Apologies to those of you who have seen this, but I just read about the growing number of Complaints Choirs worldwide, which are just what they sound like, choirs which sing a litany of complaints set to music. The genesis of the idea came from two Helsinki artists who were inspired by the Finnish expression “Valituskuoro,” which translates as “Complaints Choir,” but actually refers to the phenomenon of a bunch of people complaining about something at the same time. Taking this expression literally, under these artists’ influence, the first Complaints Choir was formed in Birmingham (UK, not USA). Since then, groups have sprung up all over the world, including in Helsinki.

I think this is a fabulous idea, and I would love to join one of these choirs. Seeing as it’s nearly Thanksgiving (in the US), this may seem an odd time to promote complaining—this holiday is supposed to be about being thankful after all–but somehow singing about our common daily annoyances (which might seem particularly acute to expats) shows just how petty most of these complaints are, while still acknowledging them in a light-hearted way. To see what I mean, take a look at the video below of the Helsinki Complaints Choir in action (don’t worry if you don’t speak Finnish, there are subtitles).

I can’t say exactly when it was I decided that if I got married I wouldn’t change my last name, but I know that by the time I got to college the idea was pretty much confirmed in my mind. I knew a lot of people at that time who were finding creative ways to combine both last names of the couple getting married: hyphenation, a double last name for both, or a combination of two names into one word. There were even some couples who chose a completely different last name to share. While I applauded the creativity of these folks, I knew it wasn’t for me.

So when Joe and I got married, I stuck to the plan and didn’t change my name (for the record, neither did he). Since then, we’ve opened joint bank accounts, signed leases together, filed joint tax returns; all the things that married couples do, and for the most part we had no problems because of our different surnames. Of course, we laughed about the insurance agent who kept sending personalized return address labels to “Elizabeth Kissell” (Elizabeth is my hardly-used first name) and even more hilariously, someone named “Liz Kissell.” Nothing about that name was mine, it was like an entirely new identity I could choose to assume if I ever needed one.

While it’s by no means a universal practice in North America, a married couple having different last names is common enough that large institutions usually know how to handle the situation. As we’ve been finding out, it’s not so simple in France.

To start off with, the French language itself is a bit biased as to how male and female individuals are referred to. Unlike English, French doesn’t have a gender-neutral way of identifying a group of people; instead of “they” or “them,” the group is identified by whether it contains male or female members. If a group is solely male, “they” is rendered “ils,” for an all-female group it is “elles.” However, if there is even one male in a mostly female group, they are all “ils.”

It makes me wonder if that language quirk has any effect on how married couples are identified, because it’s been my experience here that institutions keep wanting to lump us together under one name. For example, our bank here issued me a bank card for our joint account with my correct name on it, but all our bank statements are addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Kissell.” I noticed another example of this when we received our Cartes de Séjour; my card not only listed my first and last names, but also my “Nom Marital,” while Joe’s card had no such addendum about the name of his spouse.

I don’t mean to imply that there’s anything malicious about this, just that it chafes a bit to have a choice I’ve made undermined by social custom. And it puzzles me that a country so devoted to the cause of equality, and so dedicated to women’s welfare and rights in other areas, still clings to this convention. I think language does matter, and it may be that this practice is just the tip of the iceberg on attitudes about men and women’s roles in society. Or maybe not. I don’t know enough yet to say whether it’s just an annoying fact of life, or a sign of something systemic. And I’m very curious to know what French women themselves make of it. Is there some way to maintain a separate identity that I haven’t learned about, or is it just accepted? Perhaps there are bigger battles to fight.

Even though we’d figured out how to get “regular” telephone service in France before we left (see Taking our phone service with us (or not)), we knew we’d both also want cell phone service. We could have waited until we got here to figure it out, but we weren’t confident enough in our French to be able to deal with all the jargon we’d inevitably encounter at the local cell phone store. Plus, we felt it would be useful to have functioning cell phones as soon as we hit the ground—without paying huge roaming fees to continue using our U.S. numbers. So we did some research into how we could make that happen. If you’re planning to travel to France and want to have a French cell phone number, the following information may be useful.

GSM: The first important thing to know about cell phones in France is that they all use the GSM standard—unlike in the U.S. where there are several competing technologies. So you need to have a GSM-capable phone. In the United States, AT&T/Cingular and T-Mobile have GSM networks. We had both been Cingular customers since way back, so we had GSM phones already.

GSM uses different frequency bands in different areas: 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, and 1900 MHz. Some GSM phones work on just one or two of these bands; others (usually called “world phones”) work on three or all four. France uses 900 MHz and 1800 MHz, whereas the U.S. uses 850 MHz and 1900 MHz. So it’s possible to buy a GSM cell phone in the U.S. that won’t work anywhere else. I had a tri-band phone (a SonyEricsson T68i, which uses the 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz bands) and Morgen had a quad-band phone (a Motorola RAZR V3), so we were both also set from that angle.

Unlocked Phones: GSM-based phones have a little removable chip called a SIM card that tells the phone things like what its phone number is and who that number belongs to. You can, in principle, get service from a new carrier, along with a new number, simply by purchasing a SIM card and popping it into your phone in place of the old one. That was exactly our plan: keep our phones, but get new SIM cards from a French provider. But most phones you buy in the U.S. have what’s known as a carrier lock, a special setting that prevents the phone from working with SIM cards from any carrier other than the one that sold it to you. The rationale is that the carriers usually sell phones very cheaply (or even give them away), assuming they’ll more than make up the difference over time with your monthly phone bills. But if you could use another provider’s SIM card, your original carrier would lose the ability to charge you for all those minutes. So they lock the phones to prevent this from happening. There are various methods to remove carrier locks—some totally legal and aboveboard, others more dubious. But we’d paid extra, when we initially bought our phones, for fully unlocked models straight from the factory rather than getting them from Cingular for exactly this reason: we wanted to have the freedom to switch networks whenever we wanted.

So we knew we were all set on the hardware side (apart from needing electrical adapters for the chargers—easily obtained for a few bucks at our local Radio Shack). Next came the SIM cards themselves.

French SIM Cards: We were happy to discover that multi-year contracts are not the norm in France (though certainly you can find them if that’s what you really want). Instead, most people use prepaid SIM cards. Buy a card with, say, a few hundred minutes of talk time, and then recharge it as needed, purchasing only as many minutes as you want (with prices typically decreasing as you buy more minutes). We both spend very few minutes per month on our cell phones anyway, so that seemed to be the best strategy.

A bunch of companies sell prepaid French SIM cards (and, of course, cards for other countries too) directly to U.S. customers. (Do a Google search for “France SIM card” and you’ll find more than you can imagine.) We understood, of course, that we’d be paying a premium over what the same cards would cost in France, but we felt the convenience would be worth it. After considering a number of options from providers such as Telestial and InTouch (both of which use the Orange network), we settled on cards from CellularAbroad (which uses the SFR network). The cost was $69 per SIM card, including an $8 airtime credit.

One of the things that attracted us to CellularAbroad was that they offer pre-activated SIM cards, which means that you can get your French phone number before leaving the U.S. Ordinarily, you can’t activate a SIM card (during which process you learn your new number) until you land in France. The other thing we liked was the SFR network, which according to what we’d heard anecdotally seemed to have better coverage within Paris than Orange. (I’m still not sure if that’s true, but I can say that coverage has been outstanding everywhere we’ve gone so far.)

Although the specifics vary from carrier to carrier and plan to plan, the way our cards work (which is not unusual) is that all incoming calls are free, regardless of how long you talk. You pay for outgoing minutes (deducted from whatever you paid to recharge the card) at the rate of €0.55 per minute for calls within France and €0.75 per minute for calls to other countries (including the U.S. and Canada). Incoming SMS messages are also free; outgoing SMS costs €0.15 per message within France and €0.30 per message internationally. Voicemail is included, and you can roam (for an additional fee) to most other European countries and Australia. Unfortunately, with this plan we can’t use our French SIM cards when traveling back to North America.

Recharging our phones with additional airtime credit is a simple matter of picking up a little card called SFR La Carte, which is available in denominations ranging from €10 to €95, and which you can purchase at just about any local market, cell phone store, or tabac (tobacconist—but really, more of an all-purpose convenience store). What we did was pick up cards in the checkout line of our local Monoprix supermarket. They were scanned along with the rest of our groceries, and then we got a printout, with our receipt, containing the number we have to enter to add the new credits to our phones.

There is a catch, though, which is that any unused credit expires after a period of time ranging from 15 days to 4 months, depending on the value of the card you buy. So, if we don’t use up our €25 in 2 months, we lose that credit—and our phones stop working. The SIM cards themselves, though, remain valid for 6 months even after you run out of credit, and as long as we recharge it during that time, we can return our phones to service, using the same number.

So far, we’ve had relatively few occasions to use our cell phones, but they’ve been very handy to have in certain situations. I’ll be eagerly awaiting news on iPhone availability here in Europe, because my poor old T68i is really showing its age and I’d love to replace it with something modern and full-featured. Whether or not I actually buy an iPhone will depend somewhat on the cost of service here, about which I haven’t even heard any rumors yet.

It’s amazing sometimes how a small thing can turn into a big thing when there is a language barrier to navigate. Case in point: last week Joe and I went into a small grocery store we’d never been in before, and all went smoothly until we got up to the checkout. The cashier was ringing up our items when suddenly he picked up two Granny Smith apples from our pile and started waving them at me and saying something I couldn’t understand. A multitude of thoughts went through my brain: did we need to bag them, was he asking me how much they cost, was apple-buying prohibited on a Wednesday? Finally in exasperation he handed off the apples to a neighboring cashier who dropped them on the scale beside her (she was next to the produce section), and then printed out a little sticker that she stuck to one of them. Handing them back to me, I could see the price on the sticker and finally realized our unforgivable error. Our usual grocery store never required us to self-price our produce items, but we’ll keep a much better eye out for this kind of thing when we visit strange stores in the future.

Several months before our move, we started thinking about how we’d make and receive phone calls with people back in North America. Our presumption was that we’d have both a landline and cell phones, but that using either one to make calls to North America on a regular basis would be prohibitively expensive. (It turns out that we were partially mistaken; I’ll say more about that later.) Similarly, we didn’t want to force the people who’d call us frequently from the United States and Canada to pay outrageous phone charges. So we decided early on that we’d use some sort of VoIP (voice-over-IP) service, with U.S. phone numbers and whatever hardware seemed to make phoning as convenient as possible.

We’d been happy Vonage customers for some time, and at first I thought we’d simply take our Vonage routers, and our San Francisco phone numbers, with us to France. Technologically, that would have worked perfectly well, but we decided against it for several practical reasons. First, we wanted to travel with as little hardware as possible. We couldn’t see packing two Vonage routers, their associated power supplies, the (cordless) phones we had connected to them, and the phones’ power supplies—all of which would have also required electrical adapters in France, too—since we were already counting every single pound and cubic inch of stuff to fit into the airline’s luggage guidelines. Vonage offers a Wi-Fi handset (the UTStarcom F1000BRB/WRB) that would have been plenty compact, but at the time its price was higher than we were prepared to pay, and the reviews we read suggested that we might be less than satisfied with its call quality and features.

Speaking of price, although Vonage is relatively inexpensive compared to conventional phone companies, we were trying to cut costs wherever possible. I had a personal account (at $24.99 per month) and a small business account (at $49.99 per month), and knowing how much cheaper Skype was, for example, we found that $75 per month hard to swallow.

The thing that finally drove us to drop Vonage, though, had nothing to do with Vonage itself. In San Francisco, especially in the months leading up to our move, we got a ton of phone calls—at least one or two per day on each of our lines—that were wrong numbers. I suspect it’s because our personal and business numbers both had sequences of four sevens in them, making it particularly easy to dial by mistake when you’d intended one fewer seven. But in any case, those extra calls were quite annoying, and they were compounded by endless telemarketing calls, despite having our numbers on the FCC’s Do Not Call list, plus the legal-but-aggravating surveys and political calls. Once we decided we wanted to get rid of those phone numbers, the decision to drop Vonage was much easier: it was as easy to start over from scratch with a different company as it would have been to switch both numbers and equipment with Vonage.

So which other company? After looking at all the VoIP providers, we determined that Skype was the only good option. Some providers expressly disallowed taking accounts to other countries; some were too expensive; some were too limited in the options they offered. And, best of all, we could use Skype for an annual cost of about what Vonage charged us per month. However, we still had to figure out what telephone hardware to take with us, and it was a tricky decision, especially since we’re Mac users. I described our experiences in detail in Choosing Mac-Compatible Skype Hardware (TidBITS 889, 23-Jul-2007).

We decided to get phone numbers in the 503 area code (Beaverton, Oregon), solely because that was the address to which our mail was being sent (the topic of a future post). We figured there’d be a certain logic if the two matched, though we could as easily have chosen new numbers in the 415 (San Francisco) area code or anywhere else.

So far, using Skype for incoming and outgoing calls with North American telephones has worked out pretty well. There have been a couple of instances of less-than-ideal sound quality, but I suspect that experimenting with our hardware, software, and network configurations here will clear that up. We did, however, encounter a couple of surprises.

The first surprise was that our new apartment already had VoIP phone service. There’s a French company called Freebox that provides telephone, broadband Internet, and video services over DSL for about €40 per month, and that’s what our landlord had installed. The best part: the particular package he set up includes unlimited free phone calls to North America. (And the sound quality and convenience are both better than Skype!) So using SkypeOut for phone calls to the U.S. and Canada is not a necessity. (Incoming calls, however, are still expensive when dialing our French number from North America, so Skype remains great for that.)

There was, however, an unpleasant surprise too: for reasons I haven’t been able to pin down (and which Skype’s technical support department is unable or unwilling to supply), you can’t dial our Freebox phone number using Skype. So if someone wanted to call us on our “regular” phone, but use SkypeOut to save money on long distance, they’d be out of luck—it just pops up an unhelpful error message. Ack.

Besides fixed phone service, Morgen and I also got French cell phone numbers. That was another interesting research adventure, and one I’ll describe in a future post.