Paris preparations

This post by La Belette Rouge about her own "baby step" preparations getting ready for a move to France, got me thinking about how I prepared myself.

I had about 6 months advance notice to get myself ready for the big move. Some things that I did:

- Took a french conversation & grammar class at L'alliance Francaise in Washington, DC.
- Joined French Meetup
- Subscribed to every francophile blog I could find. A few of which are listed in the links on the side of this blog.
- Filled my iPod with podcasts in french to work on my comprehension. Some of my favorites are "BFM Gouts de Luxe" and "RFI Journal Francais Facile", both of which you can find for free on the iTunes music store.
- Listened to all of the back episodes of the Katia & KylieMac podcast to get a bit of a feel for being an expat in France. (Listening to all of the episodes is a bit more of a challenge now that they've hit episode 100, congrats girls!)
- Read a big stack of books on France, the French, and being a young expat. Some were more helpful than others.
- Started reading French news sites daily like Le Monde and 20 Minutes.
- I looked weekly on online classified and apartment hunting sites to get familiar with what was available: Craigslist, FUSAC, Particular a Particular
- Answered a lot of my questions on banking, taxes, living in France etc by reading Expatica.com

In my own preparations I was most concerned about improving my level of French (since that is so key to being able to function in daily life here) and then some navel-gazing to make sure I was mentally ready for all of the changes ahead. (Really trying to get through my head the fact that I will feel foreign, frustrated, overwhelmed, and sometimes lonely, and that it is normal and okay!)

Oh, and speaking of working on your french, I recently came across MangoLanguages.com, and really enjoyed using their free online language course. This site is better for beginners, so I was using it for Spanish & Portuguese, but I did some of their French lessons just for kicks and they were good too.

Ok, now I'm going to be REALLY paranoid

Just last week I noticed that my apartment (on the 5e etage) doesn't have fire alarms. Having been raised an overly cautious American, I have it ingrained in my head to have fire alarms all around the house and to change the batteries when you change the clocks. Well, after asking my landlord and a couple French colleagues, apparently not having fire alarms is the standard. They just don't think about it, they said. Fire alarms only exist in office buildings.

What?

Well how do you wake up if there is a fire in the middle of the night? To me, that is the huge benefit of fire alarms. They are not for when I'm awake; they're for when I'm sleeping, and I need to be woken up to get out of the building! So, I've been somewhat paranoid about this for a week now, and had been thinking I'd go on a quest to find some battery operated fire alarms to stick on my wall.

So fast-forward to this morning: I'm sleeping and for some reason I wake up, and all I smell is smoke! First, I think maybe one of the wall heater units has overheated, but when I check those, I don't see anything out of the ordinary. So then I check my kitchen - no smoke there. I must be imagining things. So I go back to bed. But as I lay there, I really smell smoke, I can't just be making this up. So I go out to my balcony ... still don't see anything ... then I look up over the building - and there is lots of thick black smoke!

AAAH! So I proceed to Officially Freak Out. There are no fire alarms - how do I know if the smoke is from my building or another one? How would anyone contact me to let me know? How do you know if you should evacuate or what? So I grab my coat and figure I'll just go outside and see (thinking that if I stayed in my apartment and had my breakfast, and there really WAS a fire in the building, I would be eternally kicking myself.).

So I go outside, and find a whole bunch of firetrucks across the street behind my apartment, and lots of smoke pouring out of the roof of that building, and some people on their balconies in their pajamas not seeming to know if the fire was in their building or not.

At this point, I think I have the right to be paranoid about this whole fire alarm situation. If you have any insight into this phenomenon, or how one is alerted about fires in France, please let me know! This also reminds me that I need to look up all of the emergency phone numbers here, because my instinct of 'Call 911' is not going to be of much help in a crisis.

Showering a la francaise

Apparently the French do not like shower doors or shower curtains.

This has always baffled me. In my experience, the French prefer a bathtub. This bathtub always has a detachable shower head, so you can rinse yourself. While studying in Lyon during college, I lived with a French family. Their bathroom only had a bathtub and shower head (which was not attached to the wall, but would sit on the side of the tub). I never quite mastered the art of bathing there. You couldn’t put the showerhead down while the water was running, because it would spray everywhere. So finally I learned to run some water for the bath. Get wet. Turn off water. Soap up. Turn on water and rinse off. Washing the hair was practically impossible because you could only use one hand.

Last year I stayed in a hotel in the 8^th arrondissment in Paris. This hotel had a bathtub with a shower head that was actually attached to the wall! Amazing. But, there was no shower curtain. Instead, there was a small piece of glass (12” wide) that was attached to the wall with the shower head. Apparently this was supposed to block the water spray from getting on the floor? Inevitably, everyday I would step out of the shower with fear of killing myself from slipping on the soaked tile.

In my current rental apartment there is, yet again, no shower curtain or door. It seems to work okay in this case though because it’s a very big tub, so when you shower, as long as you angle the spray towards the wall, things stay relatively dry…

Is this an aesthetic thing? Does anyone know? Actually can be kind of efficient for cleaning because your floor gets cleaned every morning after your shower…

The Rules changed on me!

After almost three years of singledom, I've gotten quite good at dating. At least in the United States. But I'm quickly learning that in France, all of The Rules are different.

Yes, you still meet people in bars, swap phone numbers and go out on dates. BUT...then, everything changes. In the United States, at least in my experience, you can date a guy for a long time without being In A Relationship. In fact, in order to be in a Relationship, you have to have a specific conversation that goes like this:

"So, let's talk about Us. What are you thinking?"
"Well, we have a fun time together. I like hanging out with you."
"Ok, well I really like you too. Do you want to be my Boyfriend?? And not date anyone else?"
"Sure."
"Ok cool."

Yes, it is often that eloquent. No, we don't really say 'Do you want to be my Boyfriend", but you get the idea. You have to be That Explicit. Otherwise (in my experience), it is assumed that you are Just Dating, and therefore, can still be seeing other people at the same time.

However, apparently in France, you can go out once, maybe twice, but if you act like a couple (whatever this means), and especially if you kiss (not the polite cheek kiss but an actual Kiss), then you are Together. And that's it. You're a couple. No discussion. No angsting about "will he think I'm being too obsessive about wanting to commit??". Nada. You're just Together.

This is fine. In fact, both of these paradigms are Just Fine ... but they require different behaviors. I think I need to switch from the All You Can Eat buffet mentality to a "choose very carefully because you only get one scoop of ice cream" mentality. Other Americans out there - have you experienced this too?