3: Serenity

...or in search thereof.

Snow is falling in slow motion silently outside the window of my temporary residence in Montparnasse. It’s a good day to be indoors — except for the fact that indoors is where all the bureaucratic and financial consequences of my decision to move to France have also taken up residence. I say with false reassurance to my dog, Billie, who is sleeping in her bed, “We’re almost there.” She is oblivious.

I have knot in my core all the time. When, about a week ago, I signed a year’s lease on an apartment here in Paris (a mandatory step before submitting an application for a visa), it was a shock to see quite a large a sum of money emigrate from my bank account. I hadn’t been here ten days before the relocation company I’m working with emailed me a list of fifteen apartments currently on the market matching the criteria I gave them for an apartment that would suit me. Of the fifteen listings, I ranked five in order of preference. Between the time the realtor at the agency found the listing and the next morning, my first preference vanished. The agency swiftly arranged for me to visit the apartment I ranked second.

Within a day, I was walking through the flat’s light-filled rooms painted white, noticing the ceilings with simple molding, the caramel-colored parquet floors, a modern but comfortable sofa, and a dining table surrounded by six chairs covered in pale pink fleece. The apartment owner’s agent, who was present during my visit, told me the unit had recently been remodeled and redecorated. Half in French, half in English, we spoke for a few minutes about the fires in California.

The dining and seating area form a rectangular salon, lined along one side with three floor-to-ceiling “French” windows open to the sky and street. The space was uncluttered, nicely appointed, bright with blue, pink, brown tones. A non-functioning hearth and mantle with mirror above it and shelving on either side were situated at one end of the room where the dining table stood. In the kitchen, I was disappointed to find a gas range, instead of induction, now prevalent throughout the city. But the size of the kitchen was roomy for a Parisian apartment. Apart from the gas cooking and heating, my only other reservation centered on the hand-held shower head draped over the bath tub tap, mitigated a little by a socket mount above it.

After some minutes wandering around, whispering with the young woman from the relocation company about the apartment’s features, I was won over, in the end, by the light. Even on a rainy day, light from the front and the back windows reaches nearly every corner of the apartment. Cheerful, quiet, and deceptively spacious for seven hundred square feet. In addition to the apartment’s serene vibe, the neighborhood is residential, away from the center of the city, with the markets of rue Levis and Batignolles within walking distance. Living outside the city center isn’t so bad when a métro line is less than 500 feet from the building’s front door.

Choosing the first apartment I visited without seeing others made me hesitate. But not for long. It was easy for me to believe that the rental market was winding down for the year and would not revive for at least a month. Moreover, the gap between my first two choices on the list and the other three was significant. After I left I texted an expat in the city. She reassured me that my experience was typical of the rental market in Paris. You have to be decisive and move quickly. So I did.

Within twenty-four hours, my application for an apartment was accepted. The realtor and the owner selected me over three other applicants. I signed the lease online, scrambled to arrange three wire transfers (two months’ security deposit, a 10% fee to the apartment owner’s rental agent, and a large sum to the company acting as my guarantor).¹ The apartment had to be inspected, and the wire transfers had to arrive before the inspection. Then, the relocation company put me right to work, nailing down mandatory rental insurance, opening a French bank account, and, still to come, obtaining mandatory private health insurance for a year. Although I will be eligible for the French national health service three months after my visa starts, I was told that it can take months to become registered. So, it’s best to get coverage for the first year. But, for now, I have what the French government requires to get the visa.

A friend of mine (a French historian, incidentally) commented, “What you just went through is why we chose Portugal.”

I could not have done this without the expat relocation company. Not only would I not have had any reliable guide to the necessary steps involved, nor an understanding of the order in which they need to be taken, I would also not have known how to take those steps. Moving here makes applying for social security and Medicare feel by comparison no more complicated than logging into a secure website (ok, I exaggerate). Whether here in France or in the US, how on earth do people with very modest means or those whose first-language is not either French or English make their way through the entrails of bureaucracy? In my case, banking and insurance terminology both in English and French, as well as unnavigable websites, made me ball up my fists in my eye sockets to fight back tears. The author of another expat newsletter I came across recently asked rhetorically, “Can I even call myself an expat if I haven’t cried at the préfecture?”² I feel something similar much earlier in the same process.

If you have the financial means to move here, you have to really want to do it.

Getting out and walking around Paris went a long way to defusing the pressure and stress. It helped encountering the friendly French women who manage the kid’s section at The Red Wheelbarrow, a good English-language bookstore near the Sorbonne, or the people waiting on the sidewalk for their take-out from Zhao’s noodle place, or the vendors at the open air market on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I’m really pleased that Parisians of all backgrounds, complete strangers, seem willing to chat with me — in French.

Ahead of me lies the visa application itself. I’ve started it on the French government site and on the maddening VFS Global site. Both are necessary. I will return to the US right after Christmas for my visa appointment, at which I will surrender my passport. Then, I wait for it to be returned to me with the visa.

By the time I return at the end of January with a visa, I will have a lot more to say about going through this process as a soloist. Spoiler: it is harder when you’re on your own, especially with an eight-pound dog. But worth it.

In about an hour, I am taking my suitcase, my market cart filled with the dry groceries I’ve accumulated in fifteen days, and Billie in her bag to my new apartment. I feel nervous.

1. Why 3 wire transfers instead of one has remained a costly mystery.

2. I’d link the Substack newsletter, but I’ve lost track of it.