Finally settling in (in the most unsettling way possible)

I’ve been horrible about communication recently (we will pretend this is different from usual) because everyday we’ve had to deal with some sort of weirdly specific and frustrating issue pertaining to moving into our apartment.

There were various steps we had to accomplish before moving in on October 2nd, and in list form they are seemingly easy.

1.     Get a bank account

2.     Sign the lease

3.     Send a money transfer

4.     Get housing insurance

Of course, they were not and I’m going to explain them dramatically and probably with too much detail because I’m still not over it.

September 29^th: 3 DAYS BEFORE

We were sent over the lease (finally) and quickly signed it and sent it back over.

We also tried to get a bank account that day. We walked into town and straight to a BNP. They denied us because we were only living in France for 7 months, yet we knew that this exact branch had already allowed several other assistants to open accounts. Whatever. We moved on and accepted our lot in French bank account roulette. Next we tried another large bank, Société Générale, and a super nice man scheduled us an appointment for the next day. We felt very accomplished with our signing and scheduling and rewarded ourselves with a bière pêche.

September 30^th: 2 DAYS BEFORE

We forgot to sign the bottom of each page of the lease. They waited until the next day to tell us for some reason. Finally, we signed the (whole) lease and got the go ahead to transfer them the rent. For some reason Bank of America didn’t recognize their bank account information for 2 hours. I once again theorized that these people are ghosts. Somehow, after several hours, it randomly ended up clearing. The ghost theory was temporarily thrown out.

Later that day we headed to our bank appointment. It was imperative for this appointment to happen because without a French bank account it is impossible to get housing insurance, which was the last item the landlord needed. We arrived at the bank to find the same super nice man from the day before. However, the super nice man didn’t actually schedule us an appointment.

Henh? Somehow, it was just... lost? Instead, he took our paperwork and vaguely suggested that he would call us the next day. We were not pleased but had to accept the horrible process of everything ever in France.

October 1^st: 1 DAY BEFORE

We had our work orientation all day on October 1^st from 9:30-4:30, which reminded me how much I despise required events. We did get an awesome free lunch and met a lot of the other assistants. Otherwise, there isn’t much to say about it. They essentially told us what we already knew over the span of 8 hours.  My favorite part was that they gave us a document that we needed in order to get our fist paycheck in advance. No one understood what it was or what to do with it. Chaos ensued as other assistants posted pictures of the document on our group that night with captions such as “Wait... WHAT IS THIS? WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS? AM I NOT GOING TO GET PAID IF I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS IS?” Turns out that it was just an example of a document that the secretary of our school is going to fill out for us. This, of course, makes absolutely no sense. TAPIF has officially figured out the most effective and elaborate way to confuse a large group of people.

After the orientation, we decide to go to the bank immediately (the guy never called) and demand a bank account. Once again, we were greeted by the same man who was evolving from a nice, helpful man of the people into my worst enemy. He told us that we could finalize everything the next day at 9:30 and would even do our housing insurance for us. I was skeptical, but we once again had no choice but to accept. I wondered how this situation would play out in America if we encountered the same problems... Carson’s mom would probably bust up in the bank and have us an account plus a complementary fruit basket in five minutes flat. Yes, in America this simply would not fly... but I digress.

Although I still was very concerned that we wouldn’t be able to move in on time and yet another inconvenience would arise, we still went to meet the other assistants for a drink at a nearby pub. We had already hung out with several of the other assistants before and it was a great time. We have started to create our friend brain trust circle.

October 2: THE DAY OF

We went to the bank at 9:30 and to our extreme surprise, everything went according to plan. We got our accounts and our insurance, which we immediately scanned and sent to our landlords. All that was left to do was wait for them to tell us where the keys were! Huzzah! We planned on picking up the keys and then returning to our Air B&B to get our stuff together. While awaiting their response, we lingered at a coffee shop very close to the apartment.

An hour passed by. I called them on the phone; there was no response. We decided not to panic—these people were often slow with communication—and to head back to our Air B&B to make sure our suitcases were totally packed and ready.

At about noon, I received an email from the landlord. They didn’t get the wire transfer and asked if we had inadvertently sent it by mail.

I’m not really sure how you send a wire transfer through the mail, but I assured them that this was not the case and that it should be in their account in the next few hours if it wasn’t already. I received, once again, no response for several hours.

We started to prepare for our night sleeping on a sidewalk when they called and said the transfer was good and that the keys were under the doormat. Ah yes, under the doormat, a very clever and sneaky location that we surely never could have figured out on our own.

Anyway, this might have been very irrelevant information. I just wanted to remember all of the absurd complications. I’m also now realizing that there were about a million other small issues that came up during this time period, but I’m just going to let those be forgotten because otherwise I might never come back to this country.

More than likely everyone just wants to see pictures of the apartment.. so.. here are way too many of them:

 

Bathroom/washing machine 

Living room

Lofted kitchen

Another kitchen shot.

Terrace! 

Tiny stairs that we have already nearly died on several times.

Terrifying but whimsical.

Kandid Kebab

The equally small/terrifying staircase that leads to our apartment .

Bedroom!

Other side of the bathroom! 

I think we took this to show off our sweet lanterns. And the fact that we have two whole friends.

Fancy champagne

Fancy champagne+me

Same as above+a Carson

Tagine! 

The only thing the apartment didn’t have that I thought we needed was a closet.. so I found some random things and tried to make one. It turned out shockingly well all things considered.

More living room!

All of the pictures! (Sorry this is probably getting a little indulgent)

Huzzah!

Everything is absolutely perfect and we could not be more pleased. The landlord was not lying when she said that we could just put down our suitcases and be done. In fact, the list of things that were left to our disposal becomes increasingly more ridiculous: trash bags, cleaning supplies, two sets of dry cleaned sheets, an American power adaptor, hifi, a Panini press, a nespresso machine with tiny little coffee cups and a stock of pods, about 8 containers of foie gras, a package of smoked salmon, and... a bottle of champagne?

By the end of this list we were wondering if perhaps the previous tenant had not finished moving out. I reasoned that it was a housewarming gift that they simply never mentioned and decided that we should open it. Immediately. I got two flutes and went out on the terrace. Carson, in his unending southern courtesy, suggested we find out how much it costs before opening it just incase we misinterpreted the gesture and had to buy a new one later. We had yet to figure out how to get on the Internet, (instead of their network being the one that is exactly their name, it’s the other network that’s just a random string of numbers. Very intuitive.) so we called our friend and asked him to look it up. I already had taken off the foil when we learned that it was a 40 euro bottle of champagne. This was indeed somewhat out of our 3 euro bottle of wine price range. I half-assedly tried to mold the foil back onto the cork.

Fortunately, when we talked to the landlords later, we learned that the champagne in fact was a housewarming gift, but for the tenant before us. Not us. They were just confused as to why he didn’t drink it. I later noted that the prior tenant left behind an array of leather shoe polishing tools and artisanal jams that he allowed to expire. If this is any indicator, 40 euro champagne was probably too plebian for his taste.

Anyway, we decided to save it for a special occasion (read: the next night because I had already bought a much cheaper bottle of champagne).

We had a party that night with a group of our new friends on the terrace, which was a ton of fun. They were extremely jealous of our apartment, a sentiment probably best expressed by Will, who said “Honestly, I’m not even happy for you guys. I just hate you.”

The next day we ran errands and cleaned. I also finally lived my dream of running in the gigantic park that houses the citadelle and the zoo near our place. It is encircled by a river and was as magical as I imagined... minus the tiny yorkie that rabidly chased me and attempted to bite my ankles for several minutes (I could have probably punted him but valiantly decided to sprint away from the small animal) and all of the dog poop that forever covers the entirety of France.

That night we did our favorite thing in the world: cooked tagine (they don’t sell butternut squash in chunks here so I had to peel an entire squash. Never has there been a more dangerous cooking related labor of love), listened to some music, and watched Netflix. We also drank that bottle of champagne. It was extremely good and hopefully not wasted on us .

Tomorrow I have my first day of work at my school and I’m very excited to meet everyone. Carson starts on Tuesday and both of our English professors we will be working with have been incredibly helpful and nice.

Other than TAPIF/apartment things, we’ve really just been meeting people, picnicking, and exploring. One super great thing we did was check out the free zoo, which was tiny and about what you would expect a free zoo to be but enjoyable nonetheless. I imagine we’ll be better about updating now that we’ve settled in. Until then, here are more pictures:

 

Pre-zoo picnic. 

Lemur!

Creepy owl.

Actual owl.

Giant storks 

Rhinos!

Tapir with tongue out. 

Zebras who refused to show us their faces