Visitors!

The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of activity for us (and thus the lack of fresh blog postings). Our apartment has been a multinational gathering place as we have entertained visitors from both Canada and Germany.

The first to arrive was my sister Pat, one day ahead of her daughter, Blaire, who both flew to the Frankfurt airport and then took the train to Strasbourg. Pat's arrival was somewhat uneventful, but the day that she got here we were left wondering if Blaire would even make it. When Pat phoned Darla, another of her daughters, to say that she had arrived safely, Darla informed her that Blaire hadn't been so lucky with her trip. Blaire had actually missed her flight due to a tragic motor vehicle accident on Deerfoot Trail in Calgary, which caused all traffic to be halted for three hours. Luckily, though, she was able to get on another flight that left early in the evening, and she showed up at the Strasbourg train station the next afternoon, almost before we knew that she was in the country.

We spent a few chilly days over Easter weekend walking around Strasbourg with Pat and Blaire, investigating some old churches and traipsing through Petite France to see the ancient buildings. On Easter Monday we headed off to Paris to meet our friends from Burns Lake and left Pat and Blaire with intentions to go on a hike around Barr, just south of Strasbourg. However, the weather and a mix-up in bus and train schedules foiled their plans. If you ask them about their day, they'll both get wild looks in their eyes and mutter something about the freezing cold, an internet café, overeating, and an illegal Turkish gambling ring!

Our plans worked out a little more smoothly, and after meeting up with Ray, Wendy, Nikki and Brooklyn at their hotel, we had a good, if also very cold, day in Paris. We waited in line for about two hours before finally getting in to see the Eiffel Tower. It's quite an amazing structure, and the view from the top is spectacular. Had I been alone, though, I probably wouldn't have taken the time or paid the money to go up (just as we didn't when my friend Kelly and I were in Paris all those years ago!) However, it seems to be one of those rites of passage that you must go through as a tourist to Paris -- especially when you're with kids. Although we had had plans to walk the Champs Elysées, it was late in the afternoon after our visit to the Eiffel Tower, and we had to head to the train station to catch the TGV back to Strasbourg.

We spent the rest of the visit in Strasbourg, interspersed with trips to Germany and Switzerland. Highlights of the visit with our Burns Lake friends included an overnight trip to Freiburg, Germany; a trip to Europa Park, an amusement park in Rust, Germany, where Ray and Mark waited in a special lineup for the front seats on the ultimate thrill ride, the Silver Star, a roller coaster with speeds up to 127 km/h; a hike through vineyards and forest to an ancient castle; and a day trip to Basel, Switzerland, where we had a nice, if expensive, lunch and crossed the Rhine River on a reaction ferry. In Strasbourg we climbed the cathedral stairs to the viewing platform 100m high; wandered around the Place Cathédrale; took the Ill River tour; and visited a few of the city's parks. Pat and Blaire went their own way at times, with Blaire staying in Paris for a few days to visit with friends, while Pat was able to meet us in Freiburg on our second day there. Pat and Wendy also managed to get in some shopping when the rest of us weren't looking!

At the end of the visit we were sad to say goodbye to our family and friends -- Meghan especially enjoyed having the company of her best friend, Brooklyn. However, we only had a few days grace before we entertained some of Mark's relatives from Germany. Fritz (who is Mark's father's cousin), his wife Annemarie, his son Arno and Carmen, Arno's wife, along with their two children Jan and Amelie, came to Strasbourg by train for a short afternoon visit last Saturday. Annemarie brought us a very nice book about Offenburg, and we all had some French tartes and coffee. We had a nice chat with them (cheers to Arno and Carmen for their good English!) and then walked them back to the train station just before supper time. This departure, unlike the ones of our Canadian guests, wasn't so much a "good-bye" as a "see you soon", as we had already made plans for another gathering of family in Offenburg later in April.

After all of the visitors, it took us a few days to get back into our usual activities, but now we have settled into our routine of home schooling and exploring Strasbourg and the surrounding area. The kids were somewhat refreshed by the break and are now working hard to try to finish their studies early. We are looking forward to breaks in our schedule with visits from my mom and Mark's brother Steven and his wife, Chris, a trip to Greece, and a possible trip back to Berlin for Mark. Sadly, we already have the smallest feelings that our adventure is coming to an end, but we are determined to make the most of our last three months and the warm weather that we know is just around the corner!

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Interesting Uses of English in France

One thing I've discovered since coming to a country where I have only a slight grip on the language is that many people don't like to go outside of bounds of their linguistic competence. You see this reflected in the types of vacations that are advertised by travel agents in Strasbourg -- to L'ile de Réunion, Algérie, Tunisie, Senegal, Québec, etc. What these places all have in common is that people speak French there. I can understand wanting to travel to a place where the language isn't a barrier, though -- it's a big investment, and most people want to feel comfortable on their vacation.

Within the country, the French also try to keep a tight grip on their language, not often allowing foreign words in. Sometimes, however, words sneak in and become part of the language, whether they're welcome or not. Thus you have people wishing you "Bon Weekend!" on Friday, or you might go "faire le shopping" to buy your groceries or some new clothes (although it can still be called "faire les courses"). At some boulangeries (bakeries) you can buy a "sandwich americaine", conveniently stuffed with greasy pommes frites (French fries, to us.) At the patisserie (pastry shop) you can buy "les brownies", a dessert that must have made it into France so fast that they didn't have time to change the name to something more French.

What always makes me smile, though, is when the words in the other language don't quite make sense in the given context. Occasionally, proprietors will throw a word or two of another language into their shop names, possibly wanting to seem forward-thinking, hip or adventurous. Of course I can't really comment on the use of German or any other language, but the English ones usually catch my attention. Here are a few examples:


We came across this sign in Nice, where there are so many British tourists that the residents actually do speak more English than a lot of other places in France. With this store, however, I got the feeling that they just brainstormed a bunch of words that evoke a warm seaside vacation and threw them in a hat. Then they picked as many as they could and jammed them onto their sign.


I can understand why this business didn't make it (it's been closed since we moved here). I think this is an instance of people trying to be creative with a foreign language even though they may not understand all of the meanings of a word. I don't think this means that you can get actual rabbit pizza here -- although it wouldn't surprise me, since you can buy whole rabbit (lapin) at the grocery store. I'm sure they just meant that they make the pizzas fast, but as an anglophone and a person who doesn't make it a habit to consume rabbit regularly, the two concepts just don't belong together.


The word "sexy" is always guaranteed to catch people's attention. But a price? I don't really get it. (I know, I know, I fell for it. It caught my attention.)


They don't really mean that it's free, do they? I'll bet they're just teasing to get us monolingual English speakers in the door so they can make their sales pitch! (In French, of course!)


This one they got wrong, and right, in a punny sort of way. It's not the sort of general store we know from North American history, where you could buy everything from candy to farm implements. Instead this store sells military-looking clothing and accessories.



There are an extraordinary number of businesses in Strasbourg that offer to help you find work; we have at least three on our block alone. Many of them have English-sounding names, including the now politically incorrect (in North America, anyway) Manpower. In France, where every noun has a gender, the idea of neutering the language to avoid giving a name a masculine or feminine slant would be laughable.


And finally, I'm not sure that I would buy a package tour from a company that sells "norest" voyages. I think these are the ones with the lumpy beds, flashing neon lights outside your curtainless window, and the band in the bar below your room belting out endless renditions of La Bamba.


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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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