August 23, 2009


Arrival
We’ve been in Europe just about 3 weeks and have already had our share of adventures. Our trip to Paris via Dublin was the best kind – uneventful. We arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and the kids were terribly tired. Our new landlady was waiting for us in the flat. It’s on the fifth floor and is accessible by an elevator that is roughly the size of a pre-school cubby.
The flat itself is fantastic; lots of light, corner unit, hardwood floors and tiny kitchen so I don’t have to feel guilty about not cooking. Even room for the occasional guest (futon couch in the living room)!

Our landlady went through the apartment with me, showing me all of its features. It has a shower! A dishwasher! A DRYER (more on this later)!!! Apparently the toilets are particularly sensitive and must be treated with the utmost respect. Because it’s been a while since I’ve lived in an apartment and since the kids have never lived in one, I was concerned about the lack of a fire escape. So, in my best French, I asked what “one should do” in case of fire. She looked at me (LIPS!!!) for several seconds and replied (in French): “I would suggest you leave the apartment and call the fire department.” Good thinking. I later learned that there is a back concrete staircase.

The landlady had very kindly stocked the fridge with bottled water which the children immediately pronounced undrinkable and begged for something “real” to drink. Luckily, there’s a small (as in closet-sized; only slightly bigger than the elevator) market across the street, so we all set out on our first French expedition. As I grabbed one of the twelve sets of keys and started to walk out the door, Megan said, “Mom, those are the wrong keys.” I speak French, I’ve lived in Europe for 9 years and I think I know the right set of keys when I see it. When we returned to the flat, I spent 45 minutes trying to open the door, before finally giving in and knocking on a neighbor’s door. She looked at my keys and said (in French, thank God, so Megan couldn’t understand and break into her “I told you so” song), “These are the wrong keys. These are the keys to the storage room.” By now, the girls were splayed on the staircase, in front of the door and by the elevator, dead to the world. It looked like a scene from a mob movie, sans the blood. The neighbor offered to try to track down the landlady, which we eventually did.
The landlady arrived with her husband about half an hour later. Although she had brought a correct set of keys with her, in my desperate attempt to prove my daughter wrong I had jammed the lock and now none of us could get in. Which is how I learned about the back staircase. So, eight short hours after landing in Paris, my children and I were finally in our flat for the night.

On the Road Again
We spent Wednesday and Thursday getting groceries, finding the school (one half block from the flat), and buying school supplies (roughly a US mortgage payment). The children discovered what a real croissant tastes like and I was reintroduced to real coffee.

On Friday, it was time to go to the train station and pick up our rental car which, being the hyper-organized person I am, I had reserved in March. We took a cab from the flat to the station and went into the adjacent building where all of the rental car agencies are housed: Avis, Hertz, National, EuropeCar, all the rental car agencies you can name, plus a few you’ve never heard of. There was unfortunately, no sign of our rental car agency – Dollar. I re-checked the address on the Travelocity printout (which, did I mention, I had kept in my green “travel” folder since March?) So we started at Avis and asked where Dollar is located. No idea. Tried Hertz – no idea. Finally, Claire spotted a dachshund-height sign that said “Thrifty Dollar.” It was affixed to an ADA sign. ADA is a French rental car company. Whoeee!! Who says we can’t find our rental car agency?! The glass door to the ADA office was locked but we saw someone inside, so we knocked. She came to the door and I showed her my rental car contract that read “Dollar Rent–A–Car.” She perused it carefully and then jabbed a finger at the words “Rent –A –Car.” “You need to go to EuropeCar,” she told me. When I pointed out that her company, ADA, apparently handled Dollar and Thrifty reservations, she shook her head vehemently and pointed at the EuropeCar office down the hall.

So, off we went to EuropeCar, which had two agents working and a line of five people. A five-person line in France is roughly equivalent to a fifty-person line in the US (a fixed exchange rate of ten to one). Here’s why. Inevitably, one of the people in the line is not French. He has made a request that seems completely reasonable to him but, to the French agent, the request is so absurd as to not even be worth consideration. I have provided a sample of such requests and responses below:
1. May I please have the rental car that I reserved?
Answer: The rental car you reserved is not here. We have only one rental car left. It is the size of a wheelbarrow, which in France means it seats five comfortably.

2. Can I pay the rate that was advertised and that I agreed to when I made the reservation?
Answer: You are very fortunate, sir, that we have a rental car available at all. Please refer to my answer to your first ridiculous question. You see behind you several other people who, I am sure, would be happy to pay any amount of Euros for this car. Would you like to ask this question again? In that case, I will refer you to my manager. She is at lunch, so it will be several hours before she can attend to your petty whims. By that time I will surely have rented this car, this very last car, to one of the very nice and patient people behind you.

3. Is it possible to get a rental car that has some gas in it?
Answer: Sir, I am trying very hard to be helpful to you. First, I give you a rental car. Now, you want gas? Let me explain to you how it works in France. We give you the car. The car has just enough gas in it that you can drive to the gas station which is just one kilometer from here. This is a very good gas station and the only one that is close enough that you can reach it without running out of gas (although, sadly, it is in exactly the opposite direction from where you would like to go).


The other issue with lines is that, as many observers have previously noted, people only stand in them until the bus arrives, an agent finishes with a customer, the elevator doors open…you get the idea. At that point there is a violent scrum, wherein the person who was last in line often emerges victorious at the front, without casting so much as a glance at the 90-year-old woman lying bleeding at his feet. So, after forty or so minutes, when I began to approach the front of the line, I stationed each of the children in a defensive position. It’s not unlike coaching peewee soccer, where you have to make sure a kid is covering each of the sides instead of bunching up in the middle. The only difference is that the enemy (ok, admittedly not an appropriate coaching term) is approaching from behind.

As my turn came, sure enough, an unshaven mousse-haired twenty-something - wearing pink capris, an Izod with the collar turned up, and carrying a man-purse – darted from the very back of the line down the left side and tried to vector in to the available agent. I am pleased and not a little proud to report that my youngest daughter saw the play unfold and executed some wicked man-to-man coverage. He never saw her coming. She blocked him and created a perfect alley for me to approach the agent. SCORE!!!! To his credit, the guy acknowledged her outstanding defense with a little smirk and retreated to the back of the line. I would imagine that if you’re secure enough to wear pink capris and a man-purse, you can handle being outmaneuvered by an eight-year-old.

Where was I? Ah, yes, at the front of the line! With an agent!! I handed him the paperwork, which he perused with a dark scowl on his face, only to burst into a huge smile.

“Madame,” he said. “You are at the wrong place!” This was the happiest he’d been all day, I’m sure, since it meant he had solved a problem and shortened the line considerably without actually having to do anything. He proved, however, to be extremely helpful, since he had figured out where we needed to go. And, here’s the amazing part, he got up from behind the counter and led us down the hallway… back to ADA!!! He showed the woman our paperwork, the very same paperwork I had shown her an hour earlier, and she nodded and smiled. I thanked him profusely and off he trotted back to his own line of miserable foreigners. The woman looked at me nonchalantly and I said in my best French, “So our rental car is reserved here, after all.” “Yes, “ she responded smiling. “Unfortunately, now is the beginning of my lunchtime, so you will have to wait until I return in two hours.”

The Bank

Opening a bank account in France is sort of like trying to get a Screen Actors Guild card in the US. You can’t open a French bank account without a French residence and you can’t get a French apartment without a French bank account. Once we navigated this obstacle, I was the proud owner of two French bank cards which, with the exception of their color, looked pretty much the same to me. The bank sent me approximately two inches of documents to accompany these cards that, although I can read some French, I had absolutely no idea what to do with.

The French bankcard, fondly nicknamed “carte bleu” (“blue card”) by those in the know, is the key to France. With a card you can zoom effortlessly through tollbooths, shops, restaurants and the like while you are smiled upon by all manner of important French officials and service providers. You can rent a bike anywhere in Paris, stick a baguette in its charming front basket and sing as you weave untouched through traffic on the Champs Elysees. Without it, you are doomed to drag a shopping cart down tiny streets clogged with old widows who curse at you for blocking their way, or worse wait in long lines staffed by cranks who heartily resent having to deal with people who are too stupid, too poor, too foreign, or otherwise morally undeserving of the carte bleu. When I rented the car, I was asked for the carte bleu by the agent and told that with one, I could merrily smash the car to smithereens and it would be no problem. Everywhere we went in France, it seemed, I was asked for my carte bleu and, when I couldn’t produce one, instantly my day got worse. I wanted a carte bleu. I looked at my two bankcards. One was black with orange lettering and the other was gold. Nothing blue. I tried using them anyway. The ATM machine spit them back with a message that loosely translated, meant “Nice try. This card is not a carte bleu. This card is nothing. You are nothing. Go away.”

It was time to visit the bank. You can’t just walk in to a bank in Paris. You must be buzzed in the outer door, wait in a tiny vestibule while you are examined by video camera while the person on the other end decides if you are worthy of entering the bank and accessing your money. I was lucky enough to gain admittance, and I approached the counter, where I was greeted by the top of a teller’s head. “Oui, madame,” he said in a voice that suggested he couldn’t believe I had the audacity to interrupt him while he was painstakingly entering tiny numbers into tiny boxes on a tiny form. What the hell was so important?

I presented him with my two cards and my two inches of paperwork.

“Unfortunately, my cards don’t seem to work,” I opened.

“Of course they do,” he countered.

“No, I’m sorry they don’t,” I raised.

“I can assure you they do,” he called.

We were at an impasse. I asked him to look at my paperwork. He wouldn’t. “Go outside,” he ordered. “Turn left, and find the machine. Put your card in the machine.”

“But I’ve tried to do this twice already,” I said. “It didn’t work.”

The poor man had reached his limit. How much of this nonsense was he expected to suffer? He stood up and placed both hands flat on the counter. He stared at me. Hard. “Madame, go outside,” he barked. “Turn left, and find the machine. Put your card in the machine. It will work.”

I dutifully did as I was told. The machine ate my card.

I went through the same entry process (who knows, maybe in the minute I was outside the building I had been recruited, trained, armed and deployed by a terrorist organization). Of course my helpful friend had gone back to the important task of entering tiny numbers and was surprised and not a little annoyed to see me back.

“It worked, yes?” he said, without raising his head.

“The machine ate my card,” I told him, feeling a bit triumphant, in spite of the circumstances.

He looked up, surprised. He stood up. He looked down at my paperwork. He looked at me.

“Madame, he said. “You have, I think, used the wrong pincode.” He shuffled down the paperwork an inch or so and pointed to a tiny string of numbers. His specialty, of course. “This is the pincode you must use.”

“Could you retrieve my card?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.” He disappeared for a few moments and returned holding my card.


As I gathered up my papers and prepared to leave, he said, in passing, “Of course, you will not be able to use your card for eight business days.”