twelve o'clock,
you better stop and eat your lunch because nobody's going
to be working at that point and you want to
be in sync with everybody else at some point.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah, and even I guess the shops must close between
twelve and two or sometimes even longer. You know, they
do take that midday pause to really enjoy that time together,
don't they.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, there's it's still very traditional here with things like
shops and banks and post offices all closed down, offices
all closed between that twelve and two. There's a few
big box stores now in the area that you know,
like the home depot level, they stay open, or some
of the bigger supermarkets stay open. But pretty much you

(21:17):
see people there's like a little mini rush hour just
at twelve and a quarter to two, whereas people running
home to eat lunch they live nearby, Like I'm only
fifteen minutes from the center of Ajen, which is about
fifty thousand people, forty five fifty thousand people, So a
lot of those people are going home to their houses

(21:39):
that are outside of the town, and it could be
this kind of a little crazy rush hour.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
I mean, and I think also, you know, when you're
talking about this sort of community minded sort of vibe,
the fact that there's just so much influence, you know,
you can be influenced by the people who already live there.
You're going to be rubbing shoulders with the actual farmer.
I think that one thing that a lot of Americans
don't necessarily think about when they think about the French

(22:05):
countryside is the way in which it was constructed. I mean,
so many of these villages and towns and cities grew
up around a central parish or a central farmhouse, and
so it's not just sort of a massive nothing and
then like one farm in the middle of nowhere, the
way that it can sometimes be in parts of the
rural US in France, you do have these little communities

(22:27):
at the heart, and then the rural area kind of
sprawls out around it.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Is that right, yes, And I think that that's something
that was I learned it right away when I bought
this property. This command was part of a three hundred
year old now three hundred year old farm that was
quite expansive and went all the way to the Grown
River and up to what is now the main road

(22:53):
and down the probably several hundred acres in the seventeen
hundreds and over the year. Of course, I got chopped
down and chopped into smaller pieces. And at the time
that I came along, I was told there was this
ruin literally or two ruins along the canal, and I
was living on my boat on the canal, but it
was very noisy to live in a city to find

(23:15):
a mooring spot with water electricity, and so a friend
talked me in to coming out here. When I looked
out here, I came out, there were a handful of
other houses, and right away these neighbors came over to
some of They brought a huge basket of mushrooms and

(23:36):
left them on the doorstep of the barge. My closest
neighbors who actually Monique was born in this house and
grew up here. She and her husband started taking English
lessons so that they could talk to me. I mean
it was extraordinary. Thirty years ago. I was like the
expat in the area. There were no Americans, very few

(23:57):
Brits living nearby, but not nobody really in my area.
So I found right away that not only were my
neighbors going to be part of my social life, but
they were going to teach me how to live here.
And my closest farm, the closest working farm of maybe
a five minute walk from here, is where I actually

(24:19):
learned how to butcher pig, how to prepare chicken, you know,
deal with rabbits, get fresh eggs. And I learned all
that from the farm wife, who also had to learn
from her mother in law. So I was sort of
part of their passing on this information. And I realized
that I think I said something at some point. I

(24:41):
was lucky. I didn't just buy a house. I bought
a neighborhood. And I still feel that I still have
nice contacts with all my neighbors now on the street,
and I have a little yearly get together in the
summer where it's like a power tief and dinner. It
goes I'm way too late for me. I sleep early.

(25:03):
But everybody knows everybody's business to some extent. And I
think that when people come to France and they're looking
for this ideal fantasy of living in a little French house,
they're thinking they're going to be isolated and nobody around them.
That would be the worst thing that could happen. You

(25:23):
want to have neighbors, you want to get to know them.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Yeah, I mean, and the French have such an incredible
stamina for parties. I don't know how that they're up
and they're staying out.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
Until five o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
I'm always the one who has to go home.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
I'm the first one to leave always.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
I always try to be the second, but usually I'm
the first.

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Speaker 2 (26:20):
Navigating the French. You'll be right back after a word
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When you started work on Come Out, you got the
chance to really have so much effect on the way
that it looks today. And I think I'm curious if
the way that we think of sort of I'm putting

(26:42):
in scare quotes like a French country style, you know,
when you see all of the fabrics, so many of
them are inspired by Provence, and I think there's this
shabby chic kind of mindset. Do you feel as though
the actual reality of French country style coincides with what
we think of as French country style when we can

(27:04):
order it out of a catalog.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
Yeah, I think it's very different. First of all, I'm
really drawn to the shabbier the better I'm That's my
style and always has been. I don't want The first
thing I did when I get my hair cut and
quafft is I go and mess it up as soon
as I get to the car, I you know, just
mess it up because I don't want anything to look perfect.

(27:27):
And one of the things that I and why I
sort of embraced this the word champetro, was that it
had this sense of elegance about it. But it's really
if you look if you google champetro on French sites,
it's very different from googling French country style on English

(27:47):
sites because it is about the rougher edges. Showing selection,
of course, is always a big part of it. What
we choose to show the beautiful flowers or you know,
a lovely table overflowing with you know, vegetables from the market.
But you were not showing you know, iron tablecloths with emotion,

(28:10):
crystal and silver ware. It's that's not French country style.
That's somebody's idea of OBUs say, very bourgeois idea of
what the country life is. It's like, if you go
to the market with me, you don't dress up. I
mean that worst thing you could do is look like
you're going somewhere. You know, everybody's dressed to be outside.

(28:35):
The weather is going to change, or it's going to
rain or it's going to be hot, and you're carrying
keelas and heels of weight in your baskets are trolley
because now, of course I use it trolley like all
the other old ladies. But I think this idea of
what French country style is, it's more like chateau living,

(28:55):
you know, taken to a more intimate notch. But for me,
when I the first thing I did after putting a
roof over the what is now the kitchen that come on,
the original kitchen had no roof and had no electricity,
no water, nothing is I looked around and I said,
what is what would old man do? What Monsieur Dupuis,

(29:17):
who used to live here was the farmer on this farm?
What would he have done? And that dictated everything I
did in that kitchen in the early years, which was,
I will just put a shelf here. I'm not going
to build a beautiful showcase buffet from my pots. I'm
just going to stick a shelf on the wall, because
that's what he'd do. And I use that model of

(29:39):
you know, what would the farmer do or what would
the farmer's wife do? How would this have been used?
And that kitchen hasn't changed or you look at my website,
or you look at any of the photographs on Instagram,
you'll see the original kitchen over and over it. It
hasn't changed much because it had it grew into it

(29:59):
so and I said, this is all it needs. It
doesn't need to be any fancier than this. So the style, like,
I do love fabric, I love you know, I love
nice things and my books. And I'm living now in
the area that was the bar, original barn, and that
we had to completely rebuild. So it ended up being
more modern inside the surfaces than the original pigunie in

(30:24):
the part where the stone walls are exposed in the
original tiles. But even here it's like for me, there's
a sense of I have to be able to walk outside,
get my crocs muddy, and come back in without having
to be fussy. I need to go out to the
garden and get something for you know, some herbs to

(30:46):
put into a vinogradh for dinner and not feel like
I have to change my clothes. And so I want
to be comfortable in my home. And I think that
having the style of might be more somewhat feminine with
fabrics and furniture and paintings I love, So there's a

(31:09):
lot of paintings in my on the walls now. But
I don't see this as a certain kind of house style.
Some things I love around me that I put up
and I think that the it's like fashion. I love fashion,
but do I I don't own anything fageable, you know,

(31:29):
I don't own any chanality or where would I ever
go anywhere for that. But I could still look at
Bogue magazine and still look at those beautiful things and
appreciate them. But I think a French country style would
reflect how you live, not what. It just looks like

(31:49):
a beautiful, sterile place that you don't want to get anything.
You don't want to put your feet upon the coffee table,
you know. I don't want to sit on the couch,
have a cup of cars and read a book. And
I want to be able to have my dog on
the couch with me. That's country life perfect.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
Well, thank you so much Kate for joining me on
the podcast today. It was such a pleasure to talk
with you. And we'll be sure and share Kate's extremely
plentiful writing with anyone who wants to learn a little
bit more about what it is to live in, come
out in the show notes. Before I let you go,
I just have one last question for you, and that
is what is your favorite word in French?

Speaker 3 (32:31):
Oh? Well it would be seam petza. It does I
love because I really do love that idea. It's like
I think of the champagne cork popping out and with
all the things I love about the French countryside, the
garden and the trees, the animals, the sky, the moon,
all the things, all the little buildings lovely.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Sounds like a dream and it's your reality.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
Yeah, I try to keep it that way.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
Well, thank you so much, have a wonderful rest of
your day in the French countryside, and hopefully I get
to stip it you soon. This has been Navigating the French.
You can find more from me Emily Monico at Emily
Underscore in Underscore France, on Twitter and Instagram. This podcast
is produced by Paris Underground Radio. To listen to other

(33:22):
episodes of this podcast, or to discover more podcasts like it,
please visit Paris Underground radio dot com. Thanks for listening
and abientu.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
This episode of Navigating the French was produced by Jennifer
Garrity for Paris Underground Radio. For more great content, join
us on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Paris Underground
Radio