The view out our balcony

Now that we have officially taken possession of our apartment, we are even busier than before, trying to make it feel like home. The first few days were taxing... with no electricity and no furniture, but we made do...

The furniture, including bed, couch, kitchen table, chairs and much more will be arriving Wednesday evening.

On Sundays everything closes (really...everything; except a handful of restaurants), so I took advantage of the sun and went for a long bike ride in the countryside surrounding Poitiers. There were lots of roads with very little traffic and enough hills to keep me entertained. The fall colors were also starting to show themselves. There are very few road signs per se, most of the signs mark the direction to the nearest town or simply the family farm that lies down the road. Most signs in the rural areas simply signify what might be called a rural neighborhood of one or two farmhouses.

A self portait (if you look hard enough)

The weather was lovely this weekend, and, aside from the extended bike ride, the best thing we got to do was to go to the Saturday market in la Place de Charles de Gaulle. At this enormous outdoor market, we purchased goat cheese, three different kinds of cured sausage, peaches, apples, a fancy "original" German can opener, cereal spoons, wooden spoons, and a delicious hot lunch of curried chicken and sautéed potatoes. Now that we have a functioning refrigerator, we have only begun to imagine the wonderful possibilities of the Saturday outdoor market...we'll be sure to buy way too much stuff for the first few weekends...

The paperwork battle is not quite over; we have yet to apply for our residence permits. Today, we did a lot of photocopying and got a few "tampons" (French for 'stamps') from local offices (and though this may seem irrelevant and/or ambiguous to the uninitiated, the importance of tampons is never to be underestimated when in France...). We also sat in line for Rebecca's bus passes for her commute to the University. Soon to come also, internet access at our apartment, which will afford us the convenience of not having to blog on a French keyboard--theymre qll screzy///)

Rebecca's classes are going well. This week will be her first week with the first year (freshman) students; the plan is to begin with Surrealism (an excerpt from Alice in Wonderland, the famous Magritte painting that Foucault loved so much, and a quote from William Gordon: "Trust things that are alien, and alienate things that are trusted.") How does communication function within the Surrealist framework, when nothing means what it says, or says what it means...? We'll see what they think...more soon.

The Details, Part 2: The Timeline

September of 2007

Rebecca applies to the UIUC teaching exchange program

Thanksgiving 2007

Rebecca is accepted by the UIUC teaching exchange program.

January 15, 2008

Rebecca is asked by Poitiers' English Dept (PED) to send them an application, too.

late January 2008

Jeff looks into visas, learns that we must wait to apply until 2 months before we intend to leave.

February 1, 2008

Rebecca's application is accepted by the PED.

June 30, 2008

Rebecca contacts the PED to ask about her work agreement from the french labor department (ANAEM). The Chicago Consulate's website says this will be required for approval.

July 3, 2008

The PED sends Rebecca's contract, suggesting that it will be sufficient in lieu of the ANAEM agreement.

July 10-17, 2008

We complete the applications as detailed on the webpage of the Chicago consulate. This is one week of frantic copying, translating, and notarizing. Jeff's application totals some 100 pages of documents.

July 18, 2008

First appointment at the Chicago consulate--we are denied visas on the basis of not having an agreement from the ANAEM. The contract, Madame du Consulat explains, is insufficient.

July 21, 2008

After emailing the PED to give them our unhappy news, we are contacted for the first time by "Monsieur A" in the Human Resources department. Monsieur A informs us that he has just submitted the request for the ANAEM agreement. We are told that it is a "long, disagreeable, and complex process".

late July, 2008
The ANAEM application goes to the Paris Sud office instead of the newly opened, but apparently poorly publicized, Poitiers branch, where it is promptly lost.

August of 2008

All of France goes on vacation. We lose contact with Monsieur A and the PED.

August 31, 2008

We spend Rebecca's birthday on hold with an Evil Online Booking Agency, trying to change our date of departure.

September 4, 2008

Original date of departure to France

September 5, 2008

We reestablish contact with Monsieur A and the PED. They are surprised to hear that we don't have visas, but reassure us that everything will work out eventually ("On y arrivera..." meaning "We will get there...").

September 12, 2008

We spend 4.5 hours on the phone with Evil Online Booking Agency (EOBA) trying to change our tickets again. They made us hang up after making the change to the first reservation before we could make the second change. After becoming delirious during the 4 hours on the phone, Jeff neglects to mention that the new tickets should be sent to the same address as the last tickets, not the old address in Illinois.

September 15, 2008

Second date of departure

September 16, 2008

After several more emails from us, Monsieur A assures us that he has contacted both the ANAEM and the Chicago consulate, and that everything has been worked out.

September 17, 2008

Jeff calls EOBA to inquire after Rebecca's new airline tickets and to request that his new tickets be re-sent to the correct address. After putting him on hold for an hour, the Lovely Customer Service Lady explains that while Jeff's new tickets are paper tickets, Rebecca's are e-tickets...because it's much less confusing that way (?). Jeff wonders how many more times he will have to supply EOBA with his new address before they get it right. Lovely Customer Service Lady responds dryly, "Well, how many more times are you planning to change your flight?"

September 18, 2008

Unbeknownst to us, the ANAEM agreement is sent to the Boston consulate by mistake.

September 19, 2008

Second appointment at the Chicago consulate--we are again denied because they have received no ANAEM agreement. Madame du Consulat suggests that maybe it was sent to Boston by mistake, but she isn't sure. We have no idea how she knows this, and Madame du Consulat is unable to give us any more information. She suggests we call the ANAEM office in Poitiers and ask them to fax the agreement directly to Chicago.

September 22, 2008

Due to the time difference the ANAEM office is open from 2am-9:30am CDT. We make several attempts to call the ANAEM branch in Poitiers, but without knowing the proper information to locate the file, are unable to make it past reception. It doesn't help that we call within an hour of closing time...no one wants to talk to us.

September 23, 2008

We return to Madame du Consulat, without appointments, and though she has still not received the proper documents from the ANAEM, she approves our visas. We are told that some mysterious exception has been made, (maybe because classes are about to begin?).

September 25, 2008

First day of classes at Poitiers

October 3, 2008

Current date of departure

The Details, Part 1: How to Get a Visa

When this whole journey began, I sought out other people's opinions and experiences, just as many of us do when we enter uncharted waters.  Those of you who know me (Rebecca) know that I have been in school for about 22 consecutive years.  Leaving school temporarily to travel was certainly something I thought about, particularly when I had a bad work week, but then always pushed out of my head, mostly because it seemed like a logistical nightmare.  Well, it is.

So when I applied for the job in Poitiers and got it, I asked others for advice.  How did you go about finding a place to live?  What did your partner do while you were abroad?  How did you get a visa?

Overwhelmingly, most of the people I talked to seemed not to remember the exact logistics of the process.  They said things like "Yeah, it was really tricky."  Or "Jeez, it took forever."  But when pressed for step-by-step explanations, it seemed that most people had deleted the details of the trauma from their memories.  "How could they forget something like that??"  At least this is what I remember thinking.

But now I realize that it isn't that the details had been forgotten, it's that these details remained thoroughly opaque throughout most of the process.  And sadly, though I had hoped to record the details of my application process so that they might benefit some future applicant in the same position, many of these details remain obscure to me.  However, in the spirit of open source information sharing, I will attempt to provide a rough timeline of the process (at least as Jeff and I experienced it).  Stay tuned for Part 2...

Visas...sans blague

Details to follow.

Adventures in Chicago

Returning to Chicago was pretty difficult because it meant things had not gone the way we had imagined them. We put everything into storage thinking we would not see it again for a year or so. This included keys to our tandem in Chicago, keys to my friends' apartment in Chicago, and our CTA cards. Luckily, when I called my friend Eric, he was still around and happy to have us stay at his place. He even made a new set of keys for his apartment so that it would feel more like home.

(This is Eric and Stacy in their cozy apartment.)

Unfortunately, we weren't so lucky with the tandem...

...the lock had to be cut because we didn't have an extra key. Eric, being the bike guru he is, happened to have an angle grinder in his apartment that made short work of the U-Lock. After a little oiling and air, we were on our way to a great week in Chicago.

First up, dinner and a movie. Despite the cliche nature of this pairing, I can't think of a much better way to spend an evening. And afterwards, we stopped by Binny's Beverage Depot with their instant wine chiller and we did a little relaxing by the lake...

Sunday was the inaugural race in the Chi Cross Cup, a cyclocross racing series in the Chicago area. The sport of cyclocross was designed as a way to take advantage of terrible off-season conditions of northern Europe, and so it goes until February. We went to watch the races at Jackson Park near the University of Chicago and we relaxed as people biked and ran and jumped, and sometimes fell down. This racer (below) came out of this incident "okay", meaning bloodied, dazed, and with a few nasty cuts to the forehead, but (most importantly) with no damage to his bike.

The best part of cyclocross is the short, closed course which provides for a great spectator sport. It is easy to move around the course from a hairpin turn, to a barricade that racers must carry their bike over, to a high speed straightaway. Of course, spectating is only half the fun. Usually, words of encouragement or derision are close at hand for heroic performances or costly mistakes.

Eric and Aaron are alternately heckling (bad) and cowbelling (good) some of the cyclists as Jeff looks on.

After the racing was over, we (Jeff and Eric) decided to try for ourselves. No wonder they don't have a tandem category. Coordinating dismounts, barrier jumping, and remounts quickly proved to be VERY difficult.

Return to Chicago

After some back and forth with various parties, and a lot of time spent holding the phone with various customer service reps, we are headed back to Chicago. We hope that a little face time with the consulate will speed us toward a solution.

We have an ally in France in the form of someone in the Human Resources Department at the University of Poitiers. He has been working tirelessly on our behalf to cut the through the bureaucracy of the process. Hopefully, his work trying to speed things along at the ANAEM (the French department of labor) will prove fruitful and we will come back to Raleigh with visas in hand.

If we don't get our visas, at least we got to say goodbye to all our friends in Chicago. It will be nice to visit someplace we know, where we don't have to scour the internet and alternative weeklies trying to figure out where to eat or what movie to see. Best of all, we have a tandem bicycle waiting for us in Chicago at my friend's apartment. It may need a little repair, but it is much better than riding the trains and buses into the wee hours of the morning.

In some respects this convoluted visa process has been good preparation for what is to come when we have to apply for residence permits once we arrive in France. There are a few horror stories floating around the internet that make the visa process seem effortless by comparison. Whatever the future holds, we will try and keep a sense of humor about it and maybe even offer other people tips that will help them keep their sanity during their negotiation of this maze.

Changing our Date of Departure

No visas yet...  so, unfortunately, we have to push our flight back.  Instead of leaving on September 4th, it's looking like our date of departure will be more like the 15th.  I feel like I may be developing a stomach ulcer.  

I'm also missing the beach and my friend Kyle, who lives in a magical land where they drink 40's of Miller High Life out of wine glasses.  

And I miss her nice friends, too, who shared the cozy space with us.

In unrelated and happy news, we're headed to a wedding in Michigan this weekend (congrats to Tom and Jessie).  With luck, there will be enough fun and hijinx and firewater to make us forget our troubles.  Back soon with pictures.

Visas

Yesterday we went to the french consulate in Chicago in order to get our long-stay visas.  It took about a week of both of us working day and night to get all of the forms filled out and letters written (not to mention photocopied, notarized, and translated into French).  

We took the tandem bike from the place we stayed on Thursday night and biked to the consulate, which is downtown.  We arrived no later than 15 seconds after our appointments were scheduled to begin, and only slightly sweaty.  The office was stark and dismal, and the two women processing the visa applications were separated from the waiting area by thick, bulletproof glass.  The signs posted directed us to wait until our names were called.  We watched as four other people in the waiting area became impatient with waiting and finally got up and approached the women behind the glass, who yielded immediately and processed their applications.  We finally decided to do the same.

The lady we approached was wooden.  She took our applications, passports, and two self-addressed express mail envelopes and explained that as soon as her office receives a labor agreement from l'ANAEM (the department that approves foreigners to work in France), both of our applications will be approved.  

This is both good news and bad news.  It is unfortunate that the my labor agreement has not yet been sent despite quite a lot of effort on my part.  But it's out of my hands, so we'll just have to be patient.  The good news is that the lady we spoke with gave us the impression that Jefe's visa will not be a problem (i.e. that it is merely conditional on my visa).  

We celebrated by going to see Tell No One (french title: Ne le dis a personne), which was spooky and  terrific.