Now I definitely need a new wallet. French driver’s licenses (which are sort of tri-fold booklet type things) are significantly larger than the credit card-sized licenses we get in the U.S., and neither my license nor my carte de séjour will fit in my current wallet. (Or, there’s always the man-purse option, this being Europe and all, but I like to travel light.)

Here’s what my test report looked like:

Having passed the notoriously difficult written portion of the test for my French driver’s license a few weeks ago and spent several further hours behind the wheel with an instructor from the driving school by my side, I was finally able to take my road test this morning. It was nerve-wracking, as I’d anticipated. I was mentally prepared for either of two outcomes: I pass and get my license, or I fail, take more lessons, and try the test again in a few weeks. Of course I hoped very much to pass, but given how unusual (from my perspective) the French traffic laws and expected driver behavior are, I accepted the possibility that I wouldn’t please the inspector on my first try. What I was completely unprepared for was what actually happened. I finished the course—having performed, I felt, generally quite well (though with a couple of minor flubs)—only to have the inspector tell me that she’d send me the results of my exam by mail.

What…seriously? After all this anticipation and anxiety, I don’t even get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down at the end? Amazing but true. I have to wait for an envelope in my mailbox (supposedly as early as Monday) with the good or bad news. Geez.

I think I passed. I was feeling good vibes from the inspector (95% of the time, anyway) and from my instructor—who sat in the backseat the whole time, ostensibly to translate, though in fact she barely said two words throughout the whole test. (Luckily, I have mastered the French expressions for “turn right,” “turn left,” “go straight,” and “park here,” which comprised the bulk of the instructions given during the exam.) But I don’t really know; the things I perceived as “oh-by-the-way-look-out-for-this” kinds of reminders may have been intended as “you-idiot-anyone-who-misses-this-obvious-thing-fails-instantly.” I guess I’ll find out in a few days.

Update (January 5, 2008): I passed!

On December 20, my mother called to tell me that my father had died that morning. He had been in the hospital for four months. Without getting into all the details, he’d had major surgery to treat a life-threatening condition in August and initially appeared to be on the road to recovery. In the months that followed he had periods of ups and downs, but then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to anyone, he abruptly began to deteriorate and died from what amounted to multiple systems failure less than three weeks before his 86th birthday. Morgen and I flew to Pennsylvania for the funeral, which was held on Christmas Eve, and spent a week with my mother before returning to Paris. I’ve had some unusual holidays, but this will surely be remembered as the most cheerless ever.

I’ve been reflecting on our time in Paris—six months now, as of yesterday—and my predominant feeling is that of being mystified as to where all that time went. I don’t just mean that in the usual “time flies” sense. It feels as though I’ve been in a daze most of the time. We were, and are, delighted to be here; we enjoy the views, the vibe, the food, and everything else. But we (or at least I) have been remarkably distracted to the extent that it’s often been hard to appreciate or even be aware of where we are. During the second half of year, apart from the constant worries about my father’s health, I had a relentless succession of Really Big Deadlines (mainly Take Control books and Macworld articles); we had to work through the complex processes of getting our cartes de séjour (long-term French residence cards) and applying to join the French healthcare system; I took driving lessons so that I could get a French driver’s license (a notoriously long and difficult process, even for people who grew up here); we both got sick a few times with cold-like symptoms that hung on far too long; and we endured the usual array of strikes, breakdowns in our building (elevators, water, heat), and administrative challenges with various French bureaucracies.

As a result, a lot of things got put on the proverbial back burner. For example, posts on all our blogs have been few and far between, and it’s been months since we’ve had any new articles on Interesting Thing of the Day. I’m still behind on several important projects for various publishers. And we’ve had precious little time for sightseeing or other leisure activities.

I’m hoping that January will indeed be a fresh start, that I can stay (or get) on top of my various obligations, and that 2008 will be a year with fewer distractions and more fun. My goals for the year include not only writing the usual array of books and articles, but some entirely new and interesting projects, several trips, and a generally lower level of stress and higher levels of sanity and solvency.

Tomorrow morning I’ll take the road test for my driver’s license, and if I pass, that’ll be one more big thing I can cross off my list. (If not, well, I get four more tries…) Then, as long as life isn’t too interesting, I’ll try to go back and fill in some of the many blanks on this blog about how we got where we are now and what lies ahead.

One of the major items on our to-do list once we arrived in Paris was to acquire some sort of transit pass—not having a car, we knew we’d be relying heavily on the Métro (Paris’s subway system) to get us long distances across the city. Although it’s possible to buy Métro tickets for individual trips (or more cheaply, a carnet of 10 tickets), the cost can really add up if you use the system frequently.

It may seem like a simple task to purchase a transit pass, but the way things are done in France is not always easy. From our previous trips to Paris, we knew it was possible to buy a Carte Orange, which along with a special ticket you purchase separately (or at the same time you buy your first Carte Orange), provides unlimited Métro access to certain zones of the city for either a week or a month. The strange thing, at least for those who are used to buying a transit pass in North American cities, is that to get this short-term pass you need to provide a current photo, in a specific format, to go with the card. Helpfully, there are photo booths in every Métro station, where for 4 Euros you can get four photos of the right size for this purpose (and these photo booths also give instructions in English). Unhelpfully, they only take coins and there are no change machines nearby (for this and other reasons, we’ve found it useful to keep a collection of coins of various denominations handy).

Once you’ve cleared the first hurdle of obtaining a photo, the second hurdle is to actually purchase the Carte Orange. Depending on your language skills and/or the mood of the ticket clerk, this can be an easy process or an incredibly stressful one (see below for examples of both types of encounters). In our case, because we are here long-term, we had a further hurdle to clear because we wanted to get a new type of transit pass called a Navigo. With this pass, we wouldn’t need to feed a paper ticket through a turnstile, but could instead swipe our card on a special digital reader that would give us access to the station. Another benefit of the Navigo is that not only can it be “recharged” weekly or monthly at ticket machines, but it can also be recharged by automatic payments from your bank account.

We decided that we wanted to get passes that would recharge themselves automatically, and furthermore, that we would subscribe to a certain type of plan, called the Intégrale, which would give us a cheaper monthly rate and a free month of transit after we’d been subscribed for 11 months. According to the Web site of the RATP (Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens) which administers not only the Métro but the bus, tramway, and RER (intra-city trains) systems, it is possible to apply for the Intégrale online, but we couldn’t figure out how to obtain digital photos that met their criteria. (Later on, we noticed that a shop just around the corner from us had a sign advertising that they offer just that sort of digital photo, but we discovered that too late.)

Instead, we figured we’d have to get an application form from one of the Métro stations, and send it in along with a photo. Thinking it shouldn’t be too hard to obtain one of these forms from the ticket clerk at our local Métro station, I approached the guichet (ticket counter) and tried to make myself understood. I thought I was saying the right words, but the woman at the counter couldn’t understand what I was asking (or maybe she couldn’t hear me behind the thick glass), and she impatiently waved me away so she could serve the person waiting behind me.

I now realize that she most likely didn’t have the forms we needed, and her confusion came from wondering why I was asking her about something that wasn’t part of her job description, but what was communicated to me was mere incomprehension. So, at the time, daunted by her brusqueness, I retreated in embarrassment thinking that it was my language skills that weren’t up to snuff.

After regrouping, later in the week we decided to try a different tactic; this time we went to a larger station, which had an RATP office, not just the guichets. Not knowing what to expect, we were pleased to see signs indicating that we could apply for the kind of card we wanted and could receive it on the spot, if we had a RIB (a string of numbers with details of our French bank account). With this number in hand, we stepped into the office and tried again to make ourselves understood.

Once again, the woman behind the desk seemed not to understand any of the words coming out of our mouths except the word “Intégrale,” to which she shook her head saying that it is only for residents. When we nodded vigorously, saying that we were indeed living in Paris, she said somewhat incredulously “Vous habitez ici?” (“You live here?”). Once we made it clear we weren’t tourists, she still couldn’t help us; we needed not only our RIB number, but a special piece of paper from our bank stating this number. And we needed photo ID.

As we returned home to fetch our passports and bank documents, I was feeling annoyed by the whole process, while Joe was more philosophical about it. “Remember, we’re frustrated because we can’t understand her, and she’s frustrated because she can’t understand us. Besides, she’s probably unhappy with her job and we should have sympathy for her.” Buoyed slightly by his equanimity, I hoped our next encounter would go more smoothly.

We didn’t get a chance to find out; when we got back to the office there was a different woman behind the desk. This time, she simply asked for the documents she needed, we provided them, and all went along swimmingly (it turned out we didn’t need the photos for the pass after all; she took a digital shot of each of us). It seemed a minor miracle. She was very courteous and helpful, and she seemed to understand what I was saying to her. It was as if a switch got flipped; because she had patience and was really trying to understand what I was saying, suddenly the words I needed were on the tip of my tongue, as they hadn’t been for the last two weeks. I found myself asking complicated questions, and even joking with her about how I usually can’t help closing my eyes when someone takes a picture of me. I felt vindicated: “I can actually speak this language!”

Afterwards, when we went to buy Cartes Oranges to hold us over until the Intégrale kicked in at the start of the next month, the woman at the guichet had no problem understanding Joe, and the transaction went incredibly fast. It seemed in both instances that we were finally asking the right person, at the right place, and had brought the correct documents. It just proved to us that we can navigate a difficult system in a foreign language, if there is patience on both sides, and if all the other conditions are met.

Feeling like we had been through an ordeal, we patted ourselves on the back for accomplishing something that locals sometimes find difficult as well. We had our magical Navigo passes, and Paris was now ours to explore as we wished.

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.