Why this site exists
The community has a lively Telegram chat, but finding it is hard when all you’re doing is googling “Russians in Montpellier” or “moving to the South of France”. This site is the bridge between search and chat: you look up an answer to your question, find an honest, useful page, and along with it an invitation to your own people.
That’s why the model is simple and the same on every page: an invitation card on top (want the chat? one tap) and genuinely useful text below it (even if you never join, your question is answered).
What we believe
- Honesty beats volume. Better fewer pages with verified facts than hundreds of empty clones. We don’t churn out templated pages just to pad the count.
- No making things up. Addresses, prices, schedules, contacts — only what’s real and verifiable. What we don’t know, we say “check in the chat”.
- No hidden tricks. What a person sees is what a search engine sees. We don’t hide keywords and we don’t feed robots a different text.
- The community is not a product. Joining is free, and people’s contacts are published only with their consent.
What you’ll find on the site
The site grows as a living directory made for our own:
- City guides — the community, relocation and paperwork, and the local infrastructure of every city where we have people.
- Moving to France — step by step: visa, residence permit (titre de séjour), OFII validation, opening a bank account, health insurance, CAF, taxes, renting without a guarantor, work, studies.
- Directory — Russian shops, Orthodox churches, weekend schools, translators and Russian-speaking doctors.
- Blog and guides — honest write-ups from real experience: your first 30 days, how to organise a move, the language barrier in everyday life.
The site opens in your browser’s language — it’s available in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Kazakh, English and French. The language we chat in is Russian, but we’re glad to have our own no matter what passport you hold.
Who runs it
The site and the chat are run by community volunteers — ordinary Russian-speaking residents of the South of France for whom this isn’t a job but a way to help their own. So in some places we know a city inside out, and in others we’ll honestly point you to ask in the chat.
Photos from our events
On event pages we publish only photographs whose publication participants have consented to; the community organiser selects them by hand, and pictures from the chat never go public automatically. Participants’ names and usernames are not shown on the site, and quotes are published anonymously.
If you appear in a photograph and would rather it wasn’t on the site, write to the community chat and we will remove it. No explanation is needed — we act on such requests without discussion.
Contacts
All conversation happens on Telegram: t.me/vibe_sud_france. That’s also where to send suggestions, corrections, and requests for a guide to a new city.