This is week 3 of our crazy move and, as usual, I’m falling behind on my blogging commitment.
To be fair, I’ve been back and forth about how to organize this thing, this virtual space. I’ve thought of blogging chronologically, meaning, retelling everything we experience as things happen. I’ve also toyed with the idea of making it thematic: a post about food, another about wine, yet a third about driving (yes, really). In the end, I decided it will be a bit of both, or a nice melange of everything. Unplanned, unpredictable.
So, let me fast forward to when we arrived in Épinal, the town we’ll call home for the next few months.
Épinal is a small commune with about 31,000 inhabitants (they’re called Spinaliens – love it!) in the “commune intra-muros”, or the original settlement (if counting surrounding areas of greater Épinal the number jumps to 90,000).
Quick note, the actual term IS commune, which sounds strange to my English or Portuguese thinking brain. Within the French administrative system, a commune boasts of authoritative powers over its inhabitants while holding special value due to historical connections to pre-existing villages or settlements. In practical terms, French communes are equivalent to incorporated municipalities in the US, or even towns. It’s complicated.
Anyway…Épinal is located in the department (another term the French like to use to confuse us English speakers) of the Vosges (a mountainous region). The commune is located south of the Lorraine, but throughout history it was also affected by the messy struggle over the Alsace-Lorraine region. (Y’all, the historian in me is giddy…GIDDY, I SAY! with being here…so close…so much history…ah, so satisfying for this history nerd.)
The settlement began somewhere in the 10th Century and has two main historical sites: the Basilique Saint-Maurice de Épinal, built during the 11th-13th Centuries, and the Château d’Épinal, with construction beginning in the 10th century and ending in the 13thC.
I won’t lie…the first two weeks in this little town were difficult, mainly because we were figuring out how things worked and because our children were also having a hard time settling in. I will talk more about this later but, for now, this is home: a quirky, charming, old, little French commune!
