oops. there is a reason why there are q's in the place of the a's.... (it should say "late start" in the title for those of you who aren't letter replacement savvy). right. the q's. My keyboard at work is french. my laptop at home is american. I spend all day correcting my keystrokes with the french keyboard and at the end of the day when I come home and use my laptop, I get the double whamy and have to correct my typing again. That semester of typing class in highschool has just been made worthless. But this is really no way to start a blog about my adventures in France.
but... in a way... it is the perfect way to start the blog. (OK... I'm sure you know where this is going with some kind of obvious analogy to misadventures being like typing the wrong the letters... well, read on and see if you are right smartass.)
right. Late start. ok...
I think today is just over 4 weeks of LIVING IN FRANCE and lets just make the distinction between living in france and being in france (as in, "I was in france for a few months and it was wonderful! We biked the countryside and ate baguettes 24-7 and when we weren't doing that we were eating chocolate cezanne paintings.") Because when you LIVE in france after LIVING your whole life in the USA... things aren't such a romantic vacation.
So in the tradition of myself, this blog is chock full of misadventure and general stupidity... really at the expense of what little good name I have left to claim. I mean really, put me in a foreign country for a month and tell me to get settled in and seriously... I'm going to fuck up a lot of things.
-- the highlights from the past month --
1. Renting an apartment.
This whole process is really a blur for me. After a few days of being in town, Tamara and I met up with a women from the housing placement agency, CSE Mobilite, named Dominique. Dominique spoke some English. I speak some French. Tamara speaks even less French and has a tendency to pronounce everything with an Italian accent. YET for some reason Dominique would prefer to talk to Tamara. OK... After visiting 10 different apartments for a total of 15 minutes at each apartment I wa s left to pick which one I would like to live in for the next ?? years. I picked one just outside of the main part of town with a bottom floor room and a patio with a garden. Sweet! ok... so a few of the walls were painted bright red, I could repaint them, so what if there was an abandoned car in my parking spot, they said they would take care of that. So what if they didn't have the key to the bike room. I probably didn't want to leave my nice road bike in there anyway.
and then there was the paperwork. BOOM . get a French bank account. POW. sign a bunch of papers (all in french). SLAM. Transfer a big wad of US dollars to said French bank account. WHAM. Find out that the banker that I've been dealing with is going to leave the bank leaving nobody who speaks English. SLAM BANG POW ZAM (bunch more stuff happens involving me paying fees and writing checks to various people). Ok... I think I have the apartment... nope... not yet... sign this, this this this this this and this and this don't forget this thing about knowing that an earthquake could happen here and this and this. Ok... now for the walk through.... ok.. sign this thing that you can't understand and initial here and try not to let the stress affect you signature....hmmm.. ok????? oh wait... all the light sockets are burned.... oh wait.... the wall paper is falling off... oh wait... the water heater turns off intermittently... fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuu
ok... at this point I would post photos, but for some reason all the commands in the blogging software are in french and I don't want to accidentally erase everything...so just hold on a bit.
-BON! I'm working in English again... here are the photos of the pad-
