Dreaming of France -- Visa Adventure

Thank you for joining this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.

Well, I'm not going to try to build up any suspense. We traveled to Chicago this week and applied for our Visa.
Chicago is about five hours away from us, but it is where we needed to travel for our in-person interview to request a long-stay visa. In general, Americans don't need visas to visit France for three months or less, so we've never had to do this before.
We spent the night with some old friends who live about 20 minutes outside of the city. We took the train in early Thursday morning. Our appointments were not until 11 and 11:10 (we both had to have appointments), but we just commuted when our friend went to work at 8 a.m.

That gave us time to find a place for breakfast.
We were lured into a place that had a chalkboard sign that read "Homemade pastries" but when we got inside, I asked where the pastries were and they had none. What they had instead, was a breakfast buffet that you paid for by weight. Weird, huh?
Once we'd finished, we pulled out our red folder with our documents. I had put mine in order according to the list:
*an application
*a passport-sized photo (no smiling, no glasses)
*a questionaire
*my passport and a photo copy of the identity page
*a letter explaining what I intend to do in France (eat pastries, drink wine, write books)
*a notarized letter promising I won't work in France (at least not a French job)
*a letter explaining my work and showing my paystubs
*proof of means of income -- Earl's retirement savings and the income from the sale of our house
*our marriage license
*proof of accommodation (we included the hotel in Paris where we'll stay along with the two housesits in France and our friend's address in Aix en Provence where we'll go to file our paperwork)
*a processing fee ($115 cash)
*a residence form (since we plan to stay in France for more than 12 months)
*a self-addressed, pre-paid Express envelope from the post office only -- not UPS or FED EX

I also  had a birth certificate, just in case.
After breakfast, we decided to walk to the consulate, which is on Michigan Avenue, down toward the Magnificent Mile. Even though we arrived at the building nearly an hour early, I wanted to go ahead and check in. I felt nervous, jittery.
Earl suggested we get something to drink at the Starbucks on the second floor, but I wanted to head to the 37th floor to the French consulate. So he acquiesced.
The information desk gave us a pass to get through the gates to the elevators. We were supposed to scan the pass and glass doors slid open to let us through. But I scanned my pass and the doors turned red, but I pushed on them anyway. Suddenly, a loud blaring noise rang out and a man with a walkie talkie came rushing toward us calling, "Step back."
They'll never let me into France now, I thought as the man took my pass and scanned it before allowing me through the gates.
A few seconds in the elevator, which made my ears pop as it zipped up to the 37th floor, and we stepped off into France.

Proof that we were in the right place.

Here's me in those same chairs.

A young man, who was returning to the office, told us we should put our passes in a deposit window, like a bank. The two women behind the windows lined up the passes, probably in order of people's appointments.
The office was very small with a television mounted in the corner. It played French food shows the whole time we were there.
A man and two children were there when we arrived, and another man, French, jumped ahead of the line to get his passport, but almost everyone else there was a student getting a visa to study abroad. And the majority of those students were Asian. Perhaps they were studying in the U.S. and wanted to do a study abroad, or maybe they came from countries that needed a visa to visit France.
At a little after 11, the younger woman motioned me up. She didn't try to pronounce my name, but her microphone wasn't working so we hadn't been able to hear her all morning anyway.
I pulled out the packet of papers and asked whether she wanted all of them.
Yes, she nodded. So I slide the inch-thick stack through the window and she slowly went through each one.
She handed me back the extra passport photo and my birth certificate, and the envelope that my $115 cash was in.

Earl took a picture of me standing at the window as I supplied my papers. 

Then she asked to get my fingerprints. They had a machine that didn't require ink or black-tipped fingers, but it was quite contrary. It took several times and kept beeping at me as I tried to get the machine to light up for all four fingers, and then the other hand and then both thumbs.
While we were there, no one else had to do the fingerprint machine. It must only be for people planning to move to France.
The woman then nodded and said I could send my husband up. So Earl replaced me and supplied all of his papers. After his wrangling with the fingerprint machine, we were free to go.
Some of the students applying didn't have what they needed, so the workers had sent them out to get things like cash for the fee or envelopes for mailing the visa. We had all our documentation, so that's a plus.
Earl picked up my coat and held it for me. As I slipped my arms in, I saw the French woman behind the window smile at us.
She thinks we're cute, I thought. Then I wondered if she thought there was no way we were getting a visa to move to France.  
Just because we had all the right forms does not mean that they'll let us move to France. I think our odds would have been much better if we had closed on our house and could show them a bank statement with $150,000 in it. But the closing is not until December and the visa can take a month to arrive. We couldn't risk waiting.
So now we'll check the mailbox starting next week, hoping our visas arrive.
I didn't think about it until recently, but we left our passports there, along with our marriage licenses. I hope we get them both back.

We left the building after pausing for pictures in front of the French flag and their new president 

Happy

Earl and Emmanuel

before we walked to the Nutella cafe across the street. I'm sure it was strategically placed close to the French consulate.

Nutella oveerload

Earl had a Nutella and banana crepe while I had a berry pastry that I didn't realize would be drizzled in Nutella. I think I'd have preferred it without Nutella, but we celebrated because we were a step closer to making our dream come true, where we can eat really pastries without Nutella on them.
Vive la France!
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Dreaming of France -- 2017 This is the Year

Thank you for joining this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.

Today is the first day of the year that I will move to France. This year we will make our dream come true.
Everything I do with the kids, with my friends, makes me think, I won't be able to do this next year.
So there's a certain melancholy to it, but I imagine the adventures my husband and I want to have. I think about his recent 61st birthday and how we could push back the date to move, but how many healthy years do we have to climb mountains and dip our toes into the Mediterranean.

How many years can we count on wanting to walk unfamiliar city streets and settle into cafes for glasses of wine or tiny cups of espresso, to order in another language and try to translate menus;

to breathe in the beauty of a Roman-made arena or walk in the footsteps of great artists;

We visited the studio of Paul Cezanne and gazed at Mont Ste. Victoire which he painted many times.

The Pont du Gard in southern France was built by the Romans around 19 BC

And we rode our bikes across it. Amazing

I know that I may face many sentimental decisions in the coming months as we get rid of belongings, sell our house and plan to move to France, but I need to remember the reasons I'm doing it. We could get to the end of our lives and say we accumulated a lot of things and lived a safe life, or we can take some chances and have some adventures.
Hopefully, the safety of a leather recliner will be waiting for us when we tire of adventures.
So, don't cry for me, dear readers, wish me luck and follow along as I journey on.
Oh, and pray that none of my kids decide to become parents, because I have a feeling that grandchildren would throw a wrench into all of our plans.
Thanks for playing along with Dreaming of France. Please leave your name and blog address in Mr. Linky below, and leave a comment letting me know what  you think about my love affair with France, or your own passion for the country and its people and cultures. Also consider visiting the blogs of others who play along so we can all share the love.

Christmas Castoffs

In a matter of hours, 26 years of collecting Christmas decorations was distilled to three boxes, one for each of the kids, and a smaller one for us to take with us to France.
"That was brutal," I said as I fell onto the leather couch afterward, my insides wrung out from the unsentimental decisions I had to make about which ornaments were worth moving, which should be given to the kids, which would be given away, and which would be tipped into the trash can.
The trash can ornaments were the hardest. Paper stockings that had been streakily colored by Grace and Spencer -- their names printed in block letters at the top by a preschool teacher, a piece of red yarn looped at the corner to hang on the tree. The stocking ornaments were unwieldy and didn't even make sense to hang on a tree, but I felt a thud as we got rid of them.
We gathered a whole box of giveaway ornaments, things we couldn't remember collecting -- a wire moose ornament, a wooden rocking horse (the third one we found), an extremely heavy snow man that bent the branches down, a bunch of plastic bulbs that we hung on the low branches so the cats could bat them down and chase them across the floor.
I bought three plastic boxes with lids to organize ornaments we would give the kids. We had talked about waiting until we could gather the kids, have them each pick the ornaments they wanted to keep. But, the night before New Year's Eve, as we watched football, my husband carried boxes from the basement and we began dismantling the tree.
First, we claimed the few ornaments we would take with us, a small glass bulb with glitter stripes that came from Earl's Christmas tree as a child. A rocking horse with our names painted along the red rocker that we bought on our first road trip together when we visited Maine. A bulb with a Paris cityscape. An elongated glass snowflake sprinkled with sparkles.
I tried to picture packing this rectangular bin into my suitcase would I moved to France next year. Even more difficult to imagine is buying a tree in France, setting it up and hanging these few ornaments on the prickly branches.
The cats are always interested in any new activity, and Tupi was quick to try to decide which would be the best fit for him.

As I separated ornaments for the kids, some of them were easy. Each child has a "baby's first year" ornament, and my mother had given them ceramic stars with their names on them. Then Grace has some horse ornaments that she has collected over the years and a fairy Barbie. I don't know if she still cares about the Barbie, but she can be the one to get rid of anything she doesn't want. The letters PEACE in purple went into Spencer's bin because he hangs up the phone with his friends using the phrase, "Peace Out." A penguin dressed in Hawaiian clothes while surfing went into Tucker's box. Various other glass bulbs, some of them crackled with age, were separated between each box.

And before we knew it, the tree stood bare, only its pinprick lights shining from the still green branches.

Separating the Christmas decorations felt like a real declaration, a promise, that we would be doling out our belongings and moving with nothing more than what fits in our suitcases.
It left Earl and me both feeling as prickly as the dried out Christmas tree. We snapped at each other, but rejecting the ideas of the other.
"We'll just store these lights and garland." He folded them into a big blue tub that had previously held numerous decorations.
"But why? We'll just need to get rid of it in May or July or whenever we sell the house." My voice sounded sharp, dismissive.
"Fine, we'll do it your way. What do you want me to do with this then?" The ropes of light hung from his wrist like a wreath.
"Oh, no. We'll do what you want. Just store them in the basement and we'll go through everything again in the spring." The ridicule fairly dripped from my words. And the testiness continued the next morning as we completed taking down the tree, leaving a trail of green pine needles from the living room to the front door where the tree was hoisted to the ribbon of grass along the street. The city picks up the trees, turning them into mulch.
I silently carried the boxes downstairs, stacking them up until we sell the house.
Around noon, Tucker stopped by. As he relaxed watching a soccer game on TV, Spencer got up and came into the living room with a cup of coffee.
"Hey, where's the tree?" he asked, realizing that Christmas spirit had been stricken from the room.
"Out by the curb," Earl said.
"No, we took it to a farm," I jumped in quickly. "It'll have a better life there."
Everyone smiled. That's what parents tell kids when a pet has died or needs to be put down.
Long ago, we had a beagle named Darwin who bit the girl across the street so we were forced to get rid of the dog. Luckily, Earl had a co-worker who lived on a farm and hunted, so he took the dog. Just within the past month, Spencer asked whether Darwin had actually gone to live on a farm or if that was a euphemism.
"No, really," Earl told him. He had even taken Grace to visit Darwin on the farm.
So now, we could all feel better that our Christmas tree has gone to a farm, even though the evidence otherwise is just down our front steps.
As we lay in bed this morning, I asked Earl if we could leave the outside lights up just a while longer. I don't want to be one of those people who displays Christmas lights up to Easter, but it comforts me when I lie in bed at night and see the twinkle of those lights through our Craftsman style windows.

And I know that next year at this time, I'll be looking out another window in a different county.  

The Final Year

One year from tomorrow, my husband and I will have packed up and sold our house. We will have limited our lives to four large suitcases, and we will be leaving to live in France.
One year!
I can't write this post tomorrow because I committed to a post for FranceBookTours, so instead I'm writing it today.
Why did we choose May 20? It's the week after Mother's Day. It's the end of the semester for school, and at least two of our children will be graduated from college.

Whoever took our picture, cut off the top of the Eiffel Tower!

I'm so fortunate that my husband bought into my France dream.

I've dragged him to France numerous times, and he even went once without me when depositing Grace in France. (She hates to fly.)

This was our first trip to France together. I think my husband
has a shirt tied around his waist, rather than really high pants.

We plan to spend a few days in Paris before we take a train to the South of France. We'll rent a house for three or four months while we determine which village we want to live in.

Here we are on a windy day in front of Versailles. 

I picture us riding our bicycles or the taking the train or a rental car to various villages on market day to get a feel for each one. When we figure out where we want to move, we'll start looking for a house.

Here we are on our bike trip in front of the Pont du Gard. 

By September, I hope we'll be in a French home of our own.

This was us in a Moroccan restaurant. The building is ancient. 

And, of course, I plan to take all of you along with us, and to share the ups and the downs of moving to a new country.

Dreaming of France -- Prepping for A France Move

Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.

Today, the sky is the clearest blue, like an imagined dream that filled the sky.
As Earl and I rode our bikes to the coffee shop, I looked up and saw the white silhouette of an airplane stark against the sky.
We both thought the same thing: We should be on that plane on our way to France.
Maybe soon.
The newspaper will be laying off people in the next 60 days. We hope Earl isn't on that list, but if he is, we'll move in December since I have a full load of classes this fall.
If he keeps his job, we'll wait until next August when Spencer finishes college and is hopefully employed.
We'll feel so much better if our children have jobs and apartments.
One thing that we have accomplished, in addition to cleaning up my desk, is to make sure all of the kids have reliable cars.
Our family of five has survived with two cars. As each child got their driver's license, we resisted buying an extra car. And it worked out as Grace headed off to college in Upstate New York, and then Spencer went to school in Florida. The kid left at home got to drive the second car, and most of the time Earl takes the bus to work.
When I have morning classes, I drop Earl at work since we both go downtown Columbus. Many times I suggest that Earl should take the car to work, but he doesn't want to pay for parking.
As Tucker moved home, and Grace moved back in after college, we knew the time had come to increase the number of cars. Both Grace and Tucker needed cars to get to work.
Luckily, Grace bought her own car. We talked about used cars; we considered a lease, but Grace dived right into buying a new car. An adorable Fiat.

Spencer spent the summer at college in Athens, Ohio. We let him take our second car, a Volkswagen Passat. He has been searching for a job and being a delivery person might be in the cards for him once the college students head back to school this month.

For Tucker, we started off buying a Chevrolet Suburban that he could use for his landscaping business. Then a few days later, he quit landscaping and got a job delivering sandwiches for Jimmy Johns. That behemoth vehicle was definitely the wrong car for delivering.
So  we dug deep and bought a 2002 Subaru Outback. The gas mileage is much better and he can get into tight spaces quickly.

We didn't notice until they were purchased that all three of our children have green cars. 

We can check buying cars off our list of things to do now. All of the kids have cars. Earl and I are sharing a car, and we won't worry about getting any more until we move to France.
Grace moves into an apartment at the end of the month and just this morning we sat in the dining room peering into the living room and deciding who would get which pieces of furniture when we left for France.
Of course, Grace was the only child there, so she claimed most of the items. It's strange to think of moving and leaving most of our possessions behind.
For those of you who have moved to another country, a country across the sea, what do you think I need to bring with me?
I think it's different going from the U.K. to France because you can load your car and go through the Chunnel.
Other than clothes and pictures and some books, what must I be certain to take along?
Thanks for playing along with Dreaming of France. Please leave a comment and visit each other's blogs, too, so you can get your fix of France dreams.