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.

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.

At our second-to-last visit to the French consulate in San Francisco, the agent told us that if our visa applications were accepted we’d need to present not only our passports, but one-way plane tickets to France before we’d be issued our visas. We didn’t think this would be a problem until we started looking at actual air fare costs for the date we’d chosen for our departure (June 30).

While we knew that June and July are very busy months for tourism to France, and therefore airfare costs are significantly higher at that time, we hadn’t looked closely at airfares since we last traveled to France in 2003. When we entered our travel date on various travel and airline sites, we were shocked to see how expensive the flights were. Of course, if we had made reservations six months in advance we might have seen very different prices, but even so, the prices seemed high considering our flight date was still three months away.

Since we knew that these already high-priced fares would only continue to go up in price, we realized that we couldn’t wait until we got our visas before purchasing tickets. This was a risk since we didn’t know for certain if we’d get the visas, and we’d have to eat this cost if it turned out we were rejected or delayed beyond our travel date. After agonizing about it, we decided to go ahead and buy our tickets before knowing whether we’d get the visas, because if we did get the visas, and then tried to buy tickets, we’d be way out of our budget.

As we began the ticket-buying process, we hit a major snag; we found that most travel/airline Web sites don’t allow you to search for one-way flights, but the ones that did kept returning higher-priced fares for a one-way trip than for a round-trip! This seemed highly illogical to us, but we couldn’t see a way around it if we stuck to online purchases. So we set out to find a travel agent who could answer our questions about how to discover cheaper one-way fares. What we found was that most brick-and-mortar agencies couldn’t help us; most of them specialized in cruises, student travel, or package vacations, and weren’t set up to simply search for the best airfare for a single flight.

After many false starts, we found a company in the Yellow Pages that provided airfare quotes through their Web site. Although the company is based in San Francisco, it turned out that I could make all the arrangements via email (a plus for an introvert like me) from start to finish. This company, Airbound, operates online, but it is different from other travel sites in that an actual person contacts you about your fare request. Since we had a lot of variables to sort out (one-way ticket, pet-friendly airline, very specific travel date) this personal contact made it much easier for me to get answers to specific questions so that we could find the perfect airfare for our needs.

I was very impressed with the agent who responded to my request; she was extremely helpful and prompt in replying to my questions. She eventually found us a good deal on a Northwest flight; the only catch was that we had to leave a day later than we had planned, but this turned out not to be a problem in the end. As I mention in another post (Flying the furry skies: Transporting our cat to France) the fact that the flight was with Northwest made it much easier for us to transport our cat. About seven weeks later, when we finally got word we’d been granted visas, we were very glad that we had our tickets already in hand. It was one less detail to sort out in the short amount of time remaining to us before we left for France.

We knew from the start of our planning that we would take our cat Zora with us to France, we just weren’t sure how to make that happen. Many people were surprised when we told them she was coming with us, but it seemed the obvious choice to us. No matter how difficult it might be to bring her along, she was part of the family and we couldn’t leave her behind.

There were a few major considerations involved in this decision; first of all, we had to factor her presence into our apartment hunting process (see Finding an apartment in Paris), and secondly, we had to find a way to physically transport her to France. Never having taken her with us on other travels, we weren’t familiar with the options available to us. I had heard about cross-country pet transportation from friends, but didn’t know much about overseas relocation. We were assuming that using a pet transportation company would simplify the process for us, as they would have all the information about entry requirements and the know-how to get Zora to France safely. We also didn’t know what state we’d be in by the day of our departure, and thought it would take a load off our minds to leave Zora’s care to professionals.

Our opinion about this course of action changed dramatically when we found out how much these companies charge to provide this service. From the Web sites we looked at, it seemed rates began at about $1000, and only went up from there. This was completely outside our price range, and we knew we’d have to come up with a different solution. Using one of these companies might have made sense for us if: a) our moving costs were being paid by an employer; b) we were moving multiple animals; or c) we were moving to a country that requires a period of quarantine (France doesn’t have this requirement for cats from the U.S.). Since none of these were true for us, we opted for Plan B.

Plan B was to find a pet-friendly airline that would allow us to bring Zora with us on our flight. In the course of my research, I found that there are many airlines that allow small pets in the cabin or cargo hold, but there was an additional complication. As I detail in the post Dealing with airfare sticker shock, it was going to be hard to find a reasonable fare to France for me and Joe, and being limited to pet-friendly airlines might have meant much higher ticket costs.

Fortunately, we found a good fare on Northwest Airlines which turned out to have a very generous pet policy. Northwest allows small pets to travel in the cabin (although it has a limit on the number of them allowed per flight) or in the cargo hold if necessary. Going in, our strong preference was to have Zora with us, since we didn’t know how she would react to strange conditions in the hold. However, when I called to make the reservation for her (this has to be done separately), the agent told me that although there was space in the cabin on the first leg of our trip, the second flight had reached capacity for in-cabin pets.

I was very disappointed, but went ahead with the cargo reservation since we had no other option. I was even more nonplussed when the agent told me that Northwest has an embargo on carrying pets in the hold if the weather is too warm (and we were traveling in late June). I had nightmare visions of turning up at the airport with all our stuff and being told we’d have to find another way to get Zora to France. In desperation I asked the agent if they had a waiting list for the second flight; he recommended that I try calling back in a few weeks to see if anything had opened up. In the meantime, he made the reservation and charged me a portion of the fee ($80) for Zora with the remainder to be paid when we checked in for our flight ($150 in total).

For the next few weeks we worried about how things might turn out, hoping but not expecting that something would have changed by the time we called Northwest again. Amazingly, the next time we called the agent told me that it was possible to bring Zora in the cabin on both flights, she’d only need to change our seat assignments on the second flight so that there would be space for Zora’s carrier in front of us. Needless to say, we were extremely relieved that Zora could remain within arm’s reach for the duration of the flight, and that we wouldn’t have to wonder about her comfort level in the cargo hold during that time.

The next step was to purchase an airline-approved carrier for Zora since the carrier we had was not suitable. Pets traveling in the hold need to have very sturdy, hard-sided carriers to ensure their safety, but because Zora would be with us in the cabin, we decided to buy a much lighter, soft-sided carrier that would be easier to fit under the seat in front of us. We looked at quite a few carriers before deciding to buy a Sherpa bag because it seemed to be well-made, and it met the airline’s requirements for size, construction (ventilated on three sides), and material (leak-proof bottom). The true test came when we brought it home and Zora took to it immediately; in fact, it’s still her favorite place to hide in our Paris apartment.

The fact that the Sherpa bag was lighter than a hard-sided carrier was useful to us not just for the ease of carrying it around, but also because we worried that Zora would not be allowed on board if she weighed too much. We had read on Northwest’s Web site that the weight limit for carry-on pets was 15 pounds (for the pet and the carrier), and Zora’s weight, plus that of a carrier, might be slightly over that limit. Although we spent a lot of time fretting about that last pound, in the end we didn’t have a problem when we checked in; the weight of our luggage was carefully scrutinized, but the agent didn’t ask us to put Zora on the scale. We don’t know how we got lucky, but it could be that since the carrier (and our pet) was the right size, they didn’t question how much it weighed.

Many people asked us if we would be giving Zora any medication to calm her down during the flight, but after reading different recommendations online, we decided it would be safer to forgo it. Judging from her past behavior, we thought she might make a commotion at first, but after a while she would settle down and stay calm for the rest of the flight. We knew she would often spend an entire day sleeping/resting in the exact same spot in our apartment, and believed she could adjust to staying in the carrier throughout the trip.

On the morning of our departure, we offered her a little bit of food and water about three hours before our flight, as the airline recommended, but she seemed too nervous to eat or drink anything. We hoped she would be able to make it through to Paris without more food, and thought we might try to give her a tiny bit more water later on in the day. As we brought her to the airport, she seemed to like traveling in the new carrier better than the old one because she could see out the ventilated sides. Everything went well at check-in, and to our suprise, they didn’t ask us to pay the remainder of the pet fee because we ended up paying extra fees for our overweight luggage!

Going through security, Joe had to take her out of the carrier and bring her through the metal detector, but she behaved perfectly well and he didn’t incur any injuries. We had quite a wait before our flight, during which Zora was mostly calm, although she still wouldn’t drink the small amount of water we offered her. When we finally got on the plane, she didn’t seem to like going under the seat, so we tried to comfort her by petting her through the top of the carrier (it has a zippered opening for this purpose). She took this opportunity to try to squeeze out through the tiny hole we had opened, but we couldn’t take her out at that point. She seemed to settle down though, and the rest of the flight was uneventful.

On the next leg of our journey (a much longer flight), she again tried to push out through the top of the carrier once we had it under the seat, but then calmed down for the rest of the trip. In fact, she was so quiet and still that I kept checking on her to make sure she was still breathing! When we finally got to Paris, she seemed none the worse for wear as we took her out of the carrier for a quick cuddle and some water before we made the trip to our new place in the city. She had survived, and we had survived, what could have been a much more stressful experience for all three of us.

If you want to take your pet to France—and we did—you have two entirely separate sets of problems. One is simply that of transportation; Morgen covered that in Flying the furry skies: Finding transportation for our cat. It can be a pain, but it’s ultimately not that much harder than buying a plane ticket for a person or sending a large package overseas. The other problem, though, is satisfying the relevant authorities that your pet is healthy, safe, and otherwise fit to enter the country. That’s what I want to talk about here.

Different countries have different regulations about importing animals. In some places (in fact, even within the U.S., Hawaii is such a place), all newly arriving animals must be quarantined for some period of time to make sure they don’t have rabies or various other highly problematic diseases. Had we been traveling to England, our cat would have had to be quarantined, and we would have had to jump through several other hoops as well. But France has comparatively relaxed rules about pet importation—at least if the pet in question is a dog, cat, or ferret and it’s coming from the U.S. or Canada. (Different regulations apply to all other animals and animals coming from other countries.) No quarantine is necessary, but you do have to meet other requirements:

• The animal must have a microchip. These are tiny RFID chips injected under the animal’s skin that enable it to be identified with a unique code when a scanner is passed over the chip. So if your pet goes missing and is found by someone, the microchip uniquely identifies it and connects it with you, the owner. (And, perhaps more importantly, the chip implies the animal isn’t feral, otherwise it might simply be destroyed if it ends up in the wrong place.) Our cat, Zora, had a chip implanted by the SPCA before we adopted her, and it adhered to the standard required by the French authorities. (If it had been another kind of chip, we would have had to supply our own scanner so that they could verify it! Apparently, tattoos are acceptable substitutes for microchips in some cases.)
• The animal must have a proper rabies shot. Zora has always been an exclusively indoor cat, and for that reason, on our vet’s advice, we had skipped giving her a rabies vaccination, because there is a small chance (1 in 10,000, depending on the type of vaccine) that cancer could develop at the vaccination site. However, risk of cancer or not, the French government requires a rabies shot. Moreover, it must be one that uses the killed (or “inactivated”) rabies virus, not the newer variety that uses a “modified live” virus (MLV) which, seemingly, carries a lower risk of cancer. If this is an initial rabies vaccine (as it was for us), the shot must have been given at least 21 days before the animal arrives in France.
• You must have a French health certificate. There’s a form you can download from the French Embassy’s Web site and take to your vet. It’s in French, but the form itself (not the supporting material) has English translations. It asks for the owner’s contact information, detailed identification of the pet, vaccination records, and a few other things that didn’t apply to us.

That didn’t seem too bad. The first item was already done, so we took Zora to get a rabies shot about a month before our trip. Other than the cost of the vet visit, it was no big deal. All that remained was that certificate.

We’d read conflicting statements about when the certificate had to be signed. The form itself states that it’s valid for four months after it’s signed, but another source (I can’t recall where offhand) stated that the certificate must be signed within 10 days of travel. Grrrr. So we thought, just to be on the safe side, that we’d wait until 10 days before our trip to deal with the certificate.

Our vet was very helpful—filled out the form carefully and signed it. (Of course, there was a fee for this and the accompanying cursory examination of our cat.) But then she pointed out that the form must also be signed by an official USDA-certified veterinarian. Apparently there’s only one such designated vet in San Francisco, and our vet gave us his number. We had to make an appointment to visit him at the USDA office near the SFO airport—luckily, his schedule was open. He said we needed to bring only the paperwork our vet filled out—not our cat. Weird. So we did. He basically looked over the form, looked up our vet in a big book to make sure she was properly licensed, signed and stamped the form, and charged us a fee for the service (I believe it was $24). That whole last step struck me as extremely odd, especially considering that this official vet never actually saw the animal, but it’s just one of those things.

Per our vet’s instructions, we took with us on the plane the form with her signature and the USDA vet’s stamp (plus a photocopy) and the rabies vaccination certificate (again, with a copy). As far as we could tell, we had met all the requirements to get our cat legally into the country.

Now here’s the kicker. We landed in Paris and got our luggage. I got out all the paperwork and steeled myself to withstand all the scrutiny the French customs officials could dish out. We pushed our carts full of luggage—our cat in her carrier on top—toward the customs area, and…there wasn’t one. That is to say, there were a few tables between the baggage claim area and the door that were presumably used for inspections, but there were no inspectors. No signs saying “Nothing to Declare” or “Something to Declare.” There was one guy, dressed in the manner I took to be that of a customs inspector, casually standing near the doorway, but not particularly looking at anyone. We walked right out without anyone asking us anything or taking any notice of us, our belongings, or our cat.

I’m not sorry we went through the process and got the paperwork, but it was weird that there was no one to give it to. And frankly, a bit disturbing. Sure, I appreciated the convenience of being able to leave without having my luggage searched and everything, but geez…security, anyone? I could have been carrying an unvaccinated, unchipped cat with really sharp claws and a bad temper. Just think what havoc I could have wreaked!

Just typing in “expat health insurance france” got me to a lot of Web sites of companies that seemed to be able to provide what I needed, but none of them gave clear information about what type of plan exactly suited our situation. Wading through insurance terms and language at the best of times is difficult for me, but to try to make sense of this information without knowing the ins and outs of the French system was highly daunting. Plus, most of these companies asked you to fill out an extensive questionnaire, which included a lot of personal information, before they would give out even basic information about plans and prices. It all just seemed unnecessarily complicated, and I kept looking for a Web site that would give me some general guidance without my having to initiate anything at the start.

I found what I was looking for when I came across the Web site for Exclusive Health Care, a company that operates in France but has ties to insurance underwriters in the UK. I liked it immediately because the site seemed more personal and more open about what is required for expats moving to France. I was especially interested in the information they provided about their Gateway Plan which seemed to suit our situation perfectly. It provides what they call “catastrophe” insurance, basic coverage for emergency situations plus a few other services. The term of the coverage is for one year, but it is intended to be a stopgap for new residents waiting to enroll in the French health care system (you can only apply for this after three months of residency). Once new residents obtain insurance through the state system (known as Securité Sociale), the remaining balance on the plan is rolled over into what is called a “Mutuelle,” an add-on type of insurance which reimburses you for the percentage of health fees not covered by the Securité Sociale.

The Gateway Plan seemed like the best option for us, and as we had limited time to secure proof of insurance before our visa appointment at the French consulate, we hoped that it would not take too long to process our application. One thing that made the process go faster was that we already had an address in France (which they requested on the application form), having decided to find an apartment before we submitted our visa applications (see Finding an apartment in Paris). Despite a little bit of miscommunication at the start, and with a few worried emails and phone calls on our part, Exclusive did come through for us in time, and the documents they provided were exactly what the Consulate agents needed. We were also pleased that although we had to pay half of the yearly premium up front in order to receive our insurance policy documents, we didn’t have to pay the balance until we arrived in France and our insurance coverage officially took effect.

As we continue our stay here in France, I’m certain we’ll have more questions and confusion about our health insurance status, but with the Gateway Plan we’ve found the right solution for the time being.

Even though the consulate told us that we did not, strictly speaking, have to have a lease on our apartment before we applied for a visa, we thought it would be prudent to keep our eyes out for a place we liked. And we decided that if the right deal came along, we’d just go for it. Although we stood a certain risk (i.e., losing our deposit if we didn’t get our visas), we thought it would also make us look that much more serious about the process and thus increase our chances of success. And besides, we’d have to figure out housing sooner or later and we wanted to be able to cross it off our list as soon as we could.

We did some Google searches and found a bunch of sites that advertise Parisian apartments for rent—mostly with ads in English and thus, presumably, catering to foreigners like ourselves. Here are a few of the sites we checked regularly (just Google “Paris apartments” and you’ll find a zillion more):

• Paris Attitude
• Paristay
• New York Habitat
• Paris Net
• craigslist Paris housing

With the exception of craigslist, these sorts of sites tend to offer furnished apartments, for terms ranging from a day to multiple years, that are considered vacation rentals as far as French housing laws are concerned. This is hugely important. On the one hand, when renting out an apartment on a “short-term” basis like this (even if the lease is a year long or more), the landlords have much greater security. It’s really hard to get rid of a long-term tenant you don’t want anymore, even if they’ve committed what in the U.S. would be a grave offense. Not so with vacation rentals, in which virtually all the rights remain with the landlord. On the other hand, this fact also works in the favor of people trying to rent an apartment from overseas, especially if (like us) they’re self-employed. To exaggerate just slightly, the only thing you need to do to rent one of these apartments is pick an apartment you like and show them the money. However, to rent an apartment long-term, as a resident, you have to provide detailed financial records, personal references, and more—you have to prove to the owner that you’re worthy. You also have to compete with dozens of other people trying to do the same thing. If your French isn’t great or if you don’t appear to have a stable, conventional, permanent job, your chances become that much worse. But if you succeed, the reward is lower rent and the protection of the tenant-biased housing laws.

We opted to go the short-term route initially, for several reasons. For one thing, we knew we wanted a furnished apartment. We couldn’t afford to ship any furniture to France or to buy all new furniture—and unfurnished apartments also often lack major appliances (like refrigerators), which would have been an additional expense. But money aside, we wanted the convenience of a place we could get settled in quickly without having to worry about the thousand small details that come with an unfurnished place. Second, we had only a rough idea which parts of Paris we might enjoy living in. You can only tell so much from ads on Web sites, and before we made a truly long-term commitment, we wanted to be able to explore the neighborhood (and the apartment itself) in person. So a short-term rental gave us an easier out if we weren’t happy. And finally, we only had so much time and energy. We weren’t sure we could convince a French landlord that we’d be the ideal tenants—remotely, and with our unconventional occupations. Rather than stress ourselves out over that process, likely several times over, we thought we’d save some aggravation and take the easier path.

The first step in finding an apartment is knowing what arrondissement (section of the city) you want to look in. As most maps of Paris will show you, the arrondissements form a spiral, with 1 in the center of the city (where the Louvre is). The lower numbers (1–7) are thus very central, where most of the museums and major tourist attractions are, and the higher numbers (12–20, more or less) are toward the periphery. But every arrondissement has its own character, and being right in the thick of the tourist area isn’t necessarily a benefit. The city’s excellent public transit system makes it quick and easy to get almost anywhere from almost anywhere else, so the key is to find an area with the sort of vibe you prefer and the right trade-offs between cost and convenience. We knew we didn’t want to be too far out toward the burbs, so we were focusing our search in the single-digit arrondissements.

Beyond general location, we had several other criteria, including cost (had to be well under what we were paying in San Francisco), amenities (had to have an oven, a washing machine, and an Internet connection, at least), and accessibility (no higher than the second floor, which would be the third floor in North America, without an elevator). Last but not least, the apartment had to be cat-friendly!

The number of apartments we saw online that met all those criteria was very, very small. Ultimately we chose an apartment in the 11th arrondissement, just slightly farther out than we thought was ideal, and for slightly more money than we’d hoped to pay. Other than that, it looked great—beautiful inside, all the bells and whistles we needed, on the 10th floor but with an elevator, and cats OK. After debating how long we should rent the apartment for, we eventually decided to sign a one-year lease, mainly so that we would have a nice long break before having to go through this again! We did all the paperwork either by email or by fax.

A few things we didn’t quite get when we were going into this process turned out to be important:

• Deposits are very high. We paid the landlord two months’ rent as a deposit, plus an agency fee. When you rent an apartment through an agency, whether short-term or long-term (and in most cases, that seems to be the best way to do it), the agency takes a not insubstantial cut. In our case, that fee was 10% of the entire lease period (so, we’re talking close to a month’s rent), all paid up front.
• Dryers are uncommon. Lots of the apartments we considered had washing machines, but very few of them had clothes dryers. The norm in France is to dry your clothes on a drying rack (or on a clothesline, if you have suitable outdoor space). A few apartments had combo, ventless washer-dryer units, but those are still relatively rare. It’s highly unusual to have a separate, stand-alone dryer. We would have preferred a dryer but since the apartment we liked had all the other items on our list, we did without.
• Air conditioning is almost unheard of. Actually we did know this beforehand, but it’s worth repeating. There’s a 99.9% probability your Paris apartment won’t be air-conditioned. There’s also a 99.9% probability that it will get unbearably hot in your apartment for at least part of the summer. That’s just The Way Things Are. You can buy air conditioners, but they aren’t cheap, and you may then face other challenges (such as compatibility with building wiring, finding a way to mount or vent them, etc.). Just saying.
• All sorts of random fees come up. Depending on the length of your lease and what sorts of concessions the landlord is willing to make, you may have to pay things like the annual TV tax (€75) and the annual occupancy tax (rate varies). You’re also required, by law, to have renter’s insurance. We paid about €290 for a basic one-year policy—all up front, natch. (Our apartment rental agency hooked us up with an insurance agent, but it’s not impossible to find the necessary insurance online.) On the other hand, utilities (including high-speed Internet service) are way, way cheaper here than in San Francisco—we’re talking about one-tenth the price. So that’s quite nice!
• It really does help to have an apartment before you get your visa. Here’s the thing. The consulate might have given us visas without seeing a lease (provided we had other documentation to show where we were looking), but they definitely required paperwork proving we had health insurance. And, the insurance company said we couldn’t get a health insurance policy without an address in France. (Well, there might have been some clever way around that, if push had come to shove, but that’s what they said.) And, having a signed lease (in French, of course) certainly made it much simpler to get a visa as well as to get a French bank account (the subject of a future post) and do several other tasks. So if you’re wondering whether you should look for housing before or after applying for a visa, our advice is to do it before.

Although we’d seen lots of pictures of our apartment before we got here, and also checked out the area on Google Earth and Google Maps, we still had little concept of what our neighborhood would actually be like when we were walking down the street. Well, what can I say, we lucked out. It’s not the trendiest part of town but it seems perfectly safe. Kids play outside, and within about a one-block radius we have two large supermarkets (plus a few smaller markets), several excellent bakeries and pastry shops, butchers, cafés, newsstands, a post office, a couple of hardware stores, several clothing stores…the list goes on and on. In short, it’s absolutely no problem for us to do virtually all our shopping and other errands on foot in our immediate neighborhood. And, we’re about two blocks from the nearest Métro station, so we feel like it’s extremely easy for us to get around. We like the folks in this neighborhood, too—we’ve found them to be friendly and helpful, even with our so-so French. In fact, we especially appreciate the fact that they don’t tend to switch right into English, as many merchants and waitstaff in the touristy areas do, because we need all the French practice we can get.

When we started thinking about this blog, we had the idea that we’d document every step we took to get to France in real time. We thought other people trying to do something similar would find it useful to see a chronological record of all our steps (and missteps). Although that didn’t happen, there’s a series of events we wanted to go back and describe in some detail, even though they happened a while ago: our four visits to the French consulate in San Francisco. Before I get to the first one, though (the other three will be future posts), I wanted to give a bit of background.

We’d read that folks from the U.S. who want to live in France for more than three months need a long-stay visa, and that one applies for such a visa at the nearest French consulate. (The one nearest to us, the Consulate General of France in San Francisco, was only about 15 minutes away by public transit.) We’d also seen the actual visa application form, which you can download from the consulate’s Web site, and the list of the other documentation you need to bring.

The problem was, despite having done considerable research, some elements of the application process just baffled us. For example: the visa application form asks for your address in France. Fine, we’d be renting an apartment, but how were we supposed to do that before knowing if, or when, our visas would be granted? It’s tough to look for an apartment when you have no idea when your move-in date might be. In fact, we’d already made some inquiries, and one person had told us that she couldn’t rent us an apartment at all unless we already had a visa—a real chicken-and-egg problem. The same went for health insurance: you need to have proof of health insurance that meets certain criteria and will cover you for the entire duration of your stay in France, but how can you buy health insurance without knowing for sure if or when you’ll be allowed into the country? We were also supposed to bring a letter stating that we wouldn’t have any “paid activity” in France, but we’re freelance writers who will certainly continue getting money for writing while we’re there—does that count as “paid activity”? And finally, we were unsure whether our applications would be considered separately or as a couple; there were some requirements we couldn’t both have met individually, but would if considered as a family unit.

So we figured the best way to get the answers to these questions was simply to go to the consulate and ask. That in itself was a problem: it was clear that you needed an appointment to apply for a visa, but there were no indications on their Web site whether you needed an appointment just to ask a question. We called, but their voicemail system didn’t have an option either to talk to a live person or to make an appointment without a specific reason. And the consulate was open very weird hours, only some of which were designated for processing visa applications. We decided we’d just walk in and take our chances, and it so happened the day we did this was Valentine’s Day—February 14, 2007.

When we walked through the door, we found ourselves in a cramped entryway with a desk, a metal detector, and a guard. He asked what we were there for, and we told him; he seemed confused that someone was there without an appointment, but after searching our bags and checking us for illicit metal objects, he sent us through the glass door and said to talk to the guy at a certain window.

Without having to wait at all, we walked up to the clerk and explained our situation. He couldn’t have been nicer—he patiently and clearly answered all our questions. (And he spoke perfect English too, which was a relief because we weren’t sure we could say everything we needed to in French.)

When asked about housing, he gave that stereotypical French expression consisting of a half-smile, pursed lips, and a shrug; his response amounted to, “Yeah, we know, if you’re going by the book, you’re not supposed to rent someone an apartment unless they have papers. A lot of landlords just ignore that, though.” Great. But what, we asked, if they insisted on following the letter of the law? “Well,” he said, “you don’t really need to bring us a lease. What you could do, instead, is bring us copies of email correspondence between yourself and French landlords (all translated into French, of course) that can document your attempts to rent an apartment, and where you’re looking. As long as you can show us you’re making a serious effort, that should suffice.” Cool, we thought. We can do that. (Although we later solved the problem in a different way; see Finding an apartment in Paris.) In terms of figuring out a move-in date, he told us, quite confidently, that it was a two-month process to get a visa. The consulate’s Web site says “2–3 months” and we’d heard from at least one source that it can take as long as six months, but the guy we talked to sounded quite certain that it would take two months, period—so we could pick the date we wanted to move and work backward from there to figure out when to submit our applications.

Health insurance, he said, was inflexible. You just have to have it, and they have to see the documentation. So basically: suck it up. We’d have to see whether we could find a policy that would give us a refund if our visas were denied.

He went into some detail about the “presentation letter” we were to include with our applications, made it sound like the officials who reviewed our applications put a lot of stock in what we said there. He described what we could and should say in the letter about our reasons for wanting to move to France, what we’ll be doing while we’re there, and so on. I asked if we could say that we’re moving because the bread’s better there. He laughed and then said, thoughtfully, “Yes, the bread is definitely better,” and told us it actually wouldn’t hurt to mention that in passing. (We did.) This was helpful, because otherwise we might have written a very short and perfunctory letter that didn’t have the right tone or emphasis. As far as “paid activity” goes, he said that the important thing is to show that you have enough resources so you won’t have to get a job in France—that would require a different visa and a whole new set of hassles. Being self-employed, if our income is coming from the U.S., is not a problem.

Finally, he said that since we’re married, our applications would automatically be considered jointly; he recommended bringing a copy of our marriage certificate when we applied (something that wasn’t mentioned on the Web site’s list of documents).

Well, that was all our questions. We left greatly encouraged. Not only did the parts of the process that had seemed muddy before look much clearer now, we knew that at least one person at the consulate was a friendly, helpful, ordinary guy rather than a scary bureaucrat—that recognition eliminated a lot of our stress.

Following that visit, we did some math and decided that July 1 would be our ideal moving date; that’s what we’d tell prospective landlords and the insurance company. If the visas took two months to receive, we’d need to apply by at least May 1. But we’d need a bit more wiggle room, because we had to give a month’s notice on our apartment, and we didn’t want to do that unless our visas were in hand; we also had lots of other arrangements to make that we couldn’t undo in a day if the visas didn’t come through. So we backed out another month: April 1. And, for good measure, just in case something went wrong or took longer than expected, we decided we should submit our applications even sooner. Our target date for having all our documentation together was March 1, and we almost made it: our next visit to the consulate happened on March 7. It was…interesting. We’ll explain in a future post.

Truffles for Breakfast is the ongoing story of two people, Morgen Jahnke and Joe Kissell, whose dream it was to leave behind their familiar San Francisco surroundings and live simpler but (we hope) more interesting lives in France.

I described our decision to move to France in an article on Interesting Thing of the Day: La Chose Intéressante du Jour. That contains most of the details of what we’re doing and why. It’s been interesting to read the comments and email messages that article has generated. Lots of people have either welcomed us to Europe or congratulated us on our decision. Several have said that they, too, have dreamed of doing something like this—of these, some still consider it a viable possibility while others don’t. And a few have expressed puzzlement, resentment, or even antipathy: “How could you possibly think France is better than the United States?”… “People with real lives don’t have the luxury to do such a thing” … “France is no friend of ours, so neither are you.” I said a few words about the more extreme examples of such comments in Striking a Nerve.

One refrain I hear over and over again is: “I could never do that. It’s impossible.” I think that’s funny, in a way, because it’s a common French habit to proclaim that something is impossible when what you mean is that you don’t want to be bothered—or that you simply need convincing. We’ve worked our way through a lot of problems that seemed, at first, to be unsolvable. What we’ve found is that there’s a huge difference between “impossible” and “very very hard.” I’m sure that some things truly are impossible, but in our experience so far, we’ve found that persistence and determination make all the difference. To be sure, we’ve experienced some stressful days, tears, pain, and frustration—with more, undoubtedly, to come—but also a lot of joy and laughter. On the whole, I think we’re both very happy with our decision, and delighted to be living in France. I’m here to tell you that it absolutely is possible to do what we did if you make it your priority and refuse to give up when faced with apparent roadblocks.

So there’s reason number one for me to do this blog: spreading that whole shiny “you-can-do-it” attitude. Maybe your dream has nothing to do with France or even with moving, but I hope that the stories we tell here will motivate and encourage you to do whatever you need to do to make your own thing happen.

Related to this is reason number two: Helping out other people who want to move here in particular. I can’t tell you how many books and Web sites we read while preparing for this move, but we still ended up with more questions than answers. Thanks in part to the legendary French bureaucracy, the process of getting into France and staying here legally is full of ambiguities and obstacles. We struggled enormously with things like finding a place to live, getting health insurance, and fulfilling a variety of other requirements needed to get our visas. And I’d like to think that the lessons we eventually learned can help to reduce the grief and anxiety of other people trying to do the same thing. We still have some questions, too, and perhaps readers who have more experience in these matters than we do can help us (and you) figure out the answers.

And my third reason: Laziness. No, seriously. I’ve got dozens of friends, relatives, and colleagues who want to be kept up to date on everything we do here. They want to hear all the stories, see the pictures, and in some cases, live out their own fantasies vicariously. That’s all great, but I only have so much time. Once I’ve told a story three or four times, I start thinking that life is too short—OK, there are too many pastries to be eaten, too many books to be read. So, I’m hoping that if I put most of the interesting facts and photos up here, I’ll only have to do it once!

Oh, and as for the name “Truffles for Breakfast”…I expect we will, at some point, actually have truffles in our scrambled eggs. But that’s neither here nor there. We thought that name would be symbolic of our desire to pay attention to the small but truly important things in life. See our About page for more details.