Oh Happy Day!

The cold has ended. This morning we threw open the windows and they're still open.

That is all. Hurray!!!

Rave of the Day: Pre-made garlic and herbs in butter

Today's rave is for a convenience food I never knew I was missing. What you see here is a log of pretty good butter, already infused with a healthy dose of garlic and parsley.

My cell phone photo was terrible so why not add a filter?

This product is meant to live in your freezer. You take it out and cut off a slice whenever you need to sauté something, for grilling, or prepare a few snails as Escargot de Bourgogne. Certainly, it is something you could make yourself, but that defeats a little bit of the purpose here. This is a convenience to make daily life more tasty. If I'm spending an afternoon cooking up something special I don't mind peeling garlic and chopping herbs. It's when I'm rushing to make some kind of food item after a day of work and with a toddler commanding one arm and hip, that is when this product rocks my world.

Quick Foie Gras Burger

Perhaps all I really need to do for this post is translate the text of the ad. The rest of it sorta speaks for itself...

The Quick Foie Gras burger

Quick'n Foie Gras
Block of Foie Gras from France

GOOD RESOLUTIONS CAN WAIT

With the Quick'n Foie Gras good resolutions can wait!
A real slab of French foie gras delicately pan fried on a pure beef burger with onion sauce and lettuce on a whole wheat bun with split wheat. Here is a good way to prolong the pleasure of the holidays, at a low price!

Indeed 2€90 converts today to $3.86. I would worry about any steak and foie gras that cheap.

Happy Halloween!

Eric's nanny told me on no uncertain terms that she is NOT a fan of Halloween and will not be celebrating it at her house. As an American I thought that was a spoil-sport position but didn't tell her so, just tried to tell her about why I personally like the holiday.

Then we saw how it is celebrated in France and came to understand her position a bit better. We went for a walk and saw a few groups of children out trick or treating. They seemed happy and it seemed just like home. We got home and had one pair of trick or treaters, a witch and Spiderman. When we opened the door these two 6 year olds exclaimed

"Bonbons ou le souffle de la mort!"

Wait, what??? They translate 'trick or treat' as "Candy or the breath of Death"??? I see why she thinks it's morbid.

The next morning I took Eric over to her house as usual. There was a lot of vandalism in this tiny town of few inhabitants. I have just looked and can't find a good link but in the time we've been here (before and this sojourn) we have noticed that it does seem like there is more vandalism and car burning in France than we're accustomed to in America. It seems that Halloween is simply used as an excuse for even more vandalism, which is really too bad because for me it was never that, it was always dressing up and eating candy and bobbing for apples and carving pumpkins and hay rides and autumn fun.

Some of the joy of our holiday was lost in its translation across the Atlantic, and that's really too bad.

A Sign

This is a Pedestrian Crossing sign warning drivers to be aware of pedestrians exiting the train station. After getting the photo home and really looking at it I guess that figure has an identifiable gender but just glancing at it I got some very conflicting gender cues. I'm not sure why a pedestrian sign needs a gender at all?

Jargon

Daddy just forwarded me an email I could hardly decipher, having something to do with the astounding mountain of paperwork he has to complete.

I responded that it looked like a TPS report to me.

His response: "Not at all. This is a TIS of my EdT for L2 in the SFA of the UFR. Not kidding."

Daily Life with Poetry

This photo was taken on a Metro train somewhere beneath Paris. I took it because in the front of the car on the right hand side we had a standard subway advertisement. However on the left hand side we see a white panel with a blue field. Sadly my phone did not have to resolution to capture the words, which were a poem describing a person's need for poetry like a daily vitamin.

Here is another poem, this time on the platform. I took this photo for Eric, but it illustrates my point here today.

Je suis un enfant de partout

un enfant de Paris, de Cotonou,

un enfant des montagnes

des plis rouges d’un pagne.

Je suis un enfant des nids de moineaux,

de Mulhouse, de Baltimore,

des petits bateaux de la baie de Rio

et pire encore

je suis un enfant de quelque part

né de l’amour entre la chance

et le hasard.

Un enfant avec un nom,

un prénom,

mais un enfant qu’on appelle Terrien

parce que, sans moi,

cette planète n’est rien.

I have different photos to show the incredible flowers in public places, but I think these things - public poetry, flowered towns - are the real genius of French urban dwelling. We have good baguettes in America now, but we haven't yet made as much of an effort to add art in our lives. I wish we'd do more of it.

And we're back...

It's the "rentrée" here in France, or well, technically Tuesday will be. It's the time when everyone, young and old, comes back from 1,000 weeks of summer holiday and gets back to work. There's still a festive feeling to it, as people greet friends and neighbors they haven't seen in a very long time. Think 'Back to School' with all the outfit planning and excitement, except everyone goes back on the same day and the grownups are doing it all too.

It's particularly nice for me now because the nannies and shopkeepers are back. Living in the countryside is often delightful, but when the only real grocery store within 10 miles is closed and you don't have a car, well, it starts to get complicated. Today I was finally able to pick up some food easily. It was light and wonderful, the new spring in my step makes me feel like I've lost 5 pounds. Actually, come to think of it, I probably have.

Wedding Cars

A beautiful Saturday afternoon in August is the perfect time for a wedding. We live in the shadow of a church so we weren't surprised to exit our apartment today and see these cars parked. 

Two cars were parked in the Place in front of the church

One looked like you'd expect for a wedding, I assume the bride and groom arrived in this car festooned with ribbons and white flowers

 There are many wedding customs here that are familiar to me (I'm still charmed when I see the wedding guests following the bride and groom and honking, like I remember doing when I was young, now weddings rarely move venues in the USA so I haven't seen that in years). Sometimes it's just the execution of the custom that makes it strange. Take for example this getaway car. I've seen getaway cars decorated, but never like this. I've heard of brooms used at weddings, but never like this.

The getaway car was a lot more festive. I don't yet understand the significance of the various items included in the decoration.

They have two brooms, one with the bride's photo and one with the groom's. There are many different stickers used in road work, and additional photos of the bride and groom, all funny and/or compromising.

Each day surprises us in its own way!

A "Triple"

French apartments come unfurnished. And by 'unfurnished' I mean there is NOTHING there, I think that even the door knobs are optional. We used to wonder why all the apartment listings had photos of the toilet. Now we know - that is, sadly, an optional feature! Our current apartment has no lights, and certainly no appliances (but it does have a toilet). 

I have gotten a fridge, and a washing machine, but we're still living without a stove or oven. That's ok, it's summer, right? Time to eat lots of salads.... It's amazing how often one actually uses the stove.

So I'm shopping for stoves and discovered this crazy contraption - a stove, oven, and dishwasher all-in-one. They are never cheap, even second-hand, so I don't think I'm going to live my new dream of washing my dishes in the compartment underneath my oven, but I do think that would be a crazy-Euro brand of awesome.

A Bizarre Turn of Events

We don't know what to make of this one. Daddy got called into a meeting first thing in the morning yesterday with the Chair of his department. It didn't have a good feeling so we were prepared for bad news, probably some other big project they were going to make him take on and we were preparing our arguments for why he couldn't possibly take on even more work right now.

When he arrived Daddy saw that the Chair was very unhappy. It seems he had received a letter from the President of the University which declared the processing of a decree sent down from the Central Atomic Agency giving Daddy a "Delegation". The Chair demanded to know why Daddy hadn't told him about this; Daddy countered with 'What the hell is a "Delegation"?'

It seems that this Delegation relieves Daddy of any and all work expectations for a period of 5 years. He has to do absolutely nothing, and if they want him to, for example, teach the classes they had planned for him then they have to pay him an exorbitant sum per hour for this work. Not only that but they have to give him back-pay at that same ridiculous rate for all the teaching they had him do last year. They had him teaching two semester's worth crammed in one semester, starting the very day he arrived on the airplane (no glorious first night of jet-lagged sleep for him!) so this ends up being a lot of money. The Chair was furious that they have to pay this money and also hire someone else to do Daddy's job while Daddy has his Delegation.

This Delegation must be in error, and we imagine it will be reversed. It is certainly not something we were petitioning to get, having never dreamed such a thing could exist!

The University has already begun the processing of his back-pay. This letter is, for the moment, worth a lot more than the paper it's printed on. How completely bizarre!

Politics and Obama

I don't know what this Obama's politics might be, but it seems it's still a name worth having associated with one's candidature. The candidate himself, Julien Delamorte, has an unfortunate last name. Daddy said that if it were his last name he couldn't keep himself from naming his child "Ange" because then the child's name would be Angel of Death. I think it's safe to say we're lucky that's not our last name.

We didn't pay no stinkin' taxes!

I've tried to get Eric enrolled in the crèche (daycare) but unlike America you can't just roll up and sign up. I gave up a while ago and just decided to focus on nannies because it was just too complicated to even get on the waiting list.

First you have to have a lease that is an original, not a print out. Well, if you completed your lease internationally it's tough to have any original. This is 2012 people.

Then you have to have an electricity bill. Those things are solid gold over here. I don't really know why they love them so much.

Then you need pay stubs. OK, I can sorta understand that one, though in America we'd say that you only need to provide them if you're looking to get a subsidized spot.

There are a bunch of random other things I've forgotten but the one we were laughing about tonight was their requirement of your last tax statement. Ours was, of course, filed in the USA. They don't want that one, so what they want us to do is go to the Trésorie and get a statement that because we were not living in France last year we didn't pay taxes in France last year. Daddy was suggesting that we could get a bunch of other statements too, just for the fun of it. We were also not living in Chile, Sweden, Latvia, and Kenya last year. We could just make ourselves a new hobby of collecting statements from foreign governments which assert that because we had nothing to do with them during the calendar year we paid no taxes there.

THAT would make a dossier that would impress even the crèche lady!

SuperBad

This evening we were walking home from looking at yet another apartment when we saw the most amazing thing. We heard them before we saw them and so we turned to see 4 drunk policemen driving their squad car in the bus lane with the lights flashing. They were giggling and one of them was singing Star Wars music over the crowd control mic, but collapsing into fits of giggles as he passed.

If they hadn't been wearing their uniforms I'd have sworn that cop car was stolen but they looked the part, even if they weren't acting it.

We Are Official!

After a day spent at OFII we are now in possession of our Titres de Sejours. If it had been a slightly less painful experience I'd even be ready to celebrate! We did walk ourselves home from Bastille like this American Mom in Paris. There are a few things to celebrate - my French is good enough that they waived the required French language course and also the all-day "Life in France" class, which had me laughing because it is intended to teach us things like how to find housing. There were 40 people in the room, what do they think we've been doing for the last 4 months, sleeping in the street?

There was a problem because, while I had Eric with me for the first check-in lady, Daddy was giving him food while I checked in with the second check-in lady so she did not mark "Prioritaire" next to my name. I was the last of the 40 people to check in. I waited all afternoon for my private interview and Eric got pretty fidgety (though of the three of us by the end of the day he won the prize for best-behaved). Finally one of the medical staff noticed that we were still waiting at 4:10pm and the office closes at 5pm. She raised hell to get me seen, which caused my caseworker to cry and tell me that it was all my fault, that she's never had a problem with that colleague before, etc. It was pretty bad.

But in the end all that time waiting worked out for us because Daddy had to go back to the Tabac several times to get all the stamps we needed. In the end we had to pay over $1000 in lick-and-stick stamps for these Titre de Sejour cards. Turns out the big Prefecture where everyone has to go is completely incompetent and, among the other problems, quoted us the rate for a Titre renewal, not a first application. It counts as a first application every time you let your previous Titre lapse, so even though Daddy had done this before, and gotten the chest x-ray before, if you let it lapse you have to start again from zero. One thing we're sure of, that's our last state-mandated chest x-ray! Daddy asked what they're looking for, it's TB, enormous lung cancers, and to confirm we have hearts. Seriously, that's what he said. Anyway, the lady at the register takes our $1000 in simple individual stamps, sticks them on an index card, runs her pen in squiggly lines all over them and gives us our cartes de sejours. These cartes are seriously like 1980s driver's licenses - low res black and white photograph, hand laminated, etc.

Now we get to start on the process for Eric! Yippee!

Timbres Fiscaux

Well, here you can see what $280 looks like in timbre fiscal. These are not-so-very-special stamps you can buy at the Tabac to pay for administrative services in France. Ours will pay for our French green cards, the Carte de Séjour.

Luckily the baby doesn't have to go through all this!

One funny thing - they're just ordinary lick-it and stick-it stamps, but even for $280 they don't give you those little glassine bags that the USPS gives people to keep the stamps from sticking to your hands as you race home. These things were flying all over the Tabac as I tried to gather them into a little makeshift pile. So if you're going to buy some, bring your own envelope!