the last six months

So I did something very strange the other day and that was to move out of an apartment I was moving into. To understand how this happened we have to go back 6 months.

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.

the past two weeks

Monday - Negotiate with my director about the terms of a permenent position with CSC. Haggle my way to an ok offer.

Tuesday - Tell my roomate I probably will take a position with CSC she tells me she "needs the apartment in March" so I need to leave. Gives me 2 weeks to find another place. I convince her to give me 3 weeks by telling her actually she had agreed to let me stay until the end of my internship (the 8th of March).

Wednesday - Everyone tells me I need a work contract to get an apartment in Paris.

Thursday through Sunday - Consider [read: agonize over] CSC offer. Go back and forth a million times. Finally decide to accept.

Monday - Meet with director ready to accept offer only to hear that offer has decreased substantially along with the sound of all my plans going down the drain. Shock, confusion, and anger ensue.

Tuesday - Get in timeless argument with roommate over not returning something I borrowed. Only problem is that the "thing I borrowed" is an electricity bill she gave me to pay 4 months ago and hadn't made mention of since so I had to find it and told her that I possibly left it at work. Roomate still demands I give it to her right away with arguments such as "you have to return things [a bill] you borrow" and "there's no reason to take it [a bill] out of the apartment" that from what I could tell, was delivered sincerely and without sarcasm or humor.

I start sleeping with my door locked.

Wednesday - Pride prevents me from taking CSC offer and I try to get back to something close to the original offer by threatening to not accept the offer and hence withdrawing from my current project. Doesn't work and end up having to follow through by going with my director to my current project manager and telling him I won't be staying.

Realized that although I leave the meeting with my pride in tact I now am one week away from being without job or home. i.e. a homeless person. i.e. a bum.

Thursday - Go into work with French pastery breakfast thingys hoping to surpress any ill will felt by client about my sudden last minute departure from project. Arrive to find manager has scheduled a meeting with me for "manager review". Brace myself for a bitching out.

Manager dicusses posibility of hiring me directly to work for the company.

I know it's just February but I think I've had my fill of emotional roller coaster quota for the year.

catacombs

So the French culture is well known to be one of theatre, beauty, and art and this past weekend I saw that this extended even to Paris' remedy for storing the bones of the dead.

First you have to walk a ways to get to the actual bone room and along the way I must say I was very impressed with the place's use of light (Is it wrong to want the person who did the lighting there to do lighting for my next apartment?)



It really created a good ambiance before seeing the entrance which states: "Stop! It's here, the empire of death!" (Best door sign, ever).



Immediately upon entry I was greeted by inhabitants of the empire.



After of course, the initial shock, I began to realize the enormity of it all. The walls for a good half mile (maybe more) consisted of human bones.



And after I got past that, I began to see that the bones were arranged in a decorative, almost artistic way. Some obvious (skull and crossbones).



Some practical (a giant vase).



And some even romantic (a heart).



Which begs the question, why? From what I had read, the catacombs resulted in a need to store human remains due to insanitary conditions in the city - not someone's art project. My own personal theory is that the guys whose job it was to do such a morbid and monotonous task just simple got tired of stacking femurs all day. And we all know boredom is the father of creativeness so one of the guys started being fancy and before you knew it, they had built a giant vase.

I was told that they search you before leaving the place to make sure you weren't trying to bring home with you the remains of a dead stranger. I found this to be silly.

But sure enough, before we left someone checked our bags. Next to him were a stack of bones (even skulls) all confiscated within the last couple of days.



Right. I wonder what people say when they're caught. Er. I had that skull on me before I came.

So yeah in the end the catacombs really made me think (about life, death, and humantiy), like good art should.

carte de sejour part deux

So today I went to the prefecture to get my new carte de sejour. You may be asking yourself, wait but didn't Kelly already go through this hellish nightmare?

No that was just the process of renewing my residence card. From that I got a receipt that says I have requested a new card along with an appointment to pick up the real thing in two months.

Those who are astute might wonder now, but wait today is 2 months and 2 weeks after Kelly's renewal appointment. Correct. I originally had an appointment on the 6th of January and on that day I went to the prefecture only to be greeted by a locked door and this sign:



No that's not an advertisement for a new club opening, it's the poor student's only means of knowing that the prefecture has in fact, moved, and if are unlucky enough to have an appointment during the week of the 4th - 8th you now have a new appointment 2 weeks after your original date (remember my rule about never getting something done the first time you go in France? mmm h'mmm).

That brings me to today. I was a little concerned about finding the place but that turned out to be silly since the prefecture was clearly marked with a giant line of unhappy people outside.

I was prepared for this because knowing how France works I was pretty sure that before they decided to change everyone's appointment on the week of the 4th to the week of the 18th , they had already given out appointments for 18th. That meant that now the already beyond capacity number of "appointments" (it's not really an appointment it's a time slot you have assigned to you along with like 50 other people) have doubled for the week of the 18th. This I was sure of.

What I didn't account for was the fact that the prefecture had now joined offices with... wait for it.

The French DMV! (that France, still full of surprises). So now imagine the above scenario and add to that people waiting at your average DMV.

Do you ever wonder to yourself that perhaps god is just some really bored guy that tries to amuse himself when there's no good t.v. on? Or perhaps that humanity is one big video game for aliens where the goal is to make doing the simplist thing as challenging as possible. Bonus points for ridiculousness.

I wondered these things while I stood in line to get in into the prefecture. Because it's like someone saw me go to the prefecture on the 6th and decided that no, it was just too easy. Let's multiple the line by 100, move the line outside, and make it not only cold, but raining as well. Hahahahahaha.



Everything. Happens. To. Me.

In the end I got in and got my new carte de sejour. The physical act of getting it took 2 minutes. Total wait time: 2 hours.

It expires in October 2010. I shall cherish every moment until then.

il neige encore

saint sylvestre

So against the advice of Parisiennes and my own experience of underwelming "iconic" things to do (yes New Year's eve in Time Square I am looking at you), I celebrated New Years at the Eiffel Tower. But first there was dinner.

Thinking ourselves clever we tried to book a restaurant next to the Eiffel tower only to be asked for a 300 Euro deposit for dinner. Per person.

Searching for something a little more budget friendly I exhausted my Lonely Planet for choices and scoured the internet. I finally found a resteraunt for 60 euros a plate and in a decent range of the Eiffel festivities.

The upside was the restaurant turned out to have a less expensive set menu for 35 euros that was not the 7 course New Year's eve special. We opted for this because 1. We wanted to finish dinner early to head to the Eiffel and 2. We (and our stomaches) still had vague memories of the other 7 course meal we had recently (Xmas).

The downside was that get what you pay for and I ended up getting two oysters as an appetizer (90 percent of the dish consisted of the uneditable shell, unediable salt pebbles, inediable seaweed, and oyster ice shreds which I didn't eat - on the right):



For my main course I ordered Gambas but it turned out to be just one big shrimp (I'm convinced the beady eye thing is laughing at me in the picture):



The chocolate cake for dessert and the live entertainment (the owners of the restaurant are also a paino/singer duo) weren't half bad this could be due to the fact that I was already drunk by this point (hey, I did have two oysters and a big shrimp for dinner, k?).

At 11 we headed to the Trocadero. Unforch so was everyone else so by the time we actually got close enough to the train to board it we were denied by the law of physics in which a body of mass can not occupy the same area as another 500 bodies of mass squeezed into a metro car. We got lucky by the 4th train when some unfortunate souls squeezed their way off the train.

Five arm-pitt filled "why the hell are you trying to hold on to the bar therefore pressing your arm against my face, falling is a luxury for those with space TO fall" metro stops later, we ended up at Trocadero only to get into the queue to get out of the metro.

At 11:50 we stepped out of the metro and into the mud and fog to view the Eiffel tower never before lights "spectacle" (read: the Eiffel tower turned different colors):



Then it kind of did this thing were the lights incrementally decreased from the top down and I guess the this was the countdown because then the Eiffel tower went into a blaze of white light:



Afterwards you heard scattered cries of "Happy New Year!" and popped champagne bottles (gotta love the absence of open liquor laws) throughout the crowd after everyone checked their watches (or cell phones) and figured that it was, in fact, new years (thank you confusing and unorganized France).

Then everyone kind of waited around for the Eiffel Tower to do something else. When it didn't the crowd started to thin out.

Cold, and ankle deep in mud we decided to walk to a further smaller metro while swigging champagne and dodging drunk people on the streets. It took us a total of 2 and half hours of metro transit time to get back to the hotel.

So yeah that was my New Years. Two and a half hours to consume 2 oysters and 1 shrimp, 15 minutes to watch the Eiffel tower change colors , and a total of almost 4 hours trying to get to the metro, on the metro, riding the metro, and finally off the metro.

90 percent crap kinda like my appetizer. C'est la vie.

Happy New Year.

paris neige

[Jordain]



[Jardin du Luxemburg]