March - Crazy roommate asks for the apartment key back two days shy of my agreed upon departure date. Having no other alternative I frantically call bf to pick me up. Normally this should be easy enough except for bf lives 30 minutes outside of Rouen. Oh and bf is on duty as a volunteer fireman and can't be further than 5 minutes away from the firehouse (i.e. not Paris). Bf frantically calls other fireman to arrange for someone to cover for him and thankfully succeeds.
I pack up all my things within 2 hours. Crazy roommate watches me pack and then does her laundry.
Despite what happened I sleep like a baby because I am away from crazy roommate. Unforunately the next day I still have to go to work so I have to get up at 6am to be at work at 9:30. Then I get back to Rouen at 9pm, eat dinner, go to bed so I can wake up again at 6am the next morning. I do this for about 2 weeks.
Oh and I pay about 200 euros in train tickets a week for the pleasure.
Until one day I make a mistake and forget to put my work shoes in my bag so I am walking around the office in brown yellow striped pumas and a pencil skirt. A british colleague inquires. The whole story comes pouring out.
"So how much are you looking to spend on rent for an apartment?" she asks.
I tell her.
That's funny she replies, because I am looking to leave my apartment in Paris.
I see the apartment during lunch that very same day and it's so perfect it makes me want to cry.
April - So I learn that in France, it's not enough to that there will be an empty apartment and you have enough money to rent the empty apartment. No. In France you need:
- Have a long term work contract
- Make 3x the amount of rent
- Have a guarantor
- a 'dossier' with all sorts of papers that proves that you have the above + any other information that would assure then that you are not going to be the type of person that lives in an apartment and doesn't pay the rent.
What? You say? If I person doesn't pay the rent, they simply get kicked out of the apartment, right? Not in France. In France, once you sign a contract and have moved into an aparment it is very difficult to make you leave even if you don't pay the rent. And if it's during the winter, it's nearly impossible.
So owners are b*tches about who they let in. And because a good apartment in Paris is so hard to find, at any given time an owner has his/her pick of something like 30 dossiers so they can afford to be picky. And even if they didn't they would rather the aparment remain empty than let someone in who is at high risk of not paying the rent.
In my casae I didn't have my work contract yet because it's a tricky thing in France when you want to switch your visa status from student to working. Basically if you go to the company they will ask that you have a work visa before they can give you a work contract.
No problem. Except when you go to the prefecture, they ask that you have your work contract before they give you a work visa.
Right.
The way around this is for the company to write a 'letter of intention' which states that they plan to hire you once you have a work visa. You take this to the prefecture instead of a work contract and usually it's enough.
So because I didn't have my work contract yet I tried to submit my dossier to the agency (the owner of the aparment uses an agency instead of having direct contact) with the letter of intention.
Doesn't work. The agency tells me I need my work contract.
During this time the British girl is leaving the company and also Paris at the beginning of May. Fortunately she takes pity on me and holds on to her lease till the end of June so I have time to get my work papers. She also allows me to live there (I paid her the rent of course).
I asked around the expat community about how long it would take for me to get a work visa. One guy told me that since I was American it probably would be quick and he didn't want to get my hopes up by sounding too optamistic, but he thought that it would probably only take... 8 months.
May - I wait.
June - I wait. And panic. British girl extends her lease till end of August.
July- I get my work visa and rejoice. Re-submit my dossier and it is accepted.
But that's not the end because my dossier is accepted by the agency which only means they agree to send it to the owner for acceptance who at this point didn't even know of my existance and how hard I was working for him/her to take my money.
So the agency sends my dossier to the owner who has the power to reject the dossier altogether without explaination or second try. That's if, of course, he/she even saw the dossier at all because at this point we are in 'holiday season' in France where people take holiday for 4 weeks at a time.
So I wait some more. Fortunately I was accepted. I'll admit I squealed when I heard the news.
August - Despite the owner accepting to take my money, they apartment still wasn't mine yet because I still had to sign the contract (it took 2 weeks to prepare because of people's holiday schedules). Then an inspection of the apartment needed to be scheduled and both the old and new tenant have to be there.
This wouldn't be a big problem except British girl had gotten a new job with an asian company and was in China for the first 3 weeks of August. We finally got an inspection date of August 26th.
So that brings me to why I had to move out of the apartment I was moving into. In France there are two types of apartment rentals. Furnished and non-furnished and depending on the existance or absence of furniture, very different rules apply (Don't ask me why because I have no idea and frankly don't want to know). The apartment is of the non furnished varity so was suppose to be completely empty for the inspection.
Except the British girl didn't want to move the furniture and left it all to me. But the agency wanted the furniture to be moved out anyways. Nevermind that moving a queen sized bed, washer, refrigerator, couch, etc. out of an apartment only to move it back in the very same day is abso-positivily insane.
In the end we came to an agreement with the inspection guy that we would move all the furniture to the center of the rooms to he could inspect the walls and such.
However I still had to move out all personal belongings because, you know, I wasn't suppose to be there although I'd been living there for a past 5 months.
In the movies, when someone talks about moving to Paris in the next sceen they are sipping un cafe in their apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower. But of course real life isn't like that. In my case it took 5 months and no Eiffel Tower.
This is, however, the view from the street:
Not too shabby.
