By Dan
After reading Danielle’s post about her trip to the States, I thought I should write a blog post about my trip to London that same week. I took Joseph and visited my parents, who afterwards came back to Paris with us for a couple days to help watch Joseph until Danielle returned.
Joseph loves trains and I was happy to finally be taking him on a real train instead of the metro. He also loves tunnels, and reporting to me when we’re in a tunnel and when we’re not, so I was also happy to be able to tell him that I was pretty sure we’d be going through a big tunnel between Paris and London.
The problem with writing about something that happened more than two days ago is that I don’t remember the details, so all I can really report with certainty is that we went to the London Zoo, Regents Park, saw some friends, ate well, and generally had a nice time. I can, however, still remember what I did yesterday. I spent the day at my Formation Civiques, which is a mandatory civics class required for a Carte de Sejours (long-stay residency permit) in France. It was a grind of a day, but sort of an interesting slice of French bureaucracy and some of the challenges inherent in the system here.
The whole process is kind of strange because I already have my Carte de Sejours, valid for ten years, yet they told me after the fact that I had to take this course. If I don’t, it could be held against me when I am up for renewal. However, in ten years when I need to renew it I will either be a French citizen or no longer living in France. Or both. Either way it won’t be an issue.
I went anyway because it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. The process was predictably poorly organized. I had to funnel through a line where I signed in, and was sent into one of three rooms, apparently chosen arbitrarily. I was in the tulip room, identified solely by a chintzy decal of a tulip stuck on the door of the room. The room was completely bare except for about 20 very uncomfortable chairs, a desk/chair/projector at the front of the room, a tiny and cheap French flag hanging from a dowel and a tiny bust of Marianne.
We were told beforehand that translators would be provided if we needed one, and I was in a room with lots of Chinese speakers. They all sat at the back of the room with a Chinese translator. Everyone else appeared to be from North Africa. I was the only person in the room who didn’t speak Chinese or French. When I told the instructor (in French) that I didn’t speak much French he shrugged and said he didn’t have an English translator. The last thing I wanted to do was slow things down further, so I quickly responded that I didn’t mind and that I’d get by.
The instructor then called each one of us up one at a time to sign a sheet confirming that we would be taking advantage of the free meal they offer during the lunch break. The room was so crowded just doing that was an ordeal, and a waste of time that could have been saved by signing both sheets at once when we arrived.
We had to start by introducing ourselves individually with a few lines about why we were in France, which was a little tricky for me in French but I got through it. By the time we actually started the class it must have been close to 11am (I had gotten there before 9) and the instructor jumped right in with an overview of French history starting in the year 300 BC. I realized immediately what a drag it was going to be when he stopped after each sentence to allow the Chinese translator his turn to translate, literally doubling the time of the talk.
Then the one person who was actually paying attention starting asking questions. A Tunisian guy sitting in the front row raised his hand on the first powerpoint slide (the projector was crooked of course) and asked a question about what language the Gauls spoke and how similar it was to French. The instructor clearly didn’t know the answer and mumbled something about how that was very complicated, and everyone rolled their eyes and groaned, thinking how long is this day going to be if this guy asks a question at every slide.
I was uncomfortable and exhausted, having been out late with friends the night before and been woken up by Danielle 15 minutes before I had to leave the apartment. The instructor talked with a coffee stirrer in his mouth the whole time. At one point he dropped it on the floor, picked it up and threw it away, and came back after lunch with another one in his mouth. Every once in a while someone would fall asleep and he would snap at them to wake up, and silence people when they started talking, though in all he seemed relatively nice. I followed much of what he was saying at first, but once my concentration started to drift I couldn’t keep up and after a while I couldn’t distinguish between the French and the Chinese.
During the first coffee break I went outside for fresh air. It was the nicest day we’ve had in Paris this year, high 50’s and sunny, and I had to spend most of it inside. Almost every person in the class smoked and they all rushed out for a cigarette. One guy in the class, another Tunisian, approached me and told me that he had lived in the U.S. for eight years – in Connecticut and Chicago – and just recently moved to Paris where his wife is from. So we had plenty to talk about. I was happy to have an English speaker to ask about things I had missed – not the content of the talk but anything he had said about how long the class would be or what was for lunch. He was nice but was a little too proud of his American slang, saying “hey man what’s up?” every time we saw each other later in the day.
Lunch was awful, and I finished it in 5 minutes and then spent 55 minutes walking up and down the street. In the afternoon we learned more about “les principes” of French society. I already had had liberté, égalitié, and fraternité hammered into me but hadn’t heard much about laïcité (meaning, I think, secularism or freedom of religion or separation of church and state) which apparently is equally important. We touched on the drapeau tricolor, and I learned that the bust of Marianne – one of the most important French symbols – in the last few decades has actually been formally based on six different prominent French women. Two early ones were Brigitte Bardot and Catherine DeNeuve, and I hadn’t heard of the more recent ones.
So that was about it. We were supposed to go until 5pm, and towards the end he started skipping through slides and picking up the pace and let us out at 4:15. I got my certificate, which I am pretty sure is the last piece of the puzzle as far as living in working in France for the next ten years if I wish.
None of this has anything to do with my application to be a French citizen, which is still on-going and much more complicated.
I have only two real classes left, a trip with the program to Shanghai, and a couple half-classes over the next few months (oh and a 50-100 page paper for a consulting project.)
The promenade was really nice, it is a former elevated railroad track that runs along a viaduct, which has been completely re-done into a nice walkway for pedestrians. There are lots of trees and benches and you look down on very nice Parisian neighborhoods as you stroll along. More photos from the day are 