There are times when you live abroad in a country that isn’t your native one, but rather an adopted one, and you ask yourself ‘Why?’.

Why do you stay?  Why, at times, does it seem so hard?  Why do you choose to live so far away from the people who are important and should be in your children’s lives?  Why do you pay taxes into a system that takes, takes, takes from the pocket of your wallet yet the return favours aren’t equally as generous?

And then the reality dawns, that the ‘why’s’ would be the same no matter where in the world you are, they’d just be a set of different answers.

This week, a system that I doubted, and questioned, and wanted to give up on, answered some of my questions and restored a waning faith.

We choose to live here in France for the love of a land that we weren’t gifted to at birth, but that we adopted as our adult homeland. We chose it for the beauty, language, history, art, food, and of course, the wine. We chose it because we’d lived elsewhere but wanted to try the French experience, and once we’d tasted, we knew it was forever. We lined up and dealt with bureaucracy in a land where lists change according to the person behind the window overlooking your file on that given day.  We did it the proper way, two non-Europeans, living the reality.

When we lock up and go away to travel to our native lands, or explore new ones, there is a sense of joy when we return to this Gallic land.  When the children draw a deep breath through their noses and proclaim to adore the smell of home, when French friends along with foreign ones support us through the ups and downs, we know why we are here.

For despite the clichéd criticisms of many things French, it is the place. Though at times the logic (or lack of) is frustrating and stupefying, the magic and beauty that radiates works wonders to dampen the darkness.  Never dull, it challenges at every step along the way, a rollercoaster ride that goes with the unspoken code that no doesn’t mean no, it just means argue and stand your ground.

For  all those ups and downs, we are so happy that this is our home, that ten years on we know the road we took at the T-intersection was headed in the right direction.

Happy Bastille Day.

Edit: There are photos from today’s Bastille Day picnic in Versailles on our Posterous page. Hope wherever you were, you had a good one.