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Welcome to French Food Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food and because I live in rural France the stress will be upon French food. Not that I will limit myself to food only. There are numerous posts concerning life in France, comments on life in general and, certainly, opinions about anything that strikes my fancy.
I welcome your comments and promise to publish all of them good & bad so long as they're not offensive, pornographic or rude.   A note on why I moved.

This is our village. Our house can be seen to the left of the picture.    

We've decided to downsize. You can go to this website for full details:
www.campdelmas.com.

OR

If you'd like a vacation in France we rent out part of the house as a gite. Have a look here: www.camp-del-mas.com.

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E-mail: yankinparisot@gmail.com
 

Baby, Its expensive outside!

Well, to paraphrase the old saying it is expensive out there. Its cold as well or at least it has been for the past week or so. Nothing like what I'm reading about in the Eastern USA. Anyway, I get asked a lot about the cost of living here in France so I thought I might bring my readers up to date a bit on that subject.

Its particularly interesting right now as the dollar is making a modest comeback due to the Euro's problems with Greece, Portugal, Spain & Ireland. Unfortunately the English pound is just sitting there not doing much; still that's better than going down. Much of what I'm going to say is based upon the fact that the dollar and the pound have both depreciated fairly severely against the Euro. No question that the Euro is over valued.
The 'Big Mac Index' done every year by the Economist magazine shows that its at least 20% over valued when measured on a PPP basis. (PPP stands for Purchasing Price Parity. Fascinating if you love economics as I do, but not for this blog.)

Suffice it to say that it hurts if you live in the Euro zone and your income is in dollars & pounds as ours are. C'est la vie as they say. We don't HAVE to live here, we choose to. Still, however, its fun to complain.

OK, down to the nitty gritty- what do things cost? Well for one thing the 11 € four course lunches I used to brag about now cost $17. Not bad, but not the $11 they used to be. Gas? Don't ask; its running around $2.00 per LITER! 8 bucks a gallon. & you thought you had it bad. Decent beef in the supermarket runs around $10 a pound. Our monthly electricity bill is around $300 per month, not to mention our gas central heating bill which was nearly $1,800 for December & January. Wine is still OK. We can get a decent red or white for about $4 a bottle. I could go on & on, but won't I think you get the picture.

A note for my British friends. I did a fairly detailed price comparison at a Sainsbury's supermarket in the UK vs. our HyperU here during our recent UK visit. I'd say that the British prices were at least 15% cheaper, maybe more. Petrol & Diesel are about the same price.

Is there a point? Not really, but I just wanted people to know how expensive thing have become. No surprises if you come for a vacation. I did enjoy complaining though.

Bottom line? We still love it here. I just hope that the Euro keeps sinking.