Things you do not learn in undergrad

There are some things you just don't learn from a French minor nor an undergraduate experience. Lately I've been doing a lot of learning, such as:

-How to pay bills in French
-How to ask the right questions when looking for an apartment and buying furniture (in French)
-How to stock up on home repair supplies even when your English-French dictionary fails you in your quest to translate the list of supplies (with hardware store employees who don't believe in customer service and certainly don't have any solid English vocabulary)
-How to deal with people who have just set their hearts on screwing you over (once more, in French).

Over the past month and a half I’ve been, not uncharacteristically, busy. I continued managing my final administrative battles, at last getting my titre de séjour in the last week of October and my provisional work authorization in early November. I was lucky enough to be able to host a couple sorority sisters for a weekend reunion in Paris during an unpleasantly cold snap in October and I spent a weekend in late October out in Nantes with Valentin’s family.

Chi Connection: Anya (living in London), Minh (living in Lyon), Barrett (living in Paris), and I spent a frighteningly cold mid-October weekend together in Paris. Here we are behind Notre Dame.

We swung by the Louvre for a classic tourist shot.

This was a stunning view from a park near Nantes that Valentin, his mom, and I visited just before sunset.

Valentin's mom, Valentin, and me in the park.

However, the biggest event lately has been my move. I suppose events were silently accumulating in my house as I made the rounds of the greater Paris Ile-de-France region in quest of the right to live in the country, to be a doctoral student, and to sign my doctoral work contract. Either way, in early November I came home one night to find my passage upstairs blocked by a makeshift vacuum-barricade. An emergency housemates meeting followed and, in effect, as if my house were a reality elimination television show, I’d been voted out.

Panic ensued, but we were able to turn several coincidental disasters into fortuitous events, ending with the finding of a really excellent apartment. Last Friday I signed my contract. I've been furniture hunting, boxing up my old room, and considering all sorts of financial grown-up problems that I'd never contemplated only a couple months ago.

My bedroom is all packed solid, ready to move.

I've been spending my evenings and weekends hanging out at the Pasteur when not with friends as home has been short of a welcoming environment. My move is scheduled for next Monday, November 29, and the big day can't come soon enough.

Valentin and I transported new furniture across Paris for the cost of a single metro fare.

In the meantime, I have been occupying myself with final obligations in my old house necessary to get out of that housing contract. With any luck, in a month or so I'll be able to look back on this all and laugh. For the moment I'm still (not so passively) waiting with bated breath for the last few necessary arrangements to fall in place. Fortunately I've had a few angels watching over me, and I have had the support of my friends here in Paris and my family back home.

Declan was kind enough to actually spend a weekend fixing a broken tile, one of the remaining "obligations" before I can leave my house.

 By the next time I write, I'm sure things will be looking up.