Je Suis Un Croissant: An American Family's Move to France

Tara
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  • Places & Travel

Je Suis un Croissant follows one very average American family — two parents, a tween daughter, and two very good dogs — as they walk away from the hamster wheel of suburban American life and rebuild it 5,000 miles away in France. Each week, Tara pulls back the curtain on the real decision-making behind the move: the countries they ruled out (sorry, Australia), the secret they kept for months, and the logistics nobody warns you about, from French tax residency to learning a new language on Duolingo

Episodes

  1. Oct 17

    Everybody Home

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. The season one finale of Je Suis un Croissant picks up where Episode 7 left off. Tara is back in France, in a house she'd seen exactly once, and two days later the good girls arrive, delivered straight to the front door. For the first time since August, everyone is under one roof. Then comes the waiting. Tara takes listeners through living on rented furniture, a first round of holidays without their own things, and the household shipment that took almost four months to arrive. The practical segment covers the French customs paperwork, the conditions for bringing belongings in duty-free, the lithium battery rule, and the delivery day that put two households' worth of furniture in one house. Plus the end tables that don't fit and the e-bike battery saga. In the last part, Tara answers the question she asked in Episode 1: did they actually step off the hamster wheel? She describes an ordinary weekday and weekend now compared with life in the US, shares her husband's answer and her daughter's one-line review of France, and is honest about what's been harder than expected (the language) and easier (finding community). The season closes with an instant camera that went missing during the move and turned up a year later in the last place anyone looked. Programming note: there's no new episode next week while the family takes the school holiday. Season 2 starts the week after. It will be organized by subject rather than month by month, so leave a comment with what you want to hear about. Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  2. Oct 9

    Going Back Alone

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. Episode 6 ended with Tara on a plane, alone, leaving her husband and daughter in a hotel room in a town they’d known for two weeks. Episode 7 is what was waiting on the other side: the house they’d lived in for fourteen years, the only home Miss Tween had ever known, and two weeks to empty it. Tara walks back into a house that looks almost normal, except the dining table is gone and the fridge is empty. Then comes the list: a dumpster, a storage shed she had completely forgotten about, vet appointments, clients, and the final sort of everything that hadn’t made the first cut. She talks about deciding alone what her daughter would keep, the moment it all caught up with her, and what got her back up off the floor. The practical segment covers the dogs: why they couldn’t fly with her after all, what a pet relocation company actually handles, and how she kept the last boarding drop-off calm so the good girls wouldn’t know anything was different. Meanwhile in France, her husband handles the keys, the lease and the rental furniture, and Miss Tween picks out her new bedroom at Ikea. There is also one pickup-day scare that Tara could only follow by phone. Back in the States, the movers take two days instead of one, the e-bike ships with no battery, and Tara squeezes in a few last pole classes with her best friend. The episode ends with a taxi, an address Tara has never seen as home, and a reunion her daughter didn’t know was coming. Music License code: MISSTLS7K6C4JJKX Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  3. Oct 2

    Two Weeks to Find a Life

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. Episode 5 ended with Miss Tween walking back into the hotel after her first day of school. Episode 6 covers the thirteen days that followed, before Tara had to fly back to the US alone and leave her husband and daughter in a hotel in a town they’d known for less than a week. The family lived in a hotel room with a kitchenette that couldn’t really cook anything, and they hauled their laundry down the street to a laundromat. With help from a relocation specialist provided by her husband’s company, they toured five properties. The houses included a French "cave," a gorgeous kitchen with carpet everywhere, a ninety-second no, and a charming house with a very French bathroom setup. The one they both agreed on said no. In between viewings, Miss Tween was voted house captain in her first week, got in trouble over a math book still sitting in the US, and finally broke down at lunch outside Versailles. The family skipped the palace and spent the afternoon at Pop Mart, Sephora and Starbucks instead. Tara also walks through what renting in France actually requires: the dossier, guarantors, and the pet-friendly lease rule that surprised her. She finally answers the question listeners ask most, which is why the family lives in this town and not in Paris. The episode ends with a quiet early-morning goodbye, a return flight with no lease signed, and the news, a little over a week later, that the house was theirs. As always: this is one family’s experience, not legal advice. Rental rules vary by region, agency and year. Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  4. Sep 25

    A Place Where Horses Have the Right of Way

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. Four episodes ago, Tara promised to explain how the family ended up somewhere "horses have the right of way," and then didn't mention it again. Episode 5 opens by explaining it: the rule is real, it's narrower than you'd guess, and it comes with its own speed limit for the horses. Then the family gets on the plane: fourteen bags, the best friend who was there at every stage of the move, in-flight movies, tears (happy and scared), and a flight attendant who teaches Miss Tween how to say "excuse me" in French before they've even landed. It all goes to plan until customs, on one of the busiest travel days of the year. What follows is the first weekend: a hotel, a kind café owner who speaks English, a school uniform pickup where everyone is in meetings, and a search for black uniform pants on a Sunday, when most things in France are closed. On Monday comes the first day of school. It's a day for new students only, and the only thing Miss Tween asked on the way there was whether she would make any friends. Tara closes by looking back at the soft landing they had wanted and didn't get, and passes on Miss Tween's one piece of advice for anyone starting school in France: learn how to hold your knife before lunch. Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  5. Sep 18

    Cutting It Close

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. "Cutting It Close" picks up the thread Tara left dangling three episodes ago: what does the visa process actually look like once the job offer is real? The short answer is that it works. The longer answer is a month of Tara’s life she’d like back. Her husband's Talent Passport application covers the whole family, which sounds simple until you try to book three people through a third-party scheduling contractor that only shows availability one person at a time. After three failed attempts to find appointments close enough together, they land in the Los Angeles area — a city Tara and her husband used to call home — and turn the trip into a farewell vacation, complete with a genuinely unbelievable reunion with an old waiter. Then the real countdown starts. Her husband's passport and visa clear first, which tells them almost nothing about Tara's and Miss Tween's applications, still sitting untouched in a queue. With the flight days away and no confirmation in hand, Tara moves their departure back — a decision made on math, not information — and gives up the settling-in time the family had been protecting since June. The passports arrive with about a day to spare. Tara also closes out one of the show's oldest open threads: the dogs. They did make it to France — just not with the rest of the family. She walks through why, and through the actual rules for bringing a pet from the US into France (there's no quarantine, but there is a 21-day clock most people never hear about until it's too late). Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  6. Sep 11

    The Summer We Told Everyone

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. Last episode ended with the email. This one is what happens in the eleven weeks after it, when a research project turns into a ticking-clock logistics operation. I start by answering the question I asked out loud in Episode 2 and then immediately dodged: what do you do when the French school year is closing and you still do not have an offer in hand? We applied anyway. To schools, in a country we did not live in, for a life we were not sure we would be living. From there it is the summer that got away from us. Telling my mom, telling Miss Tween, telling a class already deep in goodbyes because fifth grade was ending anyway. Telling clients early and vaguely, and finding out later that the practice survived it. Camps that got cancelled and the one week we both refused to give up. Two yard sales run in front of a neighborhood we had not told yet. An e-bike that crossed the ocean without its battery. And a house we handed to a property manager instead of a buyer, just in case this adventure ever brings us back. I also owe you an apology and a date. I promised you the visa process back in Episode 1, and I still have not delivered it. In this episode I explain why, and then I promise it again, for real this time. Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  7. Sep 4

    Tax Treaties, Duolingo, and the Secret We Couldn't Tell Anyone

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. The interviews were happening. France was starting to look less like a pipe dream and more like an actual plan. And that's when the genuinely terrifying grown-up questions started. In this episode I get into the strange psychological split of that stretch — carrying on with completely normal daily life while quietly obsessing over one enormous question mark. We were meeting with immigration lawyers, tax consultants and financial advisors, trying to work out what happens to an American's taxes, retirement accounts and business when they move to Europe. Are we about to get double-taxed into oblivion? Does my LLC even exist in France? And the trickiest part of all: figuring out who actually has the answers, when US advisors don't know French law and French professionals don't know the IRS. I also tell you where this podcast got its ridiculous name, which happened on Duolingo and made all three of us laugh in the middle of a very heavy season. But the hardest part wasn't the paperwork. It was the waiting — every email taking days to cross nine time zones, while we kept the whole thing secret from almost everyone we knew and quietly started selling off our life in the background. And then the email came. ----- Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/albert-behar/djangos-night-out Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  8. Aug 28

    Bonjour. Je suis un croissant.

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. Bonjour! I'm Tara, and this is the very first episode of Je Suis un Croissant — the real, unfiltered story of my family's decision to move 5,000 miles away from the only life we'd ever known, published on the one year anniversary of our arrival in our new "home". Before you hear where we ended up, you need to hear how we got here: a husband with a decades-old dream of living abroad, a family exhausted by the American hamster wheel, and a whole lot of very serious concerns about giant spiders. In this episode, I introduce the cast — my husband, our tween daughter, and our two very good, very opinionated dogs — and walk through the checklist we used to filter an entire planet down to a handful of real contenders. Some countries got cut fast (sorry, Australia). Others held on for weeks before falling apart over cost, isolation, or a nine-year-old's veto power. By the end, the search had narrowed to two finalists, my husband was finally getting interview calls, and the adventure was about to get very real. Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  9. Season 1 Trailer

    Je Suis Un Croissant - Trailer

    Send us Fan Mail to give us feedback or let me know what topics you want next. Je Suis un Croissant follows one very average American family — two parents, a tween daughter, and two very good dogs — as they walk away from the hamster wheel of suburban American life and rebuild it 5,000 miles away in France. Each week, Tara pulls back the curtain on the real decision-making behind the move: the countries they ruled out (sorry, Australia), the secret they kept for months, and the logistics nobody warns you about, from French tax residency to learning a new language on Duolingo. Music: 'Django's Night Out' by Albert Behar on #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/c/albert-behar

  • 1 Trailer
    8 Episodes

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Je Suis un Croissant follows one very average American family — two parents, a tween daughter, and two very good dogs — as they walk away from the hamster wheel of suburban American life and rebuild it 5,000 miles away in France. Each week, Tara pulls back the curtain on the real decision-making behind the move: the countries they ruled out (sorry, Australia), the secret they kept for months, and the logistics nobody warns you about, from French tax residency to learning a new language on Duolingo

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