France: Day 2

I was channel surfing this morning while getting ready and one of the news stories was coverage of a strike day in Paris hospitals. We'll see how much the French/Striking stereotype holds up over time but let's just consider that I'm on day 2 at this point, folks.

Anyway, on to Another Goose Chase!

Ok, there is a certain very fixed order of operations for some things in France. If you mix up that order or forget a step, prepare yourself for pain.

Today's mission was to book apartment viewings. To view the apartments we needed to make phone contact. To make phone contact we needed a phone that worked since everyone has cells and there are very few public phones. Even our vacation rental apartment does not have a telephone. So we needed a phone. So step 1, after breakfast, was to zip to Orange to get a SIM card for our phone to make phone calls to book apartments. Simple, yes?

Ha!

Ha ha ha ha!

We, in our jet-lagged and culture-shocked state, went in asking for a SIM card for our phone. When the employee asked if we meant we were looking for a plan, we foolishly said yes. This was foolish because what we really wanted was a pre-paid SIM card. We didn't want a phone plan yet. Here's why...

- To get a plan, you need a bank account.

- To get a bank account, you need 2 proofs of residence.

- To get two proofs of residence, you need a permanent apartment. Permanent as in some place for which you pay at least the insurance bill. (Renter's insurance is mandatory, by the way.) Merely a signed lease and an insurance bill will suffice.

But where we hiccuped on this was...
- To get those bills, we needed to have an apartment.

- To find that apartment, we needed to schedule some viewings.

- To schedule those viewings, WE NEEDED ACCESS TO A PHONE AND EMAIL!!!

Are you still with me?

We also figured out these steps by walking literal steps from Orange, to the Visitor's Centre, to a bank which was supposed to be open but wasn't, back to the Visitor's Centre for maps (no phone/internet, remember?) and again to another bank.

The really irritating part of this is that I KNEW this! I'd researched and read about this! But I'd forgotten until after about an hour and a half into our pavement-pounding... probably because I was exhausted and it took that long to finish waking up instead of just following along through the streets of Aix in a semi-zombie-like coma.

We took a break from the phone mission to drive back to the airport to switch cars, ate lunch, regrouped, then went back out in search of a pre-paid phone card.

By the by, this Burger King was the very first storefront I saw in France.
And yes, that is corn in with the tomato slice and lettuce salad.

We eventually got the precious SIM card at the first Orange we'd visited so we could book some viewings in order to not be on the streets at the end of June.

Learn from our mistakes: unless you have a permanent place to live IN FRANCE and a bank account IN FRANCE, ask for a pre-paid SIM card. A vacation apartment or "location saisonnière" doesn't count. And give the coffee time to kick in before heading out.

... I think the back of my neck is sunburned.

All-in-all, the day got better. Things got sorted and what needed doing got done. A good supper and a half-bottle of wine can cure a multitude of complaints.

And blister band-aids are a wonderful, wonderful thing.