Should I move to France?

Been a bit busy lately but wanted to keep up the habit of posting. The next few will be posts to links I think are useful about life here in France.

Should I move to France?

You know, I keep wondering myself these days. It’s also gray and cold and January, but it’s also quite nice and peaceful in this smaller city.

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I have lived here for the last 15 months and there is still a lot of essential paperwork that I haven’t been able to work out. A big part of the reason I want to stay now is because I feel like I’ve earned it a little. With the sheer amount of time, it has taken to get certain things done, I feel like it’s just France’s way of testing me to see if I am really serious about it.

Getting a bank account here was an act of stubborn persistence. So was the Carte Vitale (health card) which I still haven’t gotten. The visa process has been amazing straightforward, but it stops there. Cell phones without a bank account at first seemed impossible. My wife is still on a vacation plan, technically. The paperwork to rent an apartment was dizzying. We had far less paperwork when we bought our house in New York.

I don’t think I am ever going to get a French driver’s license, honestly. I think I will keep my US license and just roll out a bad American accent to the police forever. They have their own paperwork to be afraid of. 

Moving to a different country has a lot of complications, but it may be worth it for you. Fair warning, if you move to France, you are basically going to jam a lifetime’s worth of bureaucracy into one year. 

The French seem to make little effort to make their paperwork easy for anyone who is not fluent in French, but you can at least take solace in the fact that it seems to be hellish for the French themselves. 

Considering how the French handle such things, it will challenge your patience and your sense of humor. You’ll need them both.

Some reading to get a sense of life in France.

For starters, David Lebovitz’s post about living in France is inciteful for sure. And, if you find this kind of thing funny, then you’re probably better suited to live in France than I am. 

That said, #23 is sadly true with more things that I’d like it to be. My driver’s license could easily be transferred over here, if I lived in 1 of the 18 states in the US that have an arrangement with France. I have no idea about the logic of this. 

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