An American in Provence

Friday, her bi-monthly day off, which is usually spent running errands (doctor's appointments, La Poste, the bank, etc.) and eating chocolate in front of the TV, watching series episodes that her husband can't stand to watch.
But this morning, she has a rendez-vous at the Bureau de Proximité of the Mairie of Marseille to file the paperwork for her passport and ID card.
She wakes up around 7, eats breakfast, and gathers all her papers together. Certified copies of her Acte de Naissance? Check.
Really bad ID photos that will haunt her for the next ten years? Check.
86€ in Timbres Fiscales to pay for the passport? Check.
Justificatif de domicile? Check (cellphone bill since the electricity bill from EDF only comes out once a year now.)
Filled out forms? Check
Décret de Naturalisation? Check
A little before 9 she heads over to the Bureau. She had called Allo Mairie a few weeks earlier to set up an appointment. The Bureau is open, it opened at 8:30, a rarity for French administration. She makes a few photocopies and waits to be called.
The woman behind the desk is nice and chatty, asking the usual questions about why she is here and where she is from.
As she is dating and signing the forms, she realizes that it is 6 years, to the day, since she arrived in France. What a coincidence! Here she is now, officially French, filling out the paperwork to get her French Passport and French ID card.
After about half an hour of formalities, she is told that she will get an SMS on her cellphone to come pick up her passport in about 3 weeks and the ID card in about two months.
She heads back home, and picks up her shopping trolley and heads back out to do the grocery shopping, instead of on Saturday morning like usual.
100€ in groceries later, she returns home, puts away the food, and spends the rest of the day watching tv, eating peanut butter sandwiches, and straightening up the apartment inbetween the peanut butter - eating and tv-watching.
Her frenchman arrives home around 7, and they order a pizza for their weekly pizza and a movie night. They have been ordering pizza once a week from the same place for about 5.5 out of the past 6 years. She then heads to bed, while he stays up, looking at motorcycles on the internet.

6 years in France!!

She has been in France for five years now.

On Monday, three days before the official 5-year anniversary, she re-submitted her file to obtain French nationality, hoping that even French bureaucrats wouldn't be so picky as to send it back for being filed three whole days ahead of time.

Woke up at 5:40, did a quick ten minutes of exercise, then shower, catch up on emails and blogs while eating a yogurt, out the door at 6:30 to drive to Aix. Parks in the parking garage, gets to her office a few minutes after 7. It is her favorite part of the day- calm, no people in the streets, cool, quiet. Nobody else has arrived at the office and won't for at least another hour.
She prepares her tea, turns on her computer, then surfs the internet or writes in her journal until about five minutes before 8 when her Frenchman calls to make sure she arrived okay. A quick conversation that takes place after his shower and before his breakfast. It is a habit that they have picked up over the years of working. They don't call each other throughout the day unless it is necessary, but a quick "I made it, have a good day" every morning.

At around 8 she begins working- reading CaseLaw, responding to Official Notices from the Patent Offices, working on the drawings for a new patent to be filed.
The Others start arriving around 9 and say hello but no Bises here.

At around 12:30 she leaves to go to La Poste in the Centre Ville- swerving tourists with their cameras, tour groups, and the little white train, she makes it to La Poste, takes a ticket, waits to be called. One package sent to the US for 25€, then quick to Chez Paul for her favorite sandwich, tomate mozzarella as well as a macaron au chocolat to be shared that evening. At 1, her French class starts, once a week, usually the mondays, in a little café on the main square in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Dictée, verb tenses, conversation while sipping a cappucino. At 2, the official time she landed in Marseille, back to work for the rest of the afternoon. One or two Nespresso espressos throughout the day, earplugs and calming medication to try and not go nuts with the street accordion player, then around 6:30 she starts to get ready to leave. It is summer so it is still light out, but fewer tourists out in the streets now.

On the road, back to Marseille. Usually less traffic at this time of night, but can always run into heavy traffic due to concerts at the Stade Velodrome or the Dôme.

She arrives around 7:30 and luckily manages to find a parking spot right in front of their building. Getting to be quite an expert at parallel parking, as well as accepting the fact that no car remains undented for long in Marseille, she swings right into the parking spot, no problem.

For dinner, quick pasta and tuna, her Frenchman's favorite, while they watch a TV series episode together, then she heads to her desk to study for a few hours before falling into bed before 11. It is hot, so they leave the fan on and the windows open all night long.

And that is the 5-year anniversary of French residency.

She has been in France now for two years. Her part-time 5-month contract did not turn into a full-time offer, so she continued to search, month after fruitless month, for a job. She was, quite frankly, astounded that she was not snapped up right away, especially as there are many small, medium, and large businesses in the area with her specialty. When her Frenchman told her that it might be very difficult for her to find a job in France, she nodded and said "Yes, I understand"; while secretly thinking to herself "I've never had a problem finding a job before, why wouldn't they snatch up an English speaking person with a Master's?"
Only to find that while the French might lament to each other their deplorable English skills in private, in the business world they are quite offended that their speaking and writing skills are not up to snuff and that a native English speaking person might actually be able to speak and write English better. In short, they feel threatened and firmly close the door.
At the end of October, they bought their first property, and moved in the first half of November, only to be quickly confronted with major renovations.
A few weeks before Christmas, they pulled out the bathtub, and she (very naively) thought that it would only take a week or so to re-do, it should be done before they leave for the US for Christmas.
In the US, they spend an interesting two weeks snow-bound with family, but at the end, she isn't too eager to return to France- spending all day at home, in a messy apartment with no shower, trying to find a job, depressed, and having serious thoughts about killing the neighbor's dog.
She has joined a "Club de Jeunes Diplômés" whose aim is to use networking and informational interviews to try and make contacts. The idea is to contact companies that you are interested, and not say that you are looking for a job, but just that you would like to find out more about what they do, and ask to have a 30 minute discussion with someone from their company who does what you are interested in. Then, if they say okay, you go (with several copies of your resume) talk to the person, find out more about what they do, and try to find out (at the end) whether they are hiring and, if not, whether they know anyone else who is.
She scores a few interviews this way, but once she goes to them she suspects they accepted because they (youngish Frenchman) thought it would be amusing to meet une américaine.
At the end of February, she finally gets a job offer- Project Manager for an industrial company, something she has no clue about, but will take anything at this point, as it isn't teaching English to rugrats.
The first few (days, weeks, months) are very hard. She hasn't "worked" in the proper sense of the term for almost two years, and never in an industrial environment and never all in a foreign language. Plus a few train strikes added in that double the commute time and stress, and the months pass very very slowly.
The bathroom is finally finished, so she can take actual showers now, instead of taking them at the gym near her work.
Her Frenchman is going to spend August working on the apartment, as usual, and since the factory is closing for a week, she is going to stay home and help him.
She keeps sending out resumes, hoping for something else, even though, as her Frenchman reminds her, it pays well and many people would be very happy to have it, given the unemployment rate. She remembers how long it took her to find a job and how depressed she was, and agrees.

She has now been in France for exactly one year.
She and her frenchman have been married for almost TWO WHOLE MONTHS now, and she still gets a secret thrill from being called Mrs. or saying "my husband".
Her French courses are now over, and most of the friends she made have left to return to their home countries, as they were only in France for a year to be a fille au pair.
She and her frenchman have signed an agreement to buy an apartment, and plan to move in November.
She still doesn't have a job, but desperately searches the internet when she gets a chance. She has signed up with the local job search agencies. She is uneligible for unemployment, big surprise, but is able to benefit from their courses on how to write a resume, how to write a cover letter, etc.
She is also working 10 hours per week for five months, May to September, from home for a company that does technology watch. She hopes that it will turn into a full-time job once the five-month contract is over. It would consist of traveling to different conferences all over Europe, meeting with different people, talking about new technology, then writing up reports.
She spends the weekdays at home alone, sitting in front of the fan, hauling their laundry to the laundromat, lugging groceries up three flights of stairs, and going to see one of her friends for lunch every Friday. On the weekends they go to visit his family or nearby monuments and museums, which they actually have time to do since they don't have an apartment to renovate. In August, they will be going to Italy for their honeymoon.
She is starting to feel comfortable in France, and not quite so homesick.

A hot summer day in the south of France. At the Marseille Provence airport, one tired 25-year old American woman arrives, after a long trip Denver-Frankfurt-Marseille. She has quit her job, given up her apartment, sold her car, given many of her possessions to her friends or else to a benefit garage sale, sent 15 boxes of junk (whoops, very precious items such as clothes and books) from Virginia to France by boat, obtained a student visa for France, attended several family weddings/reunions, and said many goodbyes.
She hasn't seen, for exactly six months, her reason for going through all this rigamarole.
She gets off the plane, gets her luggage, and goes out to meet her Frenchman. He is waiting there, one red rose in hand. After a somewhat teary reunion, they drag her luggage out to the parking lot and proceed to shove it all into his smallish French car, where another red rose is waiting. They drive to Marseille where he has rented an apartment. Once arrived in Marseille, they double park and hurriedly drag suitcase after suitcase up three flights of stairs, toss them into the apartment (where another red rose is waiting), then go back down to try and find a parking spot. That evening he cooks her a special dinner and then she goes to bed early, waking up in the middle of the night to throw up. Most likely not due to the special dinner, but just traveling, nervousness, and anxiety.
The next few days she is quite exhausted and suffering from jet lag, so the days pass in a wiltering blur. He is still working until the beginning of August, so she spends her time unpacking and exploring the area. One afternoon, sitting in a park reading a book, she is approached by Random Frenchman who quite quickly realizes she doesn't understand a word he is saying and is therefore the perfect candidate for lame pick-up attempts. He says that they should go back to his apartment so that she can meet his family and that they can all talk in English together. She politely refuses. He insists. She moves away.
The boxes sent by boat begin to arrive, so again with the double parking and hauling box after box up three flights of stairs in the July heat. The only problem is that they don't have much furniture, so the stuff pretty much stays in the boxes for the moment.
On the weekend, they go visit his family and make many trips to local furniture stores (IKEA! Castorama! BUT!). She met his family in May 2004 when they visited France for two weeks. Although they are very nice and welcoming, hours spent trying to understand what everyone is saying leave her exhausted with raging headaches. Plus hours spent trying to pick out not too expensive furniture that won't be too difficult to fit in their smallish French car and then dragged up three flights of stairs in the July heat is quite exhausting.
They can't wait for August, when he will be on vacation and they can start looking for wedding reception sites and a trip to Bretagne to meet his other grandmother, whom he hasn't seen in four years.
All in all, an interesting first few weeks in her new country.