Bûche de Noël

In early December we noticed bûches de noël (yule logs) popping up in bakeries all around our neighborhood. We did some research and learned that it is a traditional holiday dessert in France and other Francophone countries. The most basic form is a sponge cake, rolled around a filling and covered with frosting or ganache, but we’ve seen all sorts of different bûches de noël around Paris and online.

While J is always up for the more elaborate French pastries, I tend to prefer simpler desserts like cookies or brownies. Despite that, I thought it was a great idea when he suggested that we get a bûche de noël for our own holiday dinner. We ordered one from our favorite local bakery and picked it up on Christmas Eve.

It was amazing, with a dark chocolate ganache coating, chocolate cake, and vanilla filling.

This is a holiday tradition that we definitely will be repeating next year!

We're legal!

A few weeks ago we received our residency permits from l’Office Francaise de l’Immigration et de l’Integration. These allow us to live in France legally for the next year.

The permits are the end-result of the process that began over 6 months ago when we committed to moving to Paris and started working with the immigration attorneys. We started out by filling out a stack of forms and submitting them to the French government, along with copies of our passports, birth certificates, marriage certificate and a number of passport-sized photos, along with other documents related to J’s work assignment. In June we were told that we would have our visas in 4 to 6 weeks, but this estimate turned out to be wildly optimistic. There had been no progress by August, which is the month when pretty much everyone in France goes on vacation, so nothing happened until September. Even after everyone was back from vacation there were further delays. When our application was finally approved by the Labor Ministry, some mysterious force was preventing them from forwarding the approved documents to the Migration Office. Our lawyers intervened to fix that problem, but then we had to wait for the documents to travel from the Migration Office in Paris to the French Consulate in Chicago. We were getting uncomfortably close to our planned move date of the last week in September, but the paperwork finally reached the consulate about 3 months after the whole process began.

Our local French Consulate was responsible for actually issuing our temporary visas, but that could only happen after an in-person visit, which was ultimately scheduled for my last day of work in mid-September. Before the appointment, we had received three different lists of documents we needed to bring with us: one from the French Consulate’s website, one in an email from the consulate and one from our attorneys. Of course all three lists were different. We showed up nervously clutching multiple copies of everything on all three lists, plus whatever else I could think of that might be relevant. Despite all of this preparation, we merely needed to drop off our passports, sign a few papers, have our picture taken, and we were back out on the street within thirty minutes. After waiting so long to get to the point where we could set up that appointment, it seemed like a good sign it had gone so well. Of course there was still one last delay: we couldn’t just pick up our passports, but had to wait for them to be mailed back to us. We got them back the following week, with 3-month visas pasted into the pages. We sent scans of the visas back to the attorneys and focused our attention on the move and the next steps of finding a place to live in Paris.

Proof of a permanent address in France was one of the items we needed in order to get a residency permit. When we signed the lease on our apartment here in Paris, we sent a copy of our lease and our utility bills to the attorneys. We also needed new photographs because neither the many U.S. passport-sized photographs that we had already submitted with our application nor the photographs taken by the French Consulate in Chicago were the correct size for the residency permit application. Luckily most train stations in Paris have photo booths that produce photographs that are the right size for government documents and IDs.

We soon received another stack of paperwork from the attorneys. We had to sign our applications for residency permits and send the signed copies back to the attorneys. We were very sternly warned that we needed to sign the applications inside of a particular box, and the application would be rejected if even one line of our signatures was outside of the box. The attorneys had left nothing to chance and blocked off the area around the signature box with sticky notes. Luckily, we both possess the fine motor skills needed to keep our signature within a 1 inch by 4 inch box. We returned the forms to the attorneys and waited (yet again).

It was now early December, over a month since our last communication with the attorneys and we were coming down to the final weeks on our temporary visas when we were told that our residency permit applications had been granted. There was just one last step: a medical examination, after which (assuming the government deemed us to be healthy enough) we would be able to pick up the permits. We were able to set up our appointments for the examinations through the attorneys, and our exams were scheduled for mid-December.

The attorneys also informed us that we had to pay several hundreds of euros in fees to the French government, and that the fees could only be paid using tax stamps. Tax stamps are available for sale at tabacs (tobacco/lottery ticket/tax stamp stores located all over Paris) but you cannot be guaranteed of finding all types of stamps or unlimited quantities of any particular stamp at any given tabac. I was able to pick up a few of the stamps that we needed at a store a block from our apartment, but then proceeded to wander through the city for an hour, visiting four other stores before I could buy all of the stamps we needed. And you have to pay for the stamps with cash, which led to an emergency ATM visit.

The night before our medical examinations we pulled together folders with all of our paperwork, our passports, and the tax stamps, and we nervously set the alarm for an hour of the morning that we haven’t seen since our first jet-lagged days in Paris.

The next morning we had just a short walk to our local branch of l’Office Francaise de l’Immigration et de l’Integration, but were alarmed to find a large group of people lined up outside the door. We went inside see if we needed to join that line, and encountered an employee guarding the door and a crowded waiting room. We showed the guard the letters confirming our appointments and were quickly directed past the first waiting room to a location upstairs. Upstairs we showed our letters to a pair of women behind a desk in a second (equally crowded) waiting room. We were promptly directed back to a third (even more crowded) waiting room, where we showed our letters to a third set of employees. A thick folder bearing our names materialized and we were directed to wait in this third waiting room.

There was nowhere to sit, so we awkwardly milled around and tried to stay out of the way. Then after a few minutes our names were called by an official-looking person and we were escorted back to the second waiting room. Feeling very confused, we sat down, still clutching our letters. A friendly American college student spending the year studying in Paris was seated next to me and we all chatted about the process and the confusion. After waiting for another five or ten minutes, we were called back to the third waiting room for a second time.

Back in the third waiting room, we were escorted almost immediately into a large medical examination room. Some highlights of the medical examination:

• We were weighed and had our height measured. I was wearing high heels that day; I wore a suit in an attempt to look respectable. When I showed the nurse that I was in heels, she told me that I should take off one shoe and measured my height while I awkwardly stood there, kind of tilted to one side with one high heel on. As a result, my height as recorded by the French government is 1.5 inches taller than my actual height.
• They also did a few vision tests. The first vision test was a pretty typical eye chart. The next test involved a laminated card with a series of paragraphs in French, each paragraph in a different size of type. I had to read the entire paragraph in the smallest type (though I only understood and definitely knew how to pronounce about half of the words). J (who is working every day instead of going to housewife French class) only got through about 3 awkwardly pronounced words before they asked him to stop.
• They took our chest x-rays to check for tuberculosis.
• We each had an private appointment with a doctor to discuss our x-rays and medical history. The doctor took my pulse and blood pressure, examined my chest x-ray, and pronounced my lungs “trés jolie.” She took an somewhat random medical history in a mix of English and French. She would first ask her questions in French and then translate if I did not understand the question. Some questions I could understand and answer in French. Others were a little more confusing:

Had I had any surgeries? No.

Any big surgeries? No. No surgeries at all.

But were there any big surgeries? No. No big surgeries.

• J went after me, and when we compared notes we realized that even though the same person took our medical histories, she did not ask us the same questions and she did not ask nearly as many questions of him. It seems as if my limited grasp of the French language made me easier to question, and the doctor didn’t want to suffer through too much of an examination with someone who did not speak French at all.

We waited for a few more minutes out in the third waiting room, then were given some papers and told to go to the door on the left. In this final room, we were able to hand over all the tax stamps, sign a few papers, and receive official-looking laminated cards that allow us to stay in France for the next year. We were able to leave with our permits in hand less than 2 hours after we arrived.

Many of the people that we had seen in all three waiting rooms when we first arrived were still waiting when we left. We also saw a number of people working with the employees to fill out forms, schedule future appointments, or figure out what documentation they needed to prove that they were eligible to be living in Paris. We knew all throughout the process that we were very fortunate to have attorneys to help us navigate all of the paperwork and red tape, but we didn’t fully appreciate how much simpler the process of becoming legal (temporary) residents of France had been for us until we tried to walk out the door of the immigration office. The long line of people that had initially confused us when approaching the office that morning was still there, waiting outside in the cold. Meanwhile we were on our way home, residency permits in hand.

Joyeux Noël

Month two

Time is flying by - we’ve been here for over two months. This month we had our first visitors, I had my first few successful phone calls en français, and we explored a little more of Paris. Some of the things we’ve been enjoying lately are:

Finding a favorite bakery in our new neighborhood

Saturday morning trips to the Marché d’Aligre, followed by a glass of wine at Le Baron Rouge

Taking a day trip to Chartres to see the gorgeous cathedral and spend an afternoon walking through the pretty town

Falafel

Delicious Mexican food at Candelaria and El Nopal

Walks through the Jardin des Plantes and along the Coulée Verte

Surviving an hour-long trek involving both a commuter train and a suburban bus to get to Ikea

Advent calendars

For the last few weeks I've been eyeing the chocolate advent calendars on display in the grocery store. I very badly wanted a chocolate advent calendar when I was little, but don't remember ever getting one. In a moment that was very similar to the time that I realized (at age 22) that being an adult meant that I could buy any cereal I wanted at the grocery store, it occurred to me that I could finally get a chocolate advent calendar of my own!

By the time I got around to buying it, the Milka calendar I most wanted was out of stock, but this was still very exciting. . .

Cooking experiment

After living in Paris for seven or so week, the thing from home that we miss the most is Mexican food. We’ve found that there are a few authentic Mexican restaurants in Paris, and have already visited two of them: Candelaria and El Nopal. I’ve also been able to find sources for canned chipotle chiles, dried ancho chiles, and fresh hot peppers, but the thing keeping me from making Mexican food at home has been the lack of tortillas. Big grocery stores stock corn and flour tortillas, but they are of very dubious quality. We tried some flour tortillas this week and they were . . . okay? Definitely edible, but we are spoiled from years of living in Chicago and having access to tortillas so fresh that they are still warm.

An acquaintance of mine that lives in Paris told me about Thanksgiving, a shop in the 4th arrondissement that carries American grocery products. I stopped by the store for the first time last week and was excited to discover that they sold masa harina, the flour that is used to make corn tortillas. I excitedly bought a bag and went straight home to try it out. Luckily, one of the few cookbooks that I had shipped to Paris has a recipe for making tortillas from scratch.

The only ingredients involved were the masa and some water.

I had a ball of tortilla dough to work with pretty quickly, but then things got a little trickier. I don’t have a tortilla press to form the tortillas, so I had to improvise. First I tried using the flat bottom of a sauce pan to press out the dough.

I also tried using a rolling pin.

Ultimately, a combination of the two worked the best. As you can see in the pictures, I formed the tortilla in a plastic bag so I didn’t have to worry about the dough sticking to any of my improvised presses.

Finally, I cooked the tortillas in a hot, dry skillet. And it worked! The final product was delicious.

Since this experiment was a success, I am pretty sure that we will be eating a lot more Mexican food at home.

Settling in

This is what the kitchen in our current apartment (and my hand) looked like on the day that we signed our lease. Everything you see, including the combination microwave/oven sitting on top of the counter, came with the apartment. At least half of these things have been packed up and are being stored in the loft above our living room.

Last week we received the items that we had shipped from the U.S, and our apartment feels a lot more like home now that we have familiar things surrounding us.

I've been working hard to unpack and find a place for everything, and I’ve also been hunting around to fill in the gaps. We didn’t bring any baking dishes or cookie sheets, because ovens are much smaller in Paris and I suspected (correctly!) that the ones I had would not fit in whatever oven we ended up with. We also didn’t bring any kitchen appliances because of the difference in voltage between the U.S. and France. And for some reason we didn’t bring any cutting boards, but I can’t remember why.

The rest of the apartment is still far from being finished, but it feels like the kitchen is finally in good shape. Here are a few pictures of the kitchen with all of our belongings and new acquisitions put away:

Le marché de la Bastille

Paris is home to a large number of markets. Some are set up outdoors on certain days of the week, much like an American farmer’s market. Others are housed in a permanent structure and operate several days of the week, like La Boqueria in Barcelona. One of the things we love about our neighborhood is that we are close to some fantastic markets.

Since our refrigerator about the size of a college dorm room refrigerator, it is very helpful to have markets to go to several days a week. I usually plan out our meals for the week in advance, but only buy enough meat and produce for a day or two at a time. Going to the market is also a good way to build my vocabulary. Not only are all of the products are labelled in French, but because the stands are usually not self-service you have to ask for each item by name and specify the desired quantity. “Je voudrais trois pommes de terre s'il vous plaît.” If I shop at the grocery store, I only need to say “Bonjour” and “Merci, au revoir” to the person at the cash register.

The Bastille market is one of the biggest in Paris, and we started shopping there even before we moved to our new apartment. It is an outdoor market that operates every Thursday and Sunday morning, and its vendors sell vegetables, fruits, cheeses, meats, fish, bread, and an variety of non-food items like clothing and housewares. It looks a lot like an American farmer’s market, but most of the vendors are not farmers. The food mostly gets there via a huge wholesale market at the edge of the city, where farmers and other producers bring their products to sell to the market vendors, shops, and restaurants.

We brought the camera on a Thursday morning (it is too crowded on Sunday to take pictures) and snapped a few pictures of the market:

One month later

We left for Paris on September 29, arriving around 9 am on September 30. After a whirlwind week of packing, movers, cleaning, last-minute errands, dragging 6 suitcases around with us, and a trans-Atlantic flight, we were exhausted. We made it to the apartment we were renting for the first month, had a somewhat confusing introduction to the apartment from the owner, and then collapsed into bed for a quick nap. A month later, it feels both like that moment was yesterday and like we’ve been here forever.

It all still feels a little bit surreal. Sometimes I have to remind myself that we actually live here now and are not just on vacation; this is probably because I’m still getting used to not working all of the time. And at times it does feel like a glorious vacation. There are so many new places to discover and old favorites to revisit, and you can’t walk the streets of Paris without being constantly struck by just how beautiful this city is.

But don’t think for a minute that it is easy to move to a new country where you don’t speak the language or know anyone. The smallest things can be strangely difficult, like the first time I set out to clean our temporary apartment. I ended up sitting on the kitchen floor with my laptop, using Google Translate to identify the 30+ different bottles of cleaning products under the sink. I accidentally washed the same batch of clothes four times in a row before I finally cracked the code and figured out that the picture of a tiny sun meant ‘dry’. And I found out the hard way that not all dishwashers will stop running when you open the door to add that one last forgotten spoon.

We’re now in our permanent apartment, but we still aren’t settled in yet --- in fact, the list of things we still need to do sometimes seems endless. We are still dealing with immigration-related paperwork. The apartment is still missing all sorts of necessities, in part because we haven’t yet received the things we shipped from the U.S. to arrive. I’m still trying to master the nuances of the combined countertop oven/microwave. It all feels a little overwhelming sometimes.

But despite all of the work in the past month and the work ahead of us, we still love Paris and feel incredibly lucky to be here. I can’t wait to see what the next few years here will hold.

Here are some of the things and places that we’ve enjoyed during our first month:

Sacré Cœur

Walks around Montmartre while we were in the temporary apartment

Au Levain d’Antan, the bakery where I bought most of our baguettes while we were staying in the 18th

Shopping at the Bastille market on Sunday mornings to get produce

Crepes at the Breizh Café

Stopping for coffee or glasses of wine at Pause Cafe

French basque food at Café Tolo

Living Arrangements

We moved to Paris without finding an apartment ahead of time, instead renting a temporary apartment to stay in for the first month while we looked for more permanent housing. We've both been through the apartment searching process back in the U.S. a number of times, but quickly learned that the market in Paris is very different.

When we learned that we might be moving to Paris, we started looking at apartments online. It helped that prior to moving here we had visited Paris (separately and together) several times and had some ideas about which neighborhoods we might want to live in. But even within the general area we targeted, there were a lot of spots with which we were not familiar. I spent a lot of free time with www.seloger.com (a site we were told that "all the Parisians use") open in one window and Google maps open in the other, trying to figure out exactly where all of these apartments were located.

We were lucky enough to be able to visit Paris again this summer, and we used that time to look at our favorite neighborhoods from the perspective of a potential resident rather than a tourist. It was really helpful to walk through all of the streets that we had been looking at online and realize that some places were even nicer than we had suspected (the northern part of the Marais, for example), and that others were maybe not quite what we were looking for (there was a disturbing rat-related incident that ruled out one particular spot).

Narrowing down the neighborhoods was fairly easy, but we still had a lot to learn about apartments in Paris. One crucial piece of information is that a so-called "unfurnished apartment" isn't just an apartment does not have furniture. In Paris, an unfurnished apartment's kitchen usually does not come with appliances, a sink or cabinets. The apartment might not even have light fixtures! The tenant is expected to provide everything, and then to take it all with them when they leave.

We ultimately decided that living with someone else's furniture would be preferable to assembling and installing an entire kitchen within a month or so of arriving in a new country, but we still needed to educate ourselves to properly set our expectations. Our home in the U.S. is about 1200 square feet and has a very typical condo kitchen. Most of the apartments in Paris that we looked at in person or online were in the range of 400 - 700 square feet and had kitchens that were minimalistic by American standards. With my love of cooking I was a little nervous when I would see apartment listings where the kitchen consisted of a small sink, a refrigerator smaller than the one I had in my freshman dorm room, and two electric burners. That's it. No cabinets, no counter, no oven, no freezer except the tiny compartment inside the refrigerator. Not all kitchens were this primitive, but by requiring a kitchen that could actually be used for cooking we were ruling out a number of apartments.

We also saw a lot of apartments that seemed fantastic on paper, but which were on the 7th or 8th floor of buildings without elevators. When our own building's elevator broke the day we left our condo to move to Paris and we had to drag all six of our (very heavy) suitcases down five stories, we were reminded that while we don't generally mind taking the stairs, there are advantages to being on a lower floor.

One thing we didn't realize until we arrived in Paris and started actively hunting for an apartment was just how quickly the market moves here. Our agent told us that if we saw a listing online for a furnished apartment that was more than a day or two old, the apartment was probably already taken. Despite that, it sounded like it was a bit easier finding a furnished apartment than an unfurnished apartment. Apparently unfurnished apartment viewings take place at a single fixed time, everyone who is interested comes to see it at once, and you need to be ready to put down a deposit on the spot. Luckily the market for furnished apartments is a bit less frenzied, since the only competition is generally other expats or people looking for a pied-à-terre in the city.

The whole process was pretty nerve-wracking, and I had visions of ending up camping out on a mattress with the rats if things didn't work out. I found myself spending time every day looking on every website I could find for new apartments and contacting people to try to schedule viewings. We spent an entire day running around the 3rd, 4th, 10th, 11th and 12th arrondissements with our agent looking at a number of different places. I think we saw nine or ten apartments over the course of a week.

We were pleasantly surprised by most of the apartments we saw, in part because our agent has access to apartment listings that never even make it to the internet. There were some not-so-nice places (like the one with where the bedroom was in a dingy former kitchen, with the tile backsplash still covering portions of the wall) and some nice places with nightmarish aspects (like huge 3-dimensional Harlequin faces emerging from the bathroom tiles). But eventually we found the right place.

Our new home is in an old building, but the apartment has been completely rehabbed. It has a nice kitchen and the bedroom has a closet so large that we call it the dressing room. There are skylights and high ceilings throughout, giving it an open and airy feeling. And best of all, it seems to be 100% rat-free.