Our life in France – the bus

Inspired by the graphic travel memoir French Milk and encouraged by a few fellow bloggers, I’ve decided to write a few posts about our life in France.

When we moved to France in 1992, we originally live in Cébazat, a suburb of Clermont-Ferrand.   We only had one car – Carl would drive it to Clermont for class in the morning, come home for lunch, and then drive to Riom to work in the afternoon.  For the most part, Vance and I would walk wherever we needed to go – the supermarket, the bank, the park, the Post Office, the bakery, etc.  Every once in a while I would drive Carl to work in the afternoon and keep the car, but that didn’t give me much time to do more than major grocery shopping, and I wanted to visit Place de Jaude, the downtown area of Clermont.

When Vance and I were out, we would pass a bus stop (it’s in the left foreground in the picture) right around the corner from our apartment.  I asked the ex-pats that we’d met about riding the bus, but no one could give me any information.  I stopped and read the flyers on the bus stop one day and saw that this bus did go to Place de Jaude and you could purchase a ticket from the driver, purchase a book of tickets at the bus depot or purchase a monthly pass.  I decided we would ride the bus one day and figured the worst that would happen would be that we’d miss Place de Jaude and end up making a loop and coming back home.

Vance and I set out one morning, bought our tickets from the driver and took a seat on the bus.  I was so intent on getting off at the right stop, that I looked out the window the whole time and didn’t observe our fellow passengers.  (When you live in a country and you’re not fluent in its language, you become a very good observer.)  I was very pleased with myself when we made it to Place de Jaude without incident and I found out where we had to go to catch the bus for the return trip.

I felt great after the success of that first trip (you have to remember that my French was not nearly as good as Carl’s and I’d never used public transportation before).  The bus in France was basically on the honor system – the driver never checked your ticket or your monthly pass.  If you were using a ticket, though, you had to validate it in a machine that’s toward the front of the bus.  I didn’t realize this until my second or third trip on the bus, when I watched other people validating their tickets – I had been throwing perfectly good tickets away after we rode.

From time to time, the “bus police” as I called them (I never did learn what they were really called) would board a bus and check everyone’s ticket or pass.  If you were riding illegally, you were kicked off of the bus and fined.  It happened more often than you’d think.

None of the other ex-pats that we knew used public transportation, but we grew to love the great system they had in France and really missed it when we returned to the US.