About

Due to constant requests (or harassment) from my friends to start a blog while I’m living in France  I’ve caved and created ‘Oh Sacré Bleu’.

Why ‘Oh Sacré Bleu’? Because NO ONE says this in France. Well that’s a lie – they did say it in the…. middle ages? Dark ages perhaps? And I like the irony 🙂

Don’t expect rambling journal entries on my daily life, I’ll only be updating when I’ve got something interesting/funny to write about.

A bientôt ! (that’s French for see you next time)

For those who want to know, why am I in France? 

Even when I was a little girl – I wanted to speak French. Maybe it was because I watched too many episodes of ‘Madeline’ as a kid, but I would play in the garden saying words like ‘Bravo!’ ‘Bonjour’ ‘Merci’ – and anything else I could think of that sounded remotely French to me.

This desire eventually led to me taking high school classes, continuing to university studies before dropping out very quickly (my university seemed keen on teaching French as a dead language – grammar sheets took priority over learning to speak). After a year or so of no more French I started to miss the language I had always loved, so I signed up for private French lessons every week which I paid for myself.

Then one night on the internet I found a website about an ‘English Teacher Assistant Program’ in France. France takes about 3,000 native English-speakers to help French students learn English. It didn’t require any teaching experience and was only 12 hours a week of work. So I thought ‘sweet I can do that – and finally fulfill my dream of living in France and learn the language properly’.

And… voila! Now I am here, living my dream and figuring out if it was all it’s cracked up to be.

Now I’m Back in Australia….

After spending a good 9 months in France I am now back in Melbourne working in a media job. I’m really glad I took the opportunity when I did to live in France before I started my career properly, since now I’m realising how much harder it is to pack up your bags and live on the other side of the world once you have a ‘real’ job 🙂

In the time I’ve gotten back to Australia I’ve managed to start my first real career job (i.e. Media Coordinator and Freelance PR work), find a house in the Melbourne suburbs which I love, finally travel to the amazing Whitsunday Islands, buy my first car and lose the weight I gained in France! haha

There are things I miss about France and Europe, particularly the people I met who I cannot wait to see again, and the ability to travel all around Europe so easily, but there were also a bunch of things that were on ‘hold’ while I was living there too. Such as that while I liked being an English teacher, I’m definitely not passionate about it and wouldn’t have been able to do PR or journalism work in France .

I still blog regularly about France, the French language, travel and anything else that inspires me.