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.

A "Decent" Dwelling

I'm not sure what it says about the French real estate market that they had to recently pass a law to establish what the smallest dwelling entails that can reasonably be considered 'decent' and legal.

They break it out for you in one line "Decent housing = not less than 9m ²". (This is less than 100 square feet).


But wait, you can get around that:

"However, the decree allows the rental of a dwelling under 9m² if its volume is at least 20m3. The volume calculation is done by multiplying the area by the ceiling height. For example, if you have a ceiling height of 3m for an area of ​​8m ², the housing has a volume of 24 m3. It is decent and can be rented."

This sounds ok, if you're a giraffe!

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!