Why We’re Relocating to Grenoble
We are relocating to Grenoble for good. We’re moving out of our house in Gometz-le-Châtel, a small town 30 km south of Paris. Our new home is a city 500 km from the French capital, in the southeast of France, surrounded by mountain ranges.
My other half saw the job posting on a Friday morning in mid-February 2023. Over breakfast, he asked me what I thought about moving to Grenoble. A professor position in his field had opened there. For him, it would mean a promotion if he got accepted: moving from an Associate Professor to a full Professor.
Why We Chose the Mountains
We’ve tossed around the idea of moving to a mountainous region from time to time. It comes up especially after every vacation we spend there. Both of us love the outdoors. In fact, that’s how we met more than 10 years ago, running in the hills of Hong Kong.
So we’d always thought that if we relocated, it would have to be closer to the mountains. The Parisian region, where we’ve been based for the last eight years, has plenty of woodland but on flat terrain with little undulation. The highest hill there tops out at just 216 m. The ideal region for us was the southeast of France, where the bigger mountains rise, specifically near the French Alps. Besides, this region produces most of our favourite cheeses: abondance, comté, beaufort, and saint-nectaire.
We have been driving to the mountains for our vacations since 2020. We usually rent a cottage there for a week and spend the time hiking and running. Each trip, though, takes us around seven hours one way. If we live in that region, we can just gallivant into the mountains at the drop of a hat.
My Reasons for Saying Yes
So when my husband asked for my opinion on moving to Grenoble if he got the position, I promptly responded, “why not?” First and foremost, it’s a promotion for him. I knew how dedicated he was to his job. I also knew how few and far between professor positions were in France, and how convoluted the French academic system could be. So he had to grab the opportunity when it appeared.
Secondly, I’ll admit I’m getting weary of my job. Honestly, I don’t think it’s the act of teaching that gets me down. There are always ups and downs in every profession. It’s the lack of career growth that comes with being a freelance English teacher (a vacataire, a micro-entrepreneur) in France. It’s not by choice that I’ve chosen this path. I’ll save that grievance for another post. As such, I won’t be sacrificing much professionally if we relocate.
More Reasons for Relocating to Grenoble
Since both of us love the mountains, I can already imagine us having a little house nestled there. Besides, Grenoble left me a favourable impression the first time we visited the city in 2016. The lively college town has drawn me in. It’s vastly different from the other places we’ve lived since arriving in France, and it’s surrounded by majestic peaks. Being this close means we can escape for a trail run anytime we like, without waiting for vacations. Another charming thing about this city is what you see as you wander from street to street: at the end of each one, there’s a glimpse of the mountains.
Lastly, the move to the mountains will certainly be a new chapter in our lives. It’s just a relocation from one corner of France to another, but it still feels significant. We’ll be trading a mini-town of 2,500 residents in Gometz-le-Châtel for a city of close to 160,000 inhabitants. That change in landscape and daily routine will definitely bring some vibrancy to our settled life in the Parisian region.
A Nerve-Racking Application Process
In retrospect, I don’t think I seriously believed we’d really be moving out of our house that soon. It just felt too soon to move! We’d only bought the house in the summer of 2021. We then spent five months renovating it, holed up in the basement while we fixed up the main living space. The professorship application process in France is complicated and competitive. Knowing that, the thought of moving to Grenoble barely registered during the early stages of his application. Between that and the hustle and bustle of daily life, I didn’t spend much time contemplating the possibility of actually moving.
Time passed. My other half was naturally stressed throughout the whole application process. It ran from that winter Friday morning all the way to the second week of May, when he did his audition. His stress might have dragged on much longer. Luckily, one of his acquaintances cared enough to unofficially tell him of his success shortly after the audition. (I’ll share my two cents about the French academic application process in another post.)
Accepting the professor position meant he would start the new 2023/2024 academic year in September 2023. That left us just 3.5 months to decide on and settle our living arrangements. We briefly flirted with the idea that I would join him immediately. But after considering my work situation, we decided it didn’t make financial sense for me to move in September.
The Freelance Teacher’s Dilemma
I teach as a freelancer in higher-education institutions. Most schools should, by May, be in the final stages of preparing the following year’s timetable and hiring extra staff. When it was confirmed we were relocating to Grenoble in mid-May, it was already a tad late to send out my CV. Getting in touch with the recruiting honchos wouldn’t have helped much either—most of the better freelance positions would already be snapped up. In addition, despite Grenoble being a college town, it has far fewer educational institutions. Notably, it has fewer business schools, where I get most of my teaching load. This means my chances of finding teaching gigs there would be slimmer than in Paris.
My freelance English teaching in the Parisian region doesn’t offer long-term financial stability. Still, it does provide a good living in the short term. Moreover, the teaching gigs are generally renewed every year. So I knew last year that my teaching load there was relatively secure for 2023/2024. Only relatively secure, though—the hours can drop without much warning if student enrolment falls, as I know from personal experience.
As such, it wouldn’t be wise for me to drop everything and move to Grenoble in 2023. It would only make sense if a secure gig miraculously came up in the meantime. The financial side was especially pertinent, since we’d have to maintain two residences: apartment rent in Grenoble, and mortgage payments in Gometz-le-Châtel. The plan for relocating to Grenoble was for me to join him permanently at the end of the 2023/2024 academic year. That would leave us a year to find a solution for our house—sell or rent. It would also give me time to explore job opportunities in Grenoble.
Finding Our Grenoble Flat
That’s how we started the new academic year: he in Grenoble, and I 500 km away. We spent June and July looking for a flat to rent there, still in the thick of relocating to Grenoble. Thankfully, Grenoble was much cheaper than Paris. We were able to afford a 50 m2 apartment on the top floor of a building, a 15-minute walk from the city centre.
Life Split Between Two Cities
The TGV played an important role in our lives during the 2023/2024 academic year. Nearly every month, one of us would visit the other, depending on our teaching timetable. We’d take the 3-hour Grenoble–Paris TGV. Imagine the cost we’ve racked up on train tickets!
Grenoble Like a Tourist
Travelling to Grenoble is like going on a city break for me. Even though we (or I, currently) live in the Parisian region, it’s not in Paris. It still takes one and a half hours to get there by train. That’s the main reason we seldom go to Paris for meals or any other kind of entertainment. In the past 8.5 years in France, we’ve lived in two towns. Gometz-le-Châtel is a tiny place of 2,500 inhabitants, where our house is currently located; Orsay is a bigger town of 15,500.
Both have hardly any restaurants, let alone pubs or bars, and even food delivery services don’t give us much more choice. So you can imagine my amazement in Grenoble. I can eat out whenever I feel like it, choose from a decent range of ethnic food, and go for one or even two cocktails after a dreary workday. Best of all, I can walk home in 15 minutes.
It’s June 2024. The 2023/2024 academic year is coming to an end, and so is the deadline we gave ourselves for finally relocating to Grenoble. In the upcoming posts, I’ll share how my job search and the move are going.