Today we go get our Cartes de Sejour. This should be an interesting adventure, considering how unhelpful the French Consulate was in Canada. We will update you with all the juicy details, après un café.
Bonne journée!
Ok. Wait till you hear about our day! Erik has insisted on writing this one, but lets just say, it was a journée comme les Français! Complete with a restoratif on the way home. And we thought the Consulate in Canada was bad! Lets just say that Erik's 'Scientist' label affords him quite a bit of status. Apparently his head is 'trop plein' (too full...as in he's too smart) to have to deal with these people. Straight out of the receptionist's mouth.
Torie accepts no liability for anything written after this point.
According to the Lonely Planet, the first version of Paris started in 300BC, but unlike french wine, bureaucracy does not get sweeter with age. To stay in France, a visa is not enough - one also needs a Carte de Sejour, which translates simply as "Extra Thing". To get this "extra thing", you need to go to the Police prefecture. Judging by the prefecture waiting room (which torie never got to see despite waiting in the line this morning for an hour and a half) France seems to be a popular destination. Especially if you don't have the appropriate documentation.
We sat in the waiting room for 1.5 hours this afternoon, and most peoples' strategy was to walk up to the counter with a stained napkin and request that they be made mayor. We saw many asylum seekers, one Polish french teacher who was being forced to work as a maid or give up her welfare, and a man who was told that he had been in the country since 2002 without a visa and even though he owned a restaurant in Paris, he needed to reapply from Vietnam.
Luckily the waiting room was equipped with a coffee machine, which produces better espresso than most Starbucks ... and for 0.35E no less. Between coffee and the entertaining battle between the overheated receptionist opening the window vs. the freezing cold patrons closing it, the wait passed quickly. I was told by Dr Zuk that the Ecole Polytechnique name would open doors, but that was the first time that I saw it in action. Once I was determined to be un scientifique, it was considered below me that I have to deal with this anymore. I was told to tell my host to take care of all this, and that as Torie said, my head was too full to concern myself with this. We were told to get out of there, let the host worry about it, and that we were special.. very very special... just like our mothers told us.
Luckily, France is filled with locations meant for washing the bad taste of bureaucracy out of one's mouth, and we took advantage. A few glasses of wine at a brasserie on the walk home, a walk to the top of Montmartre and a beautiful night time view the Eiffel Tower, and walking home down the steps of the Butte, a bottle of darn fine 3Euro wine, and suddenly the love affair with France begins anew.
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