Pondering #3: Social Security

One of the first things that we had to do when we got to Dijon was sort out Michael’s working visa and my social security. These proved to be two things that took longer than we thought possible. It was Michael’s introduction to real French red tape and my introduction on how to become Frenchified.

To be able to work legally in France, most foreigners need a carte de séjour. Even citizens of EU countries other than France need this work permit apparently. However, because of the red tape many people are living and working in France without the necessary papers. Some of my friends had been living and working in France for 3 years before finally getting the piece of paper that allowed them to be legal money-earners. Michael went to the Prefecture (regional immigration registration office) countless times and even travelled in and out of the country in the time it took for the ‘system’ to award him his carte de séjour.

Michael’s first brush with French red tape was in Sydney with the French Consulate before we left. They had told him he needed a visa to enter France, which would allow the process of getting a work permit to begin. As part of the paperwork requirements for this visa, Michael had to provide the Consulate with an itinerary of his trip. They said that this is normally obtained from your travel agent. Alas! We didn’t have a travel agent. We were flying standby. And alas! Michael made the mistake of telling them this fact! They then refused to award his visa without proof that we were definitely travelling to France. They needed an official itinerary or he wouldn’t get the visa. So, being a smart person, I printed out an itinerary of our standby flights on United and, not being smart people, the French Consulate accepted it! Phew! Michael could now enter France legally. All he had to do was visit the Prefecture within 7 days of his arrival in France and he would be given a carte de séjour.

You would think this was too good to be true, and it was. After lining up for an hour, he was swiftly told that he could have his carte de séjour only after he provided another set of papers. These needed to be faxed over from Australia. Several months later, when he went to hand in some more required documents, he came across another man at the window of the Prefecture office who suggested he get a 10-year carte de séjour, since his wife (that’s me) was French (on paper anyway). This process cost more time and finally after 9 months and many renewals of permit pendings, he was granted his 10-year carte de séjour. Yay!

But what about me? I am French on paper but I wouldn’t know how to be French if I tried. Having a French passport and a French Dad should automatically give you a free ticket to access the French health system, shouldn’t it? Apparently not. The first 2 or 3 three visits were pointless. Each time I explained how I had dual nationality but had never lived in France and each time I was directed to the same desk (the one for foreigners). There I was told the same thing yet again, that I couldn’t have access to the French social security system with an Australian passport.

So one day, having learned my lesson, I went in there and only showed my French passport, explaining that I was born in Australia but had never lived in France and needed to know how to get social security now that I was living in France. This tactic worked and I was directed to take a number to make an appointment to come back (in 6 weeks!) and see the man who could help me.

When the day finally arrived, the man did actually appear to know what he was talking about but I still had to obtain documents from Australia to complete the dossier they needed to process my request (part of the problem with the bureaucratic system in France). I, of course, gave up and only tried again after a few more months. This caused the lady at the front desk to remonstrate me for not organising it straight away when I arrived and she promptly sent me to another counter to fix the situation. And wouldn’t you know, this time, at last, the lady simply said, “Oh yes, all you need to do is fill in this form and return it to us. You should have you social security card in the mail within 14 days.” And get it I did, within 14 days!

The most frustrating thing about the system is the system itself. The employees at the respective offices seem to be armed with a minimum of information and a maximum of buck-passing tools. If a customer has a query or question that the employees can’t answer, they’re taught that obviously the customer hasn’t come with the right form or piece of identification and they should be promptly sent away. But don’t dismay, the French people themselves know that perseverance is the key and this always works in the end. As it did for me. I ended up receiving my social security card in January, a mere 8 months after starting the whole process.

In the meantime, while I was still trying to sort out my social security problems, I had the bad luck to need to visit a dentist. I’m not one for going to the dentist every 6 months for a clean and $60 thank you very much. I hadn’t been to the dentist for a clean for maybe 10 years? So, silly me, after brushing my teeth one night before bed, I felt a hole on the inside of one of my bottom teeth. I thought I’d chipped one of my teeth and even my aversion to dentists had to be put aside in this case. Michael was worried about how much it was going to cost to go to the dentist and I slept very badly for several nights, dreaming that one of my teeth actually fell out! I have these dreams sometimes...I wonder what they mean? Actually, don’t tell me – maybe I don’t want to know!

Anyway, after ringing a dentist and having a very rude lady on the other end of the phone tell me that I needed to find out what health cover I had before I could see their dentist, I got in touch with a different dentist, a lovely lady who booked me in that afternoon.

To my great relief, when she saw my teeth she said it was only tartar! Yay! And she inspected my other teeth with interest then stopped and asked me how old I was. That's when I started worrying again. Were my teeth really going to fall out? But no need to panic! She just asked me why I had such good teeth and why I didn't have any holes or tooth decay! Phew! (I did start wondering that maybe it wasn’t such a good thing to have no holes or decay…why else would she be so shocked?)

In the end I had to go for two tartar cleaning sessions and she even told me how much it was going to cost before I committed to making a booking with her. It was unfortunate that I didn’t have my social security to claim back the expense but she was such a nice dentist! She has completely changed my view of dentists (but she has also confirmed that I don’t need to go for cleans every 6 months…not yet anyway).

Bread and Keys

The day came (finally) to exchange the keys for our new apartment in Rue Musette. I call it an apartment because it wasn’t really a unit (too old for that) and it wasn’t really a flat (it wasn’t flat - the floor was a bit not level in places!) so it was an apartment. In French they shorten the French l’appartement to l'apparte so that's what I'll do too. And it was our dream apparte. It was tops! We moved in as soon as it was legally ours and began to make it our home.

We did find some minor problems with l’apparte but they paled when we thought about living at the fac. There were a couple of leaky taps and gurgling frog-like sounds that came up from the bath drain. The plumber who gives quotes came to see about making a quote to give to the landlord to see if he’d ok the fixing of the leaks for the quoted price, after which time he would call us to make an appointment for the plumber who fixes things to come and fix things. So the leaks got fixed eventually. Ah the French! But the frog lived with us for almost the whole 14 months we were there (mysteriously disappearing after we finally tried frogs’ legs at a local restaurant)!

The markets woke us up on our first morning but we soon learned to close the windows on the nights before market days. We could people-gaze from our bedroom windows! And our windows had shutters (a strange concept coming from Sydney where shutters are pieces of wood nailed to the sides of windows to give the appearance of having shutters). Real proper French shutters! Cool - or as they say in French - supercool! (I learned that saying quite easily - I wonder why?!)

The apparte was located above a very poor-quality chain bread shop called Point Chaud, but no matter how bad the final product seemed to be, the smells of chocolate, butter and pastry, creeping up from the ovens were absolutely divine (and enough to destroy the strongest person’s diet!). Also very warm and welcoming when leaving for work early on winter mornings. When it came to choice of bread shops nearby, there were many. And we tried most of them before deciding on making one of them our local. It wasn’t the closest but it worth the extra 50 metres in walking (walk off the bread). It had scrumptious baguettes and bread loaves that didn’t go hard and inedible after 2 days like the ones we’d been buying at the fac. This bread shop used fresh dough every day, which really made a difference in the end. It also had variety, not just the usual baguettes and patisserie selection that other bread shops provided. 

And the ladies who worked there, obviously sisters, were charming. When Michael’s parents came for a visit in October, we told the bread shop ladies that they would be coming in to buy our bread but that they didn’t speak French. The ladies were happy to oblige and Michael’s parents commented on how friendly and helpful they had been. It probably wasn’t the best bakery in Dijon but it was all we needed in a bread shop. 

Fete de la Musique

When they say they're having a party in the streets of Dijon, they actually mean it! One Saturday night in June, and the first day of Official Summer, Dijon unpacked it's mini stages, plugged in its amps and presented the public with a musical display that rivalled the Big Day Out (music festival that tours around Australia and New Zealand in January every year).

On every street corner, and even in between, bands of all persuasions strummed, bashed and harmonised their way into the night. Some bands were so close to the next band that they clashed (maybe that was the desired effect!). There was traditional French accordion music with audience participation. There were your usual covers rock bands who really should have stayed in their garage. There was a very brave boy who sang Red Hot Chilli Peppers songs with a French accent and an acoustic guitar-playing friend. There was a thrash, crash, hard rock, heavy metal band whose lead singer burst into a fascinating opera voice. There was a Celtic dancing corner in a courtyard of the Palais des Ducs, where passers-by could do a bit of a square dance before heading to the electronic dance stage around the corner where the DJ played trance, stance, dance music.

The night was great. The day leading up to it was not so. We had a timetable printed out from the website of the local paper and had made a meeting time of 4pm with a friend from Michael's lab at Place Darcy, near the Dijon version of the Arc de Triumph. The music started at 3pm the timetable said. Uh-huh. At 6pm we sat down at a cafe and ordered Monacos (shandy with grenadine) and pondered whether we had the right day. We'd seen endless stages setting up and bands tuning (start a song then stop - sound check. Start the same song again then stop - sound check.), but no real action. At 8pm we sat down at our favourite Irish Pub (one of two in Dijon) and had a beer (very unFrench). What to do? Should we stay and watch this band that's setting up inside their truck and that keeps playing the same backing track while they warm up their instruments (Irish flute, banjo, and other strumming guitar like things that probably had strange names)? Or should we head off home and give up on the old music festival?

Well, to cut to the chase (phew!), we didn't give in. We finally worked out that the light probably had a lot to do with the fact that everything started late: the entertainment started about 8.30pm and was still going strong when we started the forty minute walk home to the fac at 1.30am. We kind of breathed easy thinking that we weren't going home to our future flat since it was right above those two bands competing for loudness and crowdness. The walk home was a bit cool and we now know why all those girls walk around town with cardigans tied around their waists in the middle of summer- they don't plan on coming home for dinner!

Aix-en-Provence-or-not

The saga all started when the alarm went off at 4.30am on Saturday morning (kind of like the good old days working at the airport). We put on our walking shoes and our backpacks and headed out the door and towards the train station. As we entered the station after our brisk 40-minute walk (you may think we were stupid but there are no buses at 5am in Dijon so we had no choice!), we got excited. We were going to Aix-en-Provence to meet up with my sister, Jo, for a couple of minutes before she left to return to England.

Alas!!! A sign displayed at the entry to the departures level informed us that due to strikes the past few days (surprise, surprise), some trains had been cancelled and we were all of a sudden not going to Aix. What to do, what to do? Cry? No, another girl was already doing that at the counter next to us. Get angry? No, that's too American (sorry!). Get our money back? Yep. Got it. We caught a bus home after a cuppa at the train station café and regrouped. For the simple reason that we did not want to stay at the horrible fac all weekend we decided to hire a car and go on a tour of our local Burgundy area.

From the time I was old enough to be given a sample of wine at the dinner table (about 3 years old or so…), my father had gone on about the fabulous wine at Nuits St Georges in France. Just after we’d arrived in Dijon we realised that it was just south of us on the way to Beaune. So this was our goal for the weekend: we would drive to Nuits St Georges, sample the lovely wine and enjoy the country town feel.

Alas! It didn’t have such a country town feel. It was a boring town with nothing to attract us young wine lovers other than a Cassissium. So we went there. After all, it had free tasting of crème de cassis! And actually it turned out to be very informative about the life and times of the blackcurrant.

Unfortunately it wasn’t going to keep us entertained all weekend and so we had to come up with another plan (Plan Z?). With us we had a Michelin Guide to the Burgundy and Jura areas and, after a thorough reading of about 2 pages, decided that we would head for the Morvan. Situated in the heart of Burgundy, this regional nature park had been described to us by friends native to the area as a great place to go for beautiful waterfalls, magnificent mountains and luscious green hills. It seemed just the place to relax and wind down after a bad start to the weekend.

After driving for what seemed like an age, we came across a place called Châteauneuf, an old fortified town set high up above a valley. We wound our way up the hill and into the town to check it out. We were mostly after a church where we could take shelter from the horrible heat (no air-conditioning).

As we sat admiring the vaulted ceiling from a pew, we contemplated what to do next. As it stood we didn’t have much direction and if we continued as we were, we’d end up driving around in circles all weekend and not really see or do anything out of the ordinary (other than drive around in a foreign country seeing amazing foreign things!). Something must have clicked in our heads because we suddenly had a brilliant idea. We would try and make our way to a little village called Rogny-les-Sept-Écluses (sept écluses – seven locks). Just before leaving Australia we'd been given a book to read on the plane to France called French Spirits by Jeffrey Greene. The story was based on an American couple who’d bought a disused presbytery in the village. We thought we might try to find the presbytery since we were in the neighbourhood (well, as far as Australia and Burgundy are concerned).

We bought a map and off we went in our little diesel car (with turbo for the boys). We made it to Rogny at about 9pm (broad daylight in other words) after a few hours of ambling along winding country roads.

We found that Rogny does indeed have seven locks, no longer in use, but still an impressive sight, rising 34 metres. They look like a giant staircase. I could see why they were a marvel of engineering at the time, built to overcome the large difference in height between the Loire River and the Loing River. These connected with the River Seine through a series of canals and rivers to form an important unbroken water trade route between the English Channel and the Mediterranean Sea. The old locks aren’t used anymore though. The Canal Briare, which runs through Rogny, was re-routed in 1880 around the old locks through six new locks.

I’d never seen a working lock in my life so I was captivated when a boat came through. I watched in awe as they closed the gates behind the boat and slowly let the water in under the front gates from the river ahead, which was higher. Then when the water levels were the same, the gates opened to allow the boat to go on its journey. It was fascinating.

The next morning after breakfast on the terrace of our hotel, we ventured up the hill to the presbytery to see if it really did look like the picture on our book cover. We knew as soon as we came to the little square that it was. Exactly the same. And who did we encounter outside painting the very shutters that he’d talked about painting in his book, but the author himself! I was overcome with a strange feeling of already knowing the place through reading his book and like silly tourists we walked up to him and introduced ourselves. He was lovely and showed us around his property and we chatted away for about half an hour, after which time we got him to sign our copy of his book (first time I’ve ever got an autograph…well, there was that time I got one of the Wiggles to sign a piece of paper just before their flight to LA took off but that was for someone else…I swear!).

We needed to get the car back early the next morning but we had been told that Vézelay was definitely worth a visit and being on our way home, we decided to take a look. Our directions were to follow the signs to the autoroute (you can sometimes drive 50km to get to the autoroute just by following the signs!), and along the way we’d find Vézelay. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the massive stone steeples of a church rose up from a perched village on a distant hilltop.

I don’t know what draws me to these kinds of big stone structures. Perhaps it’s the fact that in Australia we only have a small number of stone buildings less than 200 years old. Whatever it is, the Basilique Ste-Madeleine in Vézelay really did loom up and although you can imagine it’s big from a distance, up close it’s absolutely massive.

We parked our car in the pay parking and headed up the steep cobblestone street to the main square outside the church (where of course we discovered there was free parking!). We also wanted a bit of lunch seeing as how it was already nearly 2pm and that’s when all the food places tend to close for the day in France. I can’t even remember what we ate for lunch it was that unmemorable! It was probably something French like onion tart and salad.

We followed a group of tourists around with a monk explaining in detail the different features of the basilica. It’s amazing how informative some guided tours are. It’s a bit hit and miss but if you get a good one you’ll always learn something interesting that you just won’t get out of the self-guided tours.

What started off as an abbey church then a parish church was raised to the status of basilica in 1920 (don’t know what the difference between all these are…their physical size?). Back in the 12th century, St. Bernard preached the 2nd Crusade from its steps and almost 50 years later, it was at Vézelay that the French King Phillipe-Auguste and the English King Richard the Lionheart met before their departure on the 3rd Crusade. Its main features are its capitals and its tympanum. Now, if most of you are like me, you won’t have a clue what these are! Well, I found out (one of the many things I learned during our hot summer of visiting churches to escape the heat!). At the main doorway into the church is normally an arch decorated with statues set around a sculptured centrepiece. This centrepiece, or tympanum, is meant to symbolise the mission given by Jesus to the Apostles upon his ascension into Heaven: to spread the Word of God. Pilgrims coming to the Ste-Madeleine to look at the relics of Mary Magdalene in its crypt would have been welcomed by reassuring stories of salvation after a long and hard journey. Not being very arty I would usually just take a quick look, say, “Ahh” or, “Ooh”, and move on. With our monk guide we stopped for a good 15 minutes and studied in detail the story depicted in the sculpture and its interpretations and I actually learned something.

The group moved on into the main hall of the basilica and the monk took us through some of the capitals. At the top of the pillars lining the sides of the hall are sculptures that depict different scenes and images depending on the artist and the period they’re constructed in. These are called capitals. Again, I actually saw the scenes the stone carvings represented instead of just looking and moving on to the next point of interest written in the guide book. There was such expression in the faces of the stone figures and such detail in the animal statuettes. It really is amazing how talented the artists were. These days art means many things but I think they had it pretty spot on back then (again, I speak as a layperson in the artist world!). 

Our tour ended and we went for a stroll around the back of the basilica to find the gardens and view of the countryside our guide book told us about. To our surprise, there was a fair in full swing, complete with children’s competitions and stalls selling all kinds of wares. We tasted honeys and watched woodcarvers before taking some pictures of what we thought might be Dijon (a mere 140km away!), which reminded us that we should be getting home. And so ended a spur-of-the-moment weekend trip. And we still haven’t been to Aix!

Pondering #2: No Sunday Openings

During our first few weeks in Dijon, we discovered many things that were new to us. The biggest shock to our system was that nothing opened on Sundays. The streets of Dijon are completely deserted in the morning except for a few desperate people who can get up early and catch one of the few supermarkets that open until midday (hey - midday's early on a Sunday!). Bakeries also open early for a few hours but it’s not until about three in the afternoon that the tea shops and patisseries open for the afternoon strollers, presumably the time when everyone has finished having lunch with their families.

In Australia, most supermarkets are open every day of the week, including most evenings until late. This means that no real meal planning is necessary. If you need something on a Sunday, you can just step over to the local supermarket and buy it. Not so in Dijon. We learned from fairly early on that we needed to plan our Sunday meals in advance, something that took a bit of time.

The adjustment was hard and in the beginning we were resistant, complaining to our friends about the fact that we couldn’t buy any provisions or do any shopping on Sundays. But then once we got used to it, we gradually started to enjoy the fact that everything stops on Sundays. We have friends in the retail business in Australia and they never have days off together, let alone a Sunday, to spend just relaxing with their family or friends. We like the idea that it’s basically a forced day of rest for almost everyone, and those that do have to work on Sundays usually get Mondays off to make up for it. 

In the end, we enjoyed it so much that even though we now live in a place where shopping is possible on Sundays, we still provision ourselves and avoid the shops!