The Saga of the Carte de Séjour

We got a letter in the mail late in February that sent shivers down my spine. It told us to present ourselves to the préfecture to renew our temporary residency permits. The real trouble was that they had sent the letter the day that our permits had expired, and now it was two days later. We were officially illegal aliens!

To understand how we had become such desperate fugitives from the law, we must return to last autumn, specifically mid-September, 2007. As required, we had presented ourselves at the préfecture within two months of arriving in France. The préfecture is a huge office where all sorts of mind-numbing bureaucratic processes -- like getting a driver's licence, or applying for a passport or residency permit -- take place. This is the place where you take a ticket to get in line to speak to someone where they direct you to take another ticket to speak to someone else. And heaven help you if you've taken the wrong type of ticket! When we spoke to the first person we got a list of about 15 documents (plus two copies of each) that we had to provide. These include some of the 72 (or so) pages of documents that we prepared when we applied for the long-stay visa back in Canada (which they graciously warn you to bring with you), but also some new ones that we never needed we knew. It was also at this time that we were informed we had to go see a doctor, but we managed to put it out of our heads because seeing a doctor in France was about the last thing we wanted to do!

The saga continued as we arrived home from Germany in late November, when we found two letters waiting in our mailbox. The first was a note from the Ministry of Foreigners telling us that we owed 275€ each (about $800 CAD total). The second was a letter that directed us to what looked like two separate medical appointments on the same day. Because we had been trapped in Germany during the train strike, we had missed the appointments (oh, darn!) The letter that said we owed money was interesting, mostly due to the manner in which we were to pay. (This took a very long time to decipher, because we really couldn't believe it!) At the bottom of the letter was a representation of five stamps each worth 55€. We were both supposed to buy the five stamps (available at certain stores), and then lick them and paste them to the bottom of the letter, which was then to be returned to the préfecture. This is just about the oddest way I have ever seen to pay for something!

Not seeing any other choice, we gritted our teeth, bit the bullet, (add whatever other metaphor you can come up with for doing something you don't really want to do) and took ourselves off to the first medical appointment, where we were directed to strip from the waist up, jammed against a very chilly plate, and then escorted out the door with our freshly exposed chest x-rays in hand. This was a bit of a shock for both of us, considering we had no idea what kind of office we were in when we first arrived! By contrast, the actual doctor's appointment was a breeze (when they were finally able to reschedule us for mid-January, after we'd missed the first appointment). We had a pleasant chat with a nice gentleman who spoke very good English and told us that many people who try to come to France have tuberculosis, which must be treated before they can receive a residency permit. When we left the office, he told us that we could just wait for another letter from the préfecture before we had to do anything more about our residency status.

So on this warm February day, not at all used to being illegal aliens, we hied ourselves off to the préfecture, leaving the kids standing in our dust at the tram station where we had all been waiting to go for a family outing. (Mark had met us at the tram station and just happened to check the mail before he left the apartment). When we arrived at the préfecture, we were disappointed to find out that the tax man had finally caught up with us. The only thing standing between us and our permanent residency cards was the little matter of the 550€. Although we had known about the fee for months, we had always hoped to avoid paying it through some tangle of bureaucracy. But pay for it we did, our only consolation being that we didn't have to lick the stamps. In return, we received our shiny new permanent Cartes de Séjour (good until September 12, 2008, tourist use only). And so ended our two-day brush on the seamier side of life, most of which we sailed through quite comfortably and unknowingly.

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