Bonjour! I'm Tara, and this is the very first episode of Je Suis un Croissant — the real, unfiltered story of my family's decision to move 5,000 miles away from the only life we'd ever known, published on the one year anniversary of our arrival in our new "home". Before you hear where we ended up, you need to hear how we got here: a husband with a decades-old dream of living abroad, a family exhausted by the American hamster wheel, and a whole lot of very serious concerns about giant spiders.

In this episode, I introduce the cast — my husband, our tween daughter, and our two very good, very opinionated dogs — and walk through the checklist we used to filter an entire planet down to a handful of real contenders. Some countries got cut fast (sorry, Australia). Others held on for weeks before falling apart over cost, isolation, or a nine-year-old's veto power. By the end, the search had narrowed to two finalists, my husband was finally getting interview calls, and the adventure was about to get very real.

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/albert-behar/djangos-night-out
License code: PUEK1SB07ECVMLIQ

Je Suis un Croissant follows one very average American family — two parents, a tween daughter, and two very good dogs — as they walk away from the hamster wheel of suburban American life and rebuild it 5,000 miles away in France. Each week, Tara pulls back the curtain on the real decision-making behind the move: the countries they ruled out (sorry, Australia), the secret they kept for months, and the logistics nobody warns you about, from French tax residency to learning a new language on Duolingo.

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/albert-behar/djangos-night-out
License code: PUEK1SB07ECVMLIQ