‘Too much grief and no joy’: This couple plans to return to the US after their dream life in France became a ‘nightmare’

By Tamara Hardingham-Gill, CNN

(CNN) — They moved to France from San Francisco in October 2023, but just over 12 months later, Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo and her husband Ed Kierklo say they are on the brink of returning to the US.

While Joanna, 74, and Ed, 75, intended to spend the rest of their lives in the European country, the retired couple have struggled to make friends and are becoming increasingly frustrated with French bureaucracy.

“We gave it a year here,” says Joanna. “And we just said, ‘Too much grief and no joy.’ There’s no fun. We’re struggling every day.”

‘Frustrated and exhausted’

“I honestly don’t think we could have put in any more effort to acclimatize to the French way of life,” adds Joanna, who describes their experience as “a nightmare.”

While they’re still working out the finer details of their imminent return, Joanna and Ed say that they’re “frustrated and exhausted,” by life in France and feel ready to “give up and leave.”

Uprooting their lives in the Californian city and moving to France was certainly not a decision taken lightly, they say.

Joanna and Ed, who’ve been married for 20 years, had already traveled the world extensively, both together and separately, beforehand.

“I didn’t get married till I was in my 50s,” says Joanna, who is originally from San Francisco. “So when I met my husband, we traveled.

“We have no children. No siblings. No parents. There’s nothing to encumber us doing exactly what we please.”

Joanna explains that she and Ed bought and sold three different homes during their first 15 years of marriage, “giving us a comfortable amount of cash to afford us the option to travel and even relocate to anywhere we wanted.”

In 2010, the couple bought a summer home in Northern California and spent eight years or so “going back and forth to San Francisco.”

“I think every married couple needs two places to live, because you’ve got to get away from each other,” adds Joanna, who previously worked as a healthcare executive.

But she says she was becoming increasingly frustrated with the political climate in the US and felt the urge to move somewhere else permanently.

“I’m a pretty political person, and I feel like the United States should be better,” she says. “And it never gets better.”

In 2011, the couple moved to London and spent much of their spare time traveling to different countries around Europe.

“I loved every place I went,” says Joanna. “I really enjoyed seeing a lot of Europe.”

After deciding that they couldn’t afford to live in the UK capital anymore, Joanna and Ed, a former IT executive, returned to San Francisco and tried to work out where to go next.

They’d previously spent two months living in the city of Nîmes in Southern France and “loved every minute,” so the destination seemed like it could be the ideal choice for them.

“We were looking for civility, consideration and little or no gun violence… which Nîmes has all three,” adds Joanna.

The couple hired a relocation specialist to help them find an apartment to rent and started the process of applying for a long-stay visa. However, things weren’t as straightforward as they’d envisioned.

Joanna says that securing a visa proved to be complicated, as was the process of arranging for their cat Suzette to fly over to France, which cost them an extra $5,000 in total.

Food for thought

However, Joanna says they told themselves that things would be easier to “figure out” once they were actually in France.

Before leaving the US, the couple made the decision to hold onto their rent-controlled apartment, which Joanna had lived in for over 40 years, in San Francisco, just in case things didn’t go to plan.

“You’ve got to have a plan B,” she says. “What if this doesn’t work out? I mean, we could never afford to buy back into California, because it’s really expensive.”

In October 2023, Joanna and Ed arrived in Nîmes and set about building new lives for themselves in the French city, which has a population of about 137,000.

“We never ever anticipated that this wouldn’t work out,” says Joanna. “We thought, ‘We’ll die here. We’re done.’”

While they were relatively happy during their first few months there, Joanna was continually bewildered by the rules and regulations when dealing with seemingly simple things, such as setting up a French bank account.

The fact that she struggled to pick up the language — Ed has learned some French since they’ve been living there — didn’t help matters.

“I have been so busy packing, unpacking, assembling furniture etc. that I haven’t really found time to hunker down and start (learning French),” she admits. “It was always on my list but (I) just couldn’t find the time.”

And although France is renowned for its famous cuisine, Joanna quickly came to the realization that she wasn’t a huge fan of the food in the country.

“People go, ‘Oh my god, the French food is so fabulous,’” she says. “Yeah, if you want to eat brie, pâté, pastries and French bread all day long,” she says. “But who eats like that?”

She’d eagerly looked forward to cooking meals in France beforehand, but Joanna says that she had trouble finding quality produce to cook.

“You go to the supermarket, and the produce is terrible,” she says. “You pick up a piece of celery and it falls over. It’s so limp. So old and so horrible. Who would eat this?”

According to Joanna, her enthusiasm for living in France wavered considerably at the beginning of this year, when she and Ed tried to arrange for their car, which they’d left behind in San Francisco, to be transported to France.

“I read so many things that said, ‘Yes, do it,’ or ‘No, don’t do it. It’s a nightmare.’” says Joanna.

“Then, ‘Yes, you can do it. It’s not a problem.’ Well, it wouldn’t be a problem if their systems were consistent and made sense. But they just don’t. You can get five different answers to one simple little question.”

This frustration proved to be something of a pattern for the pair, who also had issues attempting to find a doctor in Nîmes.

“You have to find a general practitioner who will take you on as a patient,” says Joanna. “Well, we went to like six doctors. (They all said) ‘We don’t take new patients… ‘We don’t take new patients. We don’t take new patients.’

“What? ‘Where’s the list that tells you which ones do and which ones don’t?’ They don’t have that. You’ve just got to figure it out yourself.”

As she tried to navigate her way through French bureaucracy time and time again, Joanna says she became incredibly drained, feeling as though she was constantly coming up against obstacles.

Social struggles

“Every single day it was something more devastating than the day before,” she says. “Things are very difficult to figure out here… So I’m too old for this.”

Joanna acknowledges that the US isn’t exactly free of bureaucracy. However, she says she’s been able to manage this as “you get used to your rules I guess.”

“You talk to the French, and they just shrug their shoulders,” says Joanna. “And they go, ‘Well, this is France. That’s how it is.’”

Back in the US, Joanna, who describes herself as a “chatty box” had an active social life, but she hasn’t been able to replicate this, or anything close to it, in France thus far.

As time went on, Joanna found that this lack of socialization was having a huge impact on her.

Aside from talking to people in the supermarket, Joanna says she rarely has lengthy conversations with anyone but her husband nowadays.

“I said to Ed one day, ‘I haven’t talked to one person here in three months…’ I just miss interacting,” she says, adding that she doesn’t necessarily “want to hang around with expats” as “that’s not exactly why we came on this adventure.”

Locals have been friendly and welcoming, but Joanna hasn’t managed to “strike up friendships” the way she would have hoped to, conceding that the language and cultural barrier have made things more tricky.

“It’s a hard shell to break,” she says. “They’re very private people. But they’re also principled and moral. They’re nice people. There’s nothing unkind about them. They’re just not extremely social.”

She also found that much of the socializing in Nîmes seemed to revolve around eating.

“And then when you want to drink, you have to have a drink that’s on a little menu that they make,” she says. “So if I want to have a martini, ‘Oh, it’s not on the menu.’”

After struggling to feel completely at home in Nîmes, Joanna and Ed decided to relocate to Montpellier, a city about an hour southwest of Nîmes close to the Mediterranean coast.

While they were initially rejected when trying to rent a new apartment because “they hadn’t filed a French tax return,” the couple were able to secure a place that they liked, and moved in last month.

Joanna and Ed prefer life in Montpellier, but the couple recently came to the realization that France probably isn’t the right place for them to see out the rest of their lives.

“I love France,” says Joanna. “I think France is an amazing country, just not to live here…”

She goes on to stress that she read everything she could find on “moving to France as an expat” beforehand, but still didn’t feel prepared for the reality of life there.

“I wish more people would show the not-so-pleasant side of France,” she says. “Because there is a not-so-pleasant side of France, and that’s what we learned very quickly.”

Tough decision

Despite previously being eager to leave the US, Joanna now misses her old life there desperately.

“I miss familiarity,” she says. “I miss knowing where things are. I miss frozen yogurt — because they don’t have it here.

“I miss stupid things… I miss my friends for sure. We don’t have any family, but I have a great network of friends. I miss just being able to see them, and I miss my apartment.

“I think I just miss my life. I had one there (in San Francisco). I don’t have one here.”

While she acknowledges that her feelings could change over time, Joanna points out that “she’s not 30” and doesn’t want to “waste any more time.”

“It’s a really hard decision to make,” she says, “After it was a hard decision to make to come here, to all of a sudden say, ‘This isn’t going to work for us.’

“(But) we don’t think it’s going to work for us… We don’t have 40 more years to live, you know.”

Although she considers herself to be an adaptable person, Joanna notes that others might find it easier to adjust to life in France than they did.

“We have a couple of friends that absolutely think the way of living here is just heaven on earth,” she says. “They say, ‘We’re just going to be here forever.’ So good for them.”

Joanna acknowledges that the things that she didn’t enjoy about living in the US haven’t changed since she left.

However, she feels more comfortable returning there rather than moving to a different destination, as she and Ed “know how to live in the United States.”

“I don’t miss the politics in the United States,” Joanna stresses, adding that she’s horrified by the fact that people file for bankruptcy due to health care costs and there are children living with hunger.

“I don’t miss gun violence. I hate all that stuff, but I’ll put the blinders back on again.”

Despite the way things have turned out, Joanna and Ed have absolutely no regrets about relocating to France.

“It still remains one of the most spectacular countries to visit,” she says. “But to live here is another story.”

The couple is currently waiting to find out the cost of shipping their possessions back to San Francisco before taking the plunge. The result of the US election could also influence their decision.

But they say they feel pretty resigned to the notion that they’ll likely be returning home in the not-too-distant future.

“We have a flight going back to San Francisco in January, and I think we’re not going to come back,” says Joanna. “I don’t want to say we failed. But it just didn’t work out.”

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