C'est la vie. A saying you truly don't understand until you move to Paris...
I moved to Paris two months ago for my MFA program at the Paris College of Arts, and let me just say this: moving to Paris is a wild ride. While I thought that this ride was going to be filled with lots of glasses of wine and croissants, it's actually been filled with the joys of learning how to navigate French bureaucracy and plenty of anxiety attacks (but yes also wine and croissants). So like any young aspiring artist who moved to Paris, I decided to do the most original thing and write about it.
To start off, let me just say that everything in Paris is a catch-22. In order to get French phone service, you need a French bank account; and not just a bank account, you have to wait for them to send you your RIB document with your bank details on it. However they can't contact you without a French phone number and thus you have to go to the bank everyday until it is ready. In order to get a bank account, you need an address in France but apparently even that cannot be enough sometimes...
The day I went to open a bank account I was told that I needed an appointment, despite the bank being completely empty of customers. So I proceeded to make an appointment, however the earliest they could get was a week out. Despite my frustration I begrudgingly agreed because after all, what else was there to be done?
Fast forward to the day of my appointment. I come in with all my documents - my passport, my visa, my school letter authentication, and my attestation from the apartment agency of proof of address - to be told simply no, we cannot open a bank account for you. Supposedly my proof of address was not adequate enough despite having the attestation, contract, and billing receipt. After asking to speak to a supervisor, he and her and his supervisor then debated whether or not they could open the bank account for two hours... At the end of which they finally came to the determination that I could indeed open a bank account, however my appointment time was over and I must come back the next day. Honestly, I was dumbfounded, but after previous experiences with French bureaucracy all I could do was simply leave and come back tomorrow. C'est la vie.
Thankfully the next day I was able to open my bank account, but they told me I still had to wait for my RIB document. My banker thoughtfully wrote down all of the information thats on the RIB onto a piece of paper for me so I could use it to open a phone. However despite it being the exact same information, the phone company still refused to open an account without the official RIB document. C'est la vie.
After finally getting the RIB and thus French phone service, I now had a French phone number. The importance of this cannot be underestimated as previously stated you need one to get the other. Now that I had a French phone number I could validate my VISA online, which honestly was simple enough. Until it wasn't. The verification said I was Norwegian, something that happened to several classmates of mine as well. Now in order to apply to social security and get healthcare, you need this visa verification and all the information must be accurate. So you can understand my frustration when something so simple had turned into another big battle. I was told to go to the Préfecture de Police and that I would just walk in, explain what happened, and they'd quickly fix it. This couldn't have been further from the truth. I was told that I had to make an appointment and the lady wrote the steps down on how to do so on their website for me. I returned home and followed the steps only to hit a dead end with no appointment and I was still "Norwegian". C'est la vie.
Thankfully I was starting to understand this c'est la vie mentality the French have, and quite literally did nothing but wait. Three days later I received an email saying it was a glitch in the system and somehow everything had worked itself out. C'est la vie!
While I love to laugh about these struggles now, the truth is at the time I felt defeated and like France was personally trying to tell me I made a mistake moving to a new country. Just ask my mom how many times I facetimed her distressed with each new struggle.
Trying to navigate alone in a new country with a language barrier is definitely confusing, hard, stressful, but still worth every minute of it. Currently I'm still in the process of applying for healthcare and waiting for my Oktoberfest pictures to get developed, so I'm sure I'll have more stories to come in the coming weeks but that's it for now. Hopefully you all enjoy my unfiltered life in Paris and will see it as a piece of art as I do, xoxo.
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