Ketchup

We've been in Paris for two months, which means we've been away for four and our year abroad is already a third over. Settling in has been completely different here compared to Singapore. We have little drive to do the typical sightseeing, having been there and done that, and thanks to French bureaucracy, we've been overwhelmed with logistics and appointments. It's been busy, to say the least; so let's catch up.

First, the hair-pulling logistics. As I previously wrote, we returned from our Thai vacation to learn that our apartment was no longer available. We spent every evening for ten days calling rental agencies, inquiring about apartments, and once we found something promising, jumping through all the hoops required to secure it (documents demonstrating we could afford the apartment; documents demonstrating how we would arrange the payments; documents justifying our existence in France and in the world in general; and then carefully reading, translating and negotiating three contracts). 

The human resources office at Institut Curie, the same office which had arranged the now unavailable apartment, assured us they would aid us in all logistics and cover all upfront payments such as deposits, agency fees, first month's rent, and so on. Friday night before our departure, the last business day, the rental agency still had not received any payment and threatened to not let us into the apartment upon our arrival 8am Monday morning. More frantic phone calls ensued, and even as we sit here tonight, not only is it unclear to us how the fees were paid (a placeholder check was issued, and then presumably a real check, with the sums eventually being deducted from Pat's paycheck), we are still parsing paperwork concerning exemption and reimbursement programs for these fees.

Our second day in Paris, we walked across the river (oh look, there's Notre Dame) for a 9am meeting to open a bank account. Everything in France requires a meeting, and sometimes a meeting to determine if a meeting is necessary.

Afterward, I took the boys up the street to the Luxembourg Gardens while Pat went to Curie to meet with HR. My stomach dropped when I saw his ashen face as he rushed to meet us, a half hour past the agreed time. It turns out, in order to secure our cartes de séjour (residency cards), we would need notarized translations of our birth certificates. But our birth certificates are in a safe deposit box in Boston to which only we have access, and our visas were scheduled to expire the end of March, before we could reasonably obtain our cartes de séjour. (Fortunately, I have good legal connections in my birth town--thanks, Dad, and Pat could order a copy of his online.)

The HR woman--the same woman who handled the original apartment arrangement--insisted she had informed us of all necessary documents. After scouring his email, Pat showed her the correspondence trail, to which she curtly replied, Oh, I guess I never did tell you; I hope this won't be too much of an inconvenience for you.

Oh, but that is not all, said the Cat in the Hat. Oh no, that is not all.

A week before our visas would expire, Pat received an email (4:30 on a Friday afternoon no less) that we would also need our marriage license officially translated and notarized and could we get it to HR by end-of-day Monday.

Throughout the month Pat had continued to ask if there were any other documents, anything else at all that we would need to do in order to secure our residency cards. The HR office had assured him that we had everything and in fact, the boys didn't need residency cards at all.

The same week as the marriage license revelation, they mentioned, oh by the way, if we intended to travel outside of France with the kids, the boys would need a short-stay travel visa, requiring another half a dozen documents, including the boys' birth certificates officially translated and notarized (at 50 euros per document), too. But, we can't apply for this visa until we've secured our cartes de séjour.

To compensate for her incompetence, the HR woman has served Pat with unparalleled acrimony, making a run-of-the-mill Parisienne's attitude seem sweet as daisies.

Pat now knows the préfecture, where one goes to file the application and obtain the documents, inside and out. We have a temporary récépissé that allows the French to save face when issuing the cartes de séjour to expired-visa holders and keeps us from being deported, and Pat has an additional document that allowed him to reenter the country after his recent trip to a conference in the U.S. (which, of course, HR woman told him he wouldn't need and then at the last minute said oh, yeah, you do).

While Pat danced the dossier tango, I spent the first few weeks researching programs for Sam. First I visited the mairie (town hall) of our arrondissement to find out what type of day care programs exist and what the differences are between them (crèche, crèche familiale, crèche associative, halte-garderie, and so on). 

I spent days calling down the list of programs the mairie had given me to find out which ones had space available, and then, of course, I had to attend the requisite meetings (four) to enroll Sam in one of the municipal halte-garderies. A halte-garderie is a part-time daycare program originally intended to aid stay-at-home parents. They are open four hours in the morning and again in the afternoon, closing for lunch in between. Because full-time daycare (crèche) spots are so difficult to obtain, more and more working parents use the halte-garderie. In fact, Sam's h-g only had afternoon slots, which has complicated his nap schedule somewhat.

No matter. Sam loves it. He goes three afternoons per week, and everyday he asks for more school. I have a folder full of drawings he's accumulated over the last four weeks, and he always comes home in a great mood. I don't know how much French he's able to understand yet. More, he is familiar with the routine, and he enjoys the activities. He used to get mad when I would try to say things in French to him ("No French!"), but he doesn't complain so much and he even repeats a few words. He knows, bon jour, au revoir, and vélo (bike--we bought him a tricycle when we first got here); he's recently started to say l'homme vert (green man) when the cross-walk light changes.

Sam will stay at the h-g until they close for summer vacation the end of July. In September, he is enrolled to begin l'école maternelle (preschool) in September. It is also municipal, and so completely free, unless he stays the full day and eats in the canteen, in which case we have to pay for lunch. (When I toured the school, the little round tables were set like a dining room, complete with baskets of sliced baguettes.) School is open four days per week, and he can come home at either 11:30 or at 4.

All of this seems wonderfully too good to be true, so here's the catch. He has to be potty-trained in order to enter school. No diapers allowed. The kid has absolutely no interest in his potty, and I don't believe in forcing the issue; when he's ready, he'll use it. When I raised this concern to the director of the school or discussed it with his teachers at the h-g, I got the same blasé response: "Oh, don't worry. When you go away for summer vacation (because everybody goes away, clearly), just let him run around without his diaper and he'll catch on." Easy for them to say. No one has answered the question if he's still in diapers, what do I do?

So, if you see a naked kid crapping on the beaches of the Mediterranean this summer, it might be Sam.

And after all the headaches, we are settled, much like anywhere else. We've spent most of our weekends exploring different parks. Playgrounds we must have once repeatedly passed by without ever noticing are now fixtures in our routine. Indeed, there are about half a dozen in walking distance, more than we have near us in Boston. 

The apartment fiasco has worked out in our favor. We have a much larger, more comfortable apartment in a neighborhood we prefer.  We can see the Centre Pompidou from our living room; there are many food stores and other shops nearby that make life on this side of the river more convenient. We're even testing out a few babysitters so we can enjoy all the restaurants.

The boys are doing great. As I mentioned, Sam loves "school" and the playgrounds. Finn is very chatty, he's getting close to crawling, and his first tooth finally just broke through (not that that's kept him from insisting on three solid meals a day).

My apologies for not updating the blog sooner. Shortly after getting our Internet set up (which took a good ten days), we happened upon a website that lets us watch our favorite American shows for free. So when I should be writing or uploading photos, in truth, I've been watching TV.