But before we begin, a couple more pictures of Nancy. Christmas lights and ripped-out heart sculptures. Awww.
Anyways, so myself and the French Government (hereafter referred to as FG) are developing this interesting relationship lately. I mean don't get me wrong, FG, I totally dig the awesome food and cultural bonanza we've got going on here. I'm just not so crazy about the part where nobody is in their office from 11am to 2 or 3 pm and y'all look suspiciously like slackers more often than not. Oh--and also that time when you forced us to go all the way out to Nancy to get a routine physical, but mostly we just sat around in waiting rooms eating vending machine food to stay alive. Allllllll day long.
Yep, that would be last Wednesday.
The trip really got off to a great start when I glanced over our official letter and bounced away to buy tickets for Metz. Turns out, our appointment is on METZ STREET in NANCY VILLE. See how I made those letters big so you could see what I was talking about? Not our lovely FG. They chose to put the "Nancy" part reeeeallly small at the bottom of the address, probably because somebody in that big office is bored, bored, bored and wants to mess around.
So, we bought the wrong tickets, exchanged them at the last minute, and essentially worked ourselves into quite a hilarious huff even before the actual departure. Well, I suppose it went pretty well at first. We got up on the stroke of six am, got ready in record time, and got on the train early. We'd even packed our bags the night before so that we would have Henry's supplies ready, as well as the millions of documents and ID pictures required to survive in the Hexagon.
Well, millions of documents minus one. That one, unfortunately, was a passport. I won't say whose, but he was pretty surprised to realize that it was still on the desk back home. I was pretty surprised to find that at 7 am on a train headed full speed for Nancy with only 50% of the required passports, I didn't much care for some reason. I supposed that FG might have some weak spots and if those weak spots involved wine, so be it, but we were going to get Dustin through this freaking process, passport or no. Also, I work on Thursdays.
FG works too, but it is unclear when. Our first appointment= 9:30 am at the hospital. The hospital entrance= not easy to find. Not clearly marked. The front of the hospital looks like the back. Construction everywhere. Barely an employee in sight. Because the hospital may or may not be open at 9 am? Really? Well, the place was dead. No offense to all the old people inside, but it really was.
We finally locate the main entrance, which from my American point of view appears to be a service door wedged behind some plastic sheeting and boxes. I don't ask for much, but informational signs at a hospital would be helpful. Luckily for us they weren't essential, since we were 15 minutes early to our appointment. To my joy, we discover a whole group of American assistants in the waiting room!
Teaching assistants love each other; we're a rare group of snarky, naive, cynical, romantic Francophiles with just enough brains in our heads to pretend like we're intellectuals and not enough brains to avoid the Meuse region of France. In fact, that turned out to be our main topic of conversation in the waiting room: "So what do you love about France?" "Oh, you know, everything but Meuse." "Oh yeah me too. Man, we are totally in the armpit of the country here aren't we. Now what's your opinion of Proust?" "I find him blase, but I am so in love with your earrings, omg, where did you find those?" "In Paris!..." and so on and so forth. It's the perfect clone storm.
After painstakingly convincing the front-desk receptionist that she really really wanted to accept Dustin's passport card instead of an actual passport (laziness wins out over anal-ness much of the time) everything seemed set to go. I couldn't help but laugh when I read the fine print at the bottom of the passport card that says "This card does not replace an official passport." I never thought I'd find myself actually trying to use that silly little card as proof of citizenship in a foreign country. Oh well. You get desperate, and then you get over being desperate, and then you become completely relaxed. Also slightly insane.
We got chest x-rays, a surprisingly quick and painless process. There are some things FG totally flubs up on but then again, I must admit--there are some things FG does like a pimp. Line the assistants up one by one, in, out, don't even take off your shirt, just give the x-ray machine a nice big hug. (It's supposed to sound happy and stress-free, not like an assembly line with questionable morals.)
More discussion in the lobby, where we come to find out that Meuse really is one-of-a-kind for better or for worse. It's like a "your mom" joke, in a way. Except that here, "your mom is sooooo fat" becomes "the towns in Meuse are sooooo small." One assistant piped up with "My town is so small that when I moved in, I made the front page of the newspaper AND they put me in their local marching band." He was also interviewed by the only radio station in the area because it's highly possible none of them have ever seen an American before, and they're all going stark raving mad from excitement. I have to admit, none of us could one-up that. He's in the Vosges. Even for the Vosges, his town sounds dinky.
Then off to Appointment Number Two.
Well, not right away though. Since Appt. #2 is, oh let's say, FOUR HOURS later. So while the others scrounge around for food and mostly end up shuffling off to the hospital cafeteria, Dustin and I give each other a grim look and set out for the next location. We've learned that if you're dragging a baby around you can never tell how much transportation time you'll need, so it's best to show up extremely early and then brace yourself for a possibly interminal storytelling session with Henry while eating clementines found at the bottom of my purse. To keep this glorious tradition alive, I'm always sure to throw a couple clementines and books in there every day, along with a bottle of Ibuprofen. What. It makes anything fun.
Not sure exactly why, but this doctor's office had the same back-is-front problem as the hospital and its main entrance turned out to be the door you'd least expect. We moseyed on in and got situated nice and close to the vending machine, since at this point vending machine= only lunch opportunity for miles around. I tell you what cracks me up: a vending machine in a doctor's office that does not offer a single chocolate-free item. There may have been one, IF the Madeleines weren't chocolate-filled, which I very much doubt. France considers chocolate a separate food group. A healthy one.
Not that I'm complaining or anything, because if I had to choose death by vending machine food I'd definitely go to France to die. No stale Twinkies in this joint. Fabulous European chocolate Twinkies with no fake aftertaste whatsoever, can't remember their brand name for the life of me, but toss in a couple bottom-of-the-purse clementines and some water and you've got yourself a reasonably well-balanced snack. I hesitate to use the word "meal."
I should mention a semi-hilarious episode involving Henry (as they usually do.) The waiting room was large and included a children's playground. We took Henry over to check out the place and noticed that he needed a change. Dustin ran off to the bathrooms and reported there was no changing table there; this never comes as much of a surprise, since French bathrooms often aren't equipped for babies. Well, we're in public, but too bad so sad, Henry needs a change! And I'm not about to go do it on the nasty bathroom floor. The nasty carpeted floor inside the playhouse seems like a slightly better option. Seeing no other choice but to plow ahead and get it over with, we plonk Henry down and start changing him like maniacs.
No less than three secretaries and a nice old man converged on us immediately. If there's one thing I've noticed about the French, it's that they believe in public parenting. Which means that the public, whoever they may be, are perfectly entitled to tell you how to do your parenting. Sometimes it's cute that they care. Most of the time it's also weird and invasive.
"Don't you want to do that properly?" frowns the adorable old man, tilting his head and squinting at us analytically.
"Excuse me?" I ask, stunned at the sudden crowd of spectators.
He bites his lip. "I just think you should have some hot running water. That's the proper way to change a baby."
"He's right," says one of the secretaries. "Warm water is always best. Oh, and tilt his head to the left."
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather do that over here on a soft chair?" asks another.
I'm not quite sure why they're saying all this, since by now Dustin is mostly done. But they continue to hover anxiously, pointing out minute details and fretting about our lack of hot running water.
"We don't need water... we have wipes," I point out, holding up the Huggies case. What the heck is going on here?
Despite having just gawked at us for five minutes as we used wipes on Henry, all four of them seemed taken aback. "Oh, you have wipes!" exclaimed a secretary. "Oh, okay." And with that, they all left. The old man followed. But not before patting Henry on the head, squinting at us, and then shrugging as if to say Well, I tried!
I still have no clue what happened there.
By now the other assistants had figured out which door to go through and started trickling in one by one. This led to another interesting talk session in the waiting room where we discussed everything from graduate school to Goonies as stern French nurses took us in and out to be weighed and measured. Daniel, our local Vosges celebrity, seems to delight in theoretical situations. Following his lead, we pooled our brains to determine what would happen if the Quebecois ran out of poutine and came for ours. And just to give you a taste of how unique these people are, Henry's feeding time sparked an intense debate over whether primitive humans used tools to feed their children or simply chewed and spat into their mouths, like birds.
"Wouldn't it be unhygienic to crush your child's food with a piece of obsidian?" postulates one girl.
"Well yes," admits Daniel, "that's why I suppose they may have opted for the chewing technique."
"But of course they didn't know about germs, did they?" says another. "So why not use a rock? Prehistoric man used tools for lots of other things."
"We've found arrowheads, but we've never found silverware, unless you count knives. My theory is that they must have chewed and then passed the food from mouth to mouth so that the baby wouldn't choke."
Unbelievable. "I've seen lots of moms chew on something a little bit and then use their hand or finger to put it in the baby's mouth," I suggested, offering Henry another spoonful of mush. "I think it probably just depends on what type of food it is."
"Ohhhh, of course!" everybody murmured. As if we had just independently arrived at some really important discovery. We are such nerds.
The last step was a private meeting with a nurse who looked at our hospital chest x-rays. I got called back first. She turned my x-ray every which way, not inspiring much confidence in her ability to read x-rays, and squinted musingly at the various blotches and shadows in my lungs. "Mmmmm...you're good," she decided after thirty seconds. Then, she discovered I was raised in Washington and chatted happily about Twilight for a good five minutes, despite my complete lack of ability to converse on the subject.
Dustin's interview didn't go so smoothly. "I can speak English to him, no worries," the nurse assured, but it didn't take long before she asked me to come back and help.
"Tell him that, uh, he has something on his x-ray and according to federal law we need him to come back for an intensive checkup to figure out what it is," the nurse announced, poking a finger at Dustin's x-ray. "Little spot. Right here. And he has to come back tomorrow, because it's our only free appointment until after Christmas and if he waits that long he'll get deported. Can you translate all that?"
I sure could, but I sure didn't want to.
*Several head explosions later*
We had another appointment at the Office of Immigration, but that all went fairly quick. Dustin couldn't get anything done there because without a clean bill of health from the doctor, he's apparently considered unfit to live in France. So I had to cancel two classes the next day and stay home to take care of Henry while Dustin went to Nancy alone, armed with nothing but English and an attitude.
Needless to say, that was an adventure in itself which involved running around like crazy trying to get an ID photo and missing a train and discovering that the spot was an old tuberculosis scar and there's absolutely nothing wrong with him...but...it's a whole other story. Bottom line is, boo for red tape.
Boo on you, FG!!! A million times boo!
FURTHERMORE, if this chocolate I'm eating right now wasn't so divine, I might actually go out and do something about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment