Popped Blood Vessels From Waxing

Une aventure amoureuse Paris avec les documents - Glynnis - AY 2008-09 Paris contre l'homophobie

If The French Have Taught Me One Thing, ITS perseverance. Before I left the States, a professor who had studied and lived in Paris for a number of years gave me these sagely words of advice: learn how to argue in French. Loudly. Her suggestion stood out from the more typical "bon voyage!" sentiments I garnered from others, and though I knew I was in for a ride, I probably should have taken to heart what she said.

A few days before I left for France, I watched the film Two Days in Paris, which has much to teach about how one argues and accomplishes things with the French language. This  scene  is particularly helpful. It lacks English subtitles, but it's easy to get the general idea without understanding French. It begins quite innocently, quite formally. And after it escalates, one must always deny that one has argued, that one is responsible for anything. If all else fails, one can insult another by accusing them of slighting France's image, or else one can call them a tourist. These, my friends, are pillars of French argument.

Proud owner of the  Carte de Séjour

Since my arrival in September, I have run the gamut of French bureaucracy, utterly and completely. After months of struggling for air, I surfaced with the only trophy one can win: the carte de séjour -- a residency card. To get a carte de séjour, one must stand in line for three to five hours with around twenty official documents: an original birth certificate; a financial guarantee from your study abroad program; a financial guarantee from your parents, signed by a notary, stating that they will support you; a bank statement belonging to the financially responsible party; an enrollment letter from any and all schools you plan to attend in France; a copy of your student card(s); enrollment verification from your study abroad program; a copy of your passport; a copy of your visa; a letter from Campus France, an organization one must register with in order to obtain a visa; a copy of your landlord's identity card; a current electricity bill; an attestation de domicile signed and dated by your landlord, who confirms that you do in fact live where you say you do; copies of all aforementioned documents; etc. etc. so on and so on and forever and ever. Should any of these things not be up to par, or perhaps if the woman letting people through the line is in a bad mood that day, you will be turned away without explanation and forced to wait in line again. And to get your carte de séjour, you must make it through before your visa expires or you will no longer be a legal visitor in France.

Once you make it through the line, which of course comes only after several attempts, you get a  recipisée  (a temporary carte) which only suffices until you show up for your medical appointment where they test your eyes and take a chest x-ray to make sure you're not blind or infectious. If you miss the medical appointment, it cannot be rescheduled, and you are, as the French like to say, dans la merde . I hestitate to describe more of my experience getting my carte, since remembering the whole process is almost as painful as living through it the first time around.

Life in Paris is beautiful, and truly one of the most delightful things I've ever experienced. Whether or not the French planned it this way, it seems one must pay for life here -- especially when one is not French -- by enduring long lines, refusals, mountains of paperwork, and banking errors. Living in a foreign country is a lot like being a character in a game. I frequently return to this entry, written by Mike Cosentino about his own experiences in France. He says it so much better than I can:

It got me thinking that the entire process of getting settled here closely resembles a Role Playing Game, be it Zelda, Final Fantasy, Oblivion, and countless others. There's an overarching story that you'll be following, but for the most part you're placed in a strange land with little knowledge of what to do. Your experience points are low when you first start out, and the only way to improve your standing -- and get closer to achieving your goal of saving a princess or the entire world -- is to complete a myriad of seemingly random quests.

You'll wander around aimlessly until you get a lay of the land, and then you'll want to start getting things done. When you're ready to buy that shiny new sword you visit the shopkeeper but he won't give it up until you travel to the snowy mountains on the other side of the continent, kill 20 trolls, and return with their gemmed chalice. When you finally return to the shopkeeper he notices that one of the rubies is missing from the chalice, and again, won't sell you your sword until you commandeer a boat to take you to an island where you need slay a giant goblin, grab the ruby, and head all the way back to town. By the time you get your sword it's been three straight nights of playing and you can't even remember why you were even playing this ridiculous game in the first place.

Rinse and repeat, and you have a pretty good idea of what it's like to set up camp in a new country. It's an endless stream of running back and forth, not having just the right things, forgetting the exact thing you needed, not understanding, and not being understood. You've paid your hard earned cash for this game and dammit you're going to get your money's worth no matter how convoluted the storyline is.

Now if I can only find that one cave where the +3 Repel Bureaucracy amulet is hidden.

When I return to the States, most of my incredulous stories will be not of the places I've visited or the monuments I've seen, but of the hours I've waited in line, the papers demanded of me, or how one completes otherwise simple tasks while a resident of France. Like that one time I tried to make a simple return at FNAC because I'd bought the wrong textbook. I had to go to two separate desks on opposite ends of the store, where two separate women handwrote receipts of very long numbers on carbon paper, and handed me one of the three copies. Only then was I able to return to the caisse, where the woman operating the register handwrote another form full of long numbers, stapled all of them together, and finally gave me my reimbursement. Despite the fact that, like any store in the United States, the French have computer-operated cash registers with barcode scanners. It seems to me that the French like to work near computers, rather than with them.

I was pleasantly surprised today when I went to my French bank (my bank account has its own horrific and ridiculous paperwork story) to solve a problem, and accomplished it on the first try. Part of perseverance and part of daily life in a foreign country is feeling like a moron on a regular basis. In today's case, it was asking why I can't access my bank account online (answer: that wasn't part of the contract I signed), why my card didn't work when I tried to buy groceries (answer: there wasn't enough money in my account), and why it seems that a check I deposited didn't go through (answer: I deposited it incorrectly). Sometimes it pays to be an obsessive pack rat and keep receipts so that when a 220€ check disappears into automated teller never-never-land, someone can track it down For You Even If It Will take a month.

After signing a new contract That allow me to see my account online, checking my card to make sure it works Correctly, and putting a search On The check I Incorrectly RELOCATION, The Young teller assured Me That "We are really sorry, eh?" I know it's a very long time. " I assured Her That, "No, it's really my fault. Thank you, how nice," confessed That Then "it's always like that in France, for me. Always complicated! Completely different aux États-Unis. Je me trompe beaucoup."  She assured me that her sister experienced the same trouble when she moved to Rome, then shouted a  "bon courage!"  as I left.

Customer service and efficiency may not be France's forté, but if you get over the fact that you're going to feel like a moron a few times a day and persevere, you can get things done. A little manners and some humility can go a long way; so far I've not needed to resort to the French pillars of argument. Speaking bad French and lightly playing on the "stupid, helpless American" stereotype can apparently be effective, too.

posted on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 11:25 AM