French Bureaucracy: Not Infamous for Nothing

We spent much of the summer out East in Boston. More of the summer than expected, in fact, because of the French government and its mysterious ways. We were initially told we would have our visas by the end of June. This timed well with heading East for my grandfather's funeral (98 years old!) over the July 4th weekend. In mid-June, however, we were told the visas would not, in fact, be ready by end June. So we canceled our appointments at the San Francisco consulate and figured we would just do it all in Boston. Naturally, just after we had canceled our appointments, our visas were magically ready, but by then there were no more appointments to be had. No worries, we thought. There's a French consulate in Boston, too.

We made appointments with the French consulate in Boston, only to be informed as we got closer to the date that we would not be allowed to do it in Boston after all. Anthony and his company's lawyers pleaded the case for a while, but the French government does not get intimidated -- or pushed around -- that easily. "Non Monsieur, you must go back to San Francisco!"

Luckily, Anthony's company footed the bill. And even better, in some moment of bureaucratic mercy, the consulate told us in personal messages that we did not have to bring the girls with us, since they were under 12. This caused us great anxiety however, as the website itself said anyone 6 and over had to be present, and G was already 7. Worse yet, if we showed up, and they decided G did indeed have to be there in person, we would have to reschedule. But if we had to reschedule, P would then celebrate her 6th birthday (which was just days after our planned appointment), so both girls would have to fly out and join us in San Francisco -- six hours each way for a 20 minute appointment. This did not happen, but you can see why we were anticipating the worst.

Of the 20-minute appointment, only 2 minutes were spent actively with a consular employee, who never once looked at us or cared about our answers. We are truly not sure why this couldn't have been done in Boston, but that's all water under the bridge. The one thing he did say was to stress -- repeatedly -- that we should get our mandatory medical appointments done within the first week we were in Paris because it is absolutely imperative that we get our cartes de séjours (residence cards) within 3 months, by law.

The lawyers at Ubisoft have been on top of our immigration issues from minute one. However, even lawyers cannot budge the French government, whose motto should be "French Bureaucracy: We're Not Infamous For Nothing!" The lawyers were informed that my dossier has been lost, though it is theoretically attached to Anthony's dossier, which is not lost. Therefore, we must go to the prefectural police across town. Today I meet one of Ubisoft's lawyers there, and we wait in a cattle-car line for two hours in order to enter the building, where we are given a numbered ticket so that we can wait again, inside. It takes 45 minutes for them to go from ticket #56 to #59 at which point I can be seen at the "pré-acqueil" desk. "Pré-acqueil" means "pre-welcome," if you're wondering, so that after two lines and three hours, I'm still not at the point where I can be officially welcomed by a person who might just possibly be able to help me.

But of course they can't help me. What was I thinking?! If this works out and they can locate my lost dossier -- we are told once we are pre-welcomed and, later on, actually welcomed -- we will have to return twice more to this building, once just to have the right to make the medical appointment and then, again, after the appointment to get the cartes de séjours . However, after another very long wait, we are instead told that we are in the wrong building altogether. Even the lawyer cannot argue her way out of this one.

Anthony, the girls, and I have now been in the country for almost four months, and we still have not been allowed to make the medical appointments we need to get the cartes, let alone get the cartes themselves. On the positive side, the lawyer finds out later in the day that it turns out my dossier was never really lost in the first place.

We're All Going to Hell

If you are very Catholic, very Christian, orthodox Jewish, a mildly reformed Jew who is nevertheless horrified by how we're sending our girls to a Catholic school, an atheist friend who is horrified by how we're sending our girls to a religious school, an agnostic but culturally Jewish person horrified by how we're sending our girls to a Christian school, very easily offended, or don't have a sense of humor about serious subjects, beware that pretty much this entire posting is one big Sacrilege Alert. In fact, it's probably safest if nobody reads it at all.

Earlier in the school year, Gigi was sitting at the table one day and suddenly put her finger up to her forehead, then on to her shoulder, then down to her chest, saying, "We learned this at school today. Le Frère, la Soeur, and Somebody." It was, of course, meant to be the sign of the Cross, with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but instead came out as the sign of the Isosceles Triangle, with the Brother, the Sister, and Some Other Random Dude.

"Where did you learn that?," I asked.

"Oh some guy in a black dress taught it to us in school," she answered. Pippa added excitedly, "He comes to my class, too! The one with the funny haircut!" Well, these priests are not Franciscan monks, so they don't actually have bowl haircuts, but perhaps it just wasn't the most stylish do.

It runs in the family: Anthony, who actually did grow up (till around adolescence) Catholic and going to church, was baptized, went to Sunday school classes, etc., once went to cross himself in a church in Latin America, in order to scandalize me. But he was trying to do it properly -- that much I could tell. He went from the forehead to the shoulder to the chest to the other shoulder, and I had to say to him, "I'm Jewish, and even I know you did that wrong. It's a cross, not a baseball diamond."

Last night, on Thanksgiving, while our family and friends in America were cooking up the turkeys, here it happened to be the patron saint day of our girls' little Catholic school. A beautiful, ancient local church held a special mass for the children after school, followed by a very sugary party thrown by the school itself. (Oh, nobody even pretends to put out fresh fruit, cheese, or carrot sticks at parties for kids. Straight frosting, cooking, cakes, and sweets.)

I was a chaperone to the church and so was there to witness as both of my girls followed the crowd up to the front for communion. The sight of it made me want to burst out laughing, but since I was in a church, I had to stifle it and ended up shaking, silently laughing, and crying at the same time. It's typical of me, with my IEED (Involuntary Emotional Expression Disorder, you can read about it in my Family in Croatia blog).

But the moment I realize with great certainy that if there is, indeed, a hell for Catholic non-believers, we will certainly have first-class tickets to get there is tonight when Gigi asks me, "Mom, what does 'Vierge Marie' mean?"

"It means 'Virgin Mary'."

"What does 'Virgin' mean?"

"Somebody who's never had sex." At this Gigi looks very confused, so I start to elaborate, in case she's forgotten, "You remember? Sex is when two people put their bodies together...."

"Yes," she interrupts, "I know what sex is. But Mary wasn't a Virgin."

"How do you know?"

She looks at me like I'm truly a moron, "Because she got pregnant and had a baby!" If she had known how to tack, "a-duh," unto the sentence, she would have.

"Well, that's part of the religion. Catholics think that God got her magically pregnant, and that's why they think Jesus is the son of God." At this, she looks even more dubious, if that's possible. So I say, "And you may not believe it, and I may not believe it, but that's what many of your friends and teachers believe. That's a very special part of the religion to them. So just be respectful."

She says to me, "Oh sure. I'll be respectful when they talk about" -- and here my eight year old does perfect air-quotes! -- "the 'Virgin' Mary."

Beware the Typos

Today, I write an e-mail to G's teacher from last year, who she adores, to see if we can skype with him. Because her school in San Francisco is also a French immersion/bilingual school, her teacher is French, and so I write the e-mail en français.

There are a few problems with writing en français on an American keyboard, however. One is that the accents are a pain in the neck to insert properly. Another is that spell-check or auto-correct are both very irritating (yes, I did mean "danse" and not "dance", "ile" and not "isle" or "ill" or "I'll", etc.). But the hardest of all to guard against are my own typing habits. For example, when a word ends in the letters "in", like "lapin", my fingers just automatically type "ing."

And so, today I find myself trying to arrange the skype call with her teacher who, you should know for the purposes of this story, is -- how shall I say it? -- quite easy on the eyes. I want to tell him that it's probably best on weekends, when it's afternoon or evening here. Or another option that would work with the 9 hour time difference is if he goes to bed late (say, 11pm), and it would be 8am our time. So I aim to say, "I don't know when you go to bed at night" or, in French, "Je ne sais pas à quelle heure tu te couche le soir..." But my fingers type "touche" instead of "couche" which makes the sentence read, "I don't know when you touch yourself at night..." 

All I can say is Thank Goodness I am an anal email writer, and I always edit what I've written, and especially in French. So I do in fact fix it (and alter the sentence a lot, in case some freakish auto-correct thing happens along the way), but not until I crack myself up and blush a great deal. And I don't know why it is more embarassing for me to send it to a handsome man than anybody else, but it just is.

And I don't know why it's less embarassing for me to tell all of my family and friends about it (including him) in this blog post than to send it to him in the first place, but it just is!

Three Sheets to the Wind

Like most Parisian apartments, we do not have a dryer.  Sure, we have an appliance, in our kitchen, called a washer/dryer, but the truth of the matter is that it will wash, and then spin our clothes to a state of not-sopping, but it does not actually work like a dryer.  We have no outdoor clothesline, either, so this means that we hang our clothes on plastic racks to dry.

In general, our best spot for the racks is in the guest room/office, and I have recently realized that people on skype can see it as it sits behind me. So now, when I know I'm about to have a video call, I generally check for bras and underwear and move them stretegically to less prominent spots on the rack. Sheets require spreading out on furniture, or from rack to rack. There is a laundromat on the island, and Anthony has gone there once for comforters, but I would rather hand wash every single item in our bathtub than go to a laundromat; for whatever reason, that has always been my most-detested errand.

Not having a dryer saves on energy, and even my neighbor in San Francisco often uses her clothesline, pointing out the environmental benefits. While I totally applaud and support this sort of green behavior, I have to admit that I vastly prefer my clothes and towels when they've been dried automatically. I've heard tell that some ex-pats here in Paris have been known to claim they miss their dryers more than their families. I can't say I'm to that point (yet?), but let's just say that the alternate title for this blog post would have been "My Jeans Are Crunchy."

Croque Notre Dame, the Virgin Mary's Sandwich

Up until recently, P has been pointing to Notre Dame and calling it "Ma Dame," meaning "My Lady" instead of "Our Lady."  It's nice that she considers the church, one of the most famous in the world but also something we can see from the window of our apartment and which is just about literally in our front yard, to be her own personal cathedral.  Built and placed there just for her viewing pleasure. 

Anthony has a theory that she is confusing Croque Madame, the open-face sandwich of ham and melted cheese with an egg on top (i.e. a Croque Monsieur with egg), with Notre Dame.  I think she is just confusing her pronouns "ma" (my) and "notre" (our). In any event, it seems to be working itself out, much like she eventually learned to say her Rs.

What's the Rush?

The girls and I marvel constantly at how Parisians don't seem to be in a hurry. They saunter, they stroll, they meander, while the three of us careen wildly like pinballs bouncing off the crowds as we rush places. Nowhere is this more evident than in the metro. As we approach the metro, we become weekend joggers. When we get past the ticket booth, we become track and fielders, and if we are near the stairs and hear a train pulling into the station, we run like Olympic sprinters to try to make it on time. Sometimes we make it in the nick of time, jumping onto the train just before the doors close.

The doors close mercilessly here and so we have devised an emergency plan for the (inevitable?) time when either I am separated from the girls or one of them is separated from the rest of us. The plan is this: Whoever is stuck on the train -- either because they didn't get off quickly enough or were the only ones who made it on -- gets off at the next stop and waits in that same spot for the next train. There are not express/local trains to worry about. Those left behind get on the next train and catch up. Even if we have to go the wrong direction, or leave the station that is our actual destination, that's the plan. The girls seem pretty excited to lose me, but we'll see how they feel when it's the real McCoy.

It has taken us a couple months of occasional metro riding to figure out why nobody else is rushing. Sometimes, we run down the stairs, "Aaaargh!!!!" only to find out we have just missed the train. In that case, we look up at the board and discover the next train is coming in 3, or 2 minutes. Sometimes, by the time we can stop panting and look up at the board, the next train has already arrived, and that's not an exaggeration; they sometimes come within 30 seconds of each other. There are so many trains, and they run so efficiently (well, no strikes yet, anyway), that it's almost -- almost -- Japanese. Perhaps it's a holdover from riding the markedly-less efficient Muni buses in San Francisco? Well, at least now we know why we're the only fools running in the Paris metro.

Gay Paree

Every Thursday, I pick up G from school on the Rive Gauche, then walk her over to hip hop class in the Marais on the Rive Droite. I leave her there and walk back to the Rive Gauche to pick P up from her after-school theater class. Then we walk back to the Rive Droite to pick up G and go home to the Rive-in-the-Middle.  There are two bridges each trip across the Seine, so that makes a total of eight bridge crossings. Good thing I love crossing these bridges. It's nice with the shortening days, too, because now we cross in the darkness, with the city lights reflecting in the water. Even G, at age 8, recognizes the romance of the moment, and she often skips along saying, "We're so lucky to be living here!"

Yucky gray skies tonight, but I risk it and leave my umbrella at home when I walk G to hip hop. By the time I leave her there, however, it is raining, so I decide to take her umbrella with me for the remaining five bridge crossings. Her umbrella happens to be a zebra -- not just zebra-striped, but with a face and ears -- that Santa gave her last year.

The Marais is known as an alternative (gentrified, hip) part of the city, and I am stopped or cat-called (zebra-called?) by not one, not two, not three, but four groups of gay men and a middle-aged straight lady. If you are imagining groups of twenty something men in too-tight clothing with very affected mannerisms flambouyantly yelling across roads, "Ooh, child! That umbrella is fabulous!," then you are not too far off: The only difference is that they say it in French. And no, they are not saying it sarcastically.

When I tell each group it's because I forgot my own umbrella and borrowed this from my 8-year old, they exclaim, "You can't have an 8-year old! You look 16!" I know this to be patently false -- I look 20, at least -- but still, I know that when I am being complimented by gay French men in one of the hippest sections of Paris, I must be doing something right. I am, inadvertently, ironic retro-hip, and quite proud. So, if you suddenly see reports that the new fashion in Paris is animal-umbrellas, it all started with me.

Rug of Contention

The mattresses have arrived, more boxes have been unpacked, and the apartment is coming together. Anthony takes apart the IKEA daybed G has been using, and I haul it piece by piece up two flights of stairs to my neighbor's house for her 3 year old. Before we put up the bunk bed, I want to lay down the large pink Pottery Barn rug that we brought from San Francisco. We brought no other furniture or rugs -- just this one thing, since I thought it would be nice for the girls bedroom to have echoes of their lovely bedroom in San Francisco.

But the rug. Oh, the rug. It's a big one -- 8x10 -- and therefore barely fits into the girls' new bedroom. The only way it will fit is if we slide it under the very large, very heavy armoire in the corner. "Slide" is a euphamistic term here, since the floor already has a not-so-clean and not-so-beautiful wall-to-wall beige carpet, which I am detemined to cover. So rather than go with either of Anthony's plans: plan a) throw the rug out or plan b) cut a corner out of the rug and lay it around the armoire, we -- and by we, I mean "I" -- decide to go with plan c) make Anthony repeatedly pick up the heavy armoire by himself, while I try to feed the pink rug underneath.

The armoire is also IKEA, which means that with all the repeated lifting and tipping, it loses it's 90 degree angles. Not only is it no longer square, it is also not stable and we cannot put clothes in the closet or drawers. We finally get the carpet mostly where we want it, then at night Anthony re-works the Leaning Tower of Armoires to re-square it. This works perfectly (he's a genius!), except that the process somehow mysteriously pushes the carpet over to one side, so that it is now curled up at the corner and creeping up the wall. Anthony assembles the bunk bed, but even the weight of this on the far corner is not enough to keep the rug from bubbling, bulging, and squishing wall-ward.

Approximately every other day, I go in when nobody's home and try to shove down the climbing rug and work its bubbles out. I lift the corner of the bunk bed and stretch it taut. But the one thing I do not do is ask Anthony to help me. I am afraid that if I complain about the pink rug or, worse yet, have him help out with the pink rug, he will divorce me. At the very least, I would expect to see a big armoire-sized chunk cut out of it.

But just look at what a difference it makes in the room!

Before:

After:

And for reference: their room in San Francisco:

OPC (Other People's Crap)

The movers come bright and early to deliver our shipment from San Francisco. It's 43 packages, although they come in too fast and furious to count. We're assuming they're all there. Anthony is at work, but the girls are still home from school for the seemingly endless fall break they are on. This works out nicely since we are all very excited to get our fall clothes. It's getting brisk out there.

This shipment represents about half a year's worth of sorting and organization (much of which admittedly happened near the end). I started with general purging of obvious junk and, as time went on, I developed a 10-point system for every single item in the house.  By "every single" I am probably exaggerating, but not by much. I sorted every drawer, cabinet, shelf, room from top to bottom, and piece of furniture down to paper clips, art-work done by the girls, each book, every sock, even rubber bands and paper clips.

For each object, I asked myself, "Does this get...?"

1) packed to Boston, then onto Europe, in our luggage (summer clothes, laptop, etc.)

2) shipped to France by boat, not to arrive before we have a permanent apartment (fall/winter clothes, most books, computers, kids bikes and scooters, room decorations)

3) left in the house for the renters to use

4) left in the house in storage (we jammed a couple utility closets with other books, personal house decorations, our good dishes)

5) removed from the house to be stored with/used by friends in San Francisco (for example, the renters wanted all of the floors bare, so we removed rugs)

6) donated to Goodwill

7) given to a friend/younger child/etc.

8) sold on Craigslist

9) thrown into the trash

10) put into recycling

Once we arrived in France, I got to re-sort in order to bring small luggage with us to Croatia and store the rest in our friend's office. And I have continued to need to sort each time we moved apartments (what will we need access to in the next 2 weeks?). Finally, after about 4 months of living out of suitcases, we moved into this apartment and have been able to unpack.

But first, the owners of the apartment had not expected to rent long-term, and it came about rather suddenly while they are living in Spain, so they did not have a chance to clear everything out properly. This means that I have had to go through almost the same sorting of their stuff that I did for ours. Imagine what you've accumulated in your junk areas if you've lived in your home for 10+ years. I went through the cupboard of tupperwares and threw away all the lidless bottoms and bottomless lids; I went through every kitchen cabinet and consolidated the packages of tea, the spices, the 7 boxes of pasta in drawers, the hotel soaps and shampoos (if we live here 2 years, we won't need to buy any more); I found the various stashes of plastic bags that the owner appears to compulsively hoard.  Both the oven and the hamper were unusable because they were stuffed with bags -- a woman like my grandmothers, evidently, who never believed in baking or roasting. 

And finally, we arrive at the day of unpacking, where I spend 9 solid hours unpacking and trying to find logical homes for everything -- consolidating and sorting along the way. The girls are very excited to see our things and are, indeed, very helpful for the first 4 out of 43 boxes. In box number 5, we happen to find their toys, and their beloved American Girl dolls, and from that moment on, of course, no amount of me saying "Yippee! Look what I found!" will entice them to be Mommy's good little helpers.

I am in a race to empty and break down as many boxes as humanly possible since I know that Anthony has an exceedingly low tolerance for the mess of moving in. When he walks into a mess, his stress aura turns black enough that I can practically see it with my naked eye. I must say, it is exhausting but also rather like Christmas morning to open package after package; however, it gets to the point where I am fearful whenever I see yet another box labeled "Master Bedroom." Each time, I hope it will be more of Anthony's stuff, but no, of course, most of the time it is mine. Though I gave away half my clothes in San Francisco, I still have a lot of (Anthony would say "too many") shirts and sweaters. Technically, this is not the problem of OPC (Other People's Crap); this is the problem of MMC (More of My Crap).

To make move-in day more interesting, the bunk bed we've ordered for the girls gets delivered today. But not the mattresses, and the bed's unassembled. Those boxes are put in the entryway. Even though every room is still something of a disaster area, by the end of the day, I have broken down about half of the boxes and have at least opened most of the others.

Conquering the History of William

No trip to Normandy would be complete without visiting some of the castles and sites of Guillaume le Conquerant, know to the English speakers as William the Conquerer. Frankly, I don't think a trip to Normany without WtheC sightings would even be possible, since they are everywhere throughout the region. In Caen, we visit the Men's Abbey, constructed under WtheC as a penance to the Catholic church for marrying Matilda of Flanders against the church's will. Despite the fact that he "conquered" England in 1066 and became the first king of the Norman line, he is buried here in Caen. He -- and many of his descendents/heirs -- spent most of his time in civilized France as the Duke of Normandy, and very little time in England as king of that rather unimportant, backwater little island off the coast. King of England was nice, I suppose, but not exactly a "real job," much like being a writer. Interestingly, Duke of Normandy was a more powerful and bigger job than King of France as well, which confuses my American, non-royalist brain; shouldn't a King always be more powerful than the Duke under him? Yet I'm told this was not the case. WtheC was the man.

Near to the Men's Abbey in Caen is the Women's Abbey, built under the order of Matilda as her penance. Facts about Matilda that our family loves: as far as history knows, WtheC was very loyal to her and did not (at least publicly) take mistresses, which was the custom among French politicians back then. And -- who are we kidding? -- still to this day. Also, when he went away, he left her in charge, not just nominally but practically. Evidently, she was powerful and respected (and rich) in her own right, and she commanded well. They were distant cousins, but she had more noble blood than WtheC, who before he became known as "William the Conquerer" was known as "William the Bastard;" one can see why he would change his name. Our favorite factoid, initially, was that she was reportedly 4'2" -- shorter than me! Sadly, it turns out to be just a stubborn urban legend, and a scientific examination of her bones in 1959 placed her as more like 152 cm, or 5' tall. Just a couple cm taller than me.  Blast it, you giantess!

 

 

We make a special trip to the town of Falaise to see WtheC's château there. It is here the girls really get into the medieval aspects of WtheC's story, and they beg to buy bows and (rubber suction-cup) arrows. Naturally, the rest of their day is spent trying to shoot people whenever possible. I spend much of my time wandering through the castle with this scenario, and question, in my head: Imagine that you could bring WtheC, the Queen, ladies in waiting, and the rich and noble from their time all the way to 2011. Certainly, they would be dumbstruck by movies, cell phones -- phones in general, TVs, computers, the internet, cars, central heating, refrigerators and freezers, gas/electric ovens, frozen foods, imported foods, what is served in restaurants and bakeries, meat every day if you want it, our clothing choices, running water, flush toilets, hot showers on command, electric lighting, comfortable King and Queen beds, airplane travel, literacy of the masses, medication, longer life spans, et cetera, et cetera. But which of them would choose to remain here in the future? Let's say WtheC could bring enough jewels and treasures that we could guarantee him he'd never have to work. He could be fabulously wealthy, but not King or Duke, in 2011. Would he trade his power and cushy 1066 lifestyle for the comforts of life a thousand years later? If not him -- perhaps we decide the power and glory are too intoxicating --  then at what level beneath him do people start choosing life now to life then? I think everybody beneath WtheC chooses 2011, but not the King himself. What do you think?

 

 

After our trips to Caen and Falaise, we are primed on our last morning in Normandy to hit the town of Bayeux, a town untouched in World War II and with charm intact. Our main goal here is to see the Tapestry of Bayeux, often called "the most famous tapestry in the world." I didn't know there were that many tapestries vying for the title, but no matter how many contenders, we're here to see the champ. I was expecting a tapestry in the more classical sense (large, heavy square woven woolen thing hanging on a wall) but instead it is a very, very, very long thin strip, approximately 230 feet long and just a few high, that is embroidered with the story of WtheC and the events leading up to and including his conquest of England. It was created just after 1066 (experts estimate in the 1070s) so it's pretty remarkable that it's still hanging, and I think instead of touting it as "the most famous tapestry," they should really be bragging about it as "the oldest embroidery." But I'm not an art expert, so I doubt anybody will listen to me on this one. We are, of course, not allowed to take photos, but here's a link to a website with good pictures and information not of the original, but of the copy made recently to stay in England: http://www.bayeuxtapestry.org.uk/Bayeux1.htm If you are really interested, you can click through this website on the pointing hands (around the word "Scene") from this, the 1st scene, all the way to the end. They give explanations that I must admit are easier to follow than the audioguide at the actual museum in Normandy which was so fast, I felt like I was running a 230 foot dash. The tapestry was made to be displayed, in order to tell the story to a largely illiterate public, around the interior of the Bayeux cathedral (pictured below), built under the auspices of WtheC's half-brother, Bishop Odo, around that same time. I keep marveling at the cathedrals in Normandy -- each one just as amazing as the next -- and have come to the conclusion that the only reason Notre Dame is so much more famous is its location. This is every bit as awe-inspiring.

 

 

We learn in a film at the Tapestry museum that there is a Latin inscription at the British cemetery for World War II soldiers here in Normandy that translates as “We, who were once conquered by William, have now liberated the Conqueror’s land.” All in all, it seems a nice way to tie together two fascinating and juxtaposed historical time periods that we've explored in our time here in Normandy. And with that, we sadly say goodbye to some dear friends and to a truly fabulous vacation, and take the two hour train back to Paris.