If April showers bring May flowers...

Hello again!  I’ve been keeping busy, as evidenced by the complete lack of blog posts. Three weekends ago, I visited the city of Montpellier (and Mari), along with my Aunt Loretta and Uncle Fred. It was a lot of fun, and a great break from Parisian city life/smells/attitude. I even got to go to the beach!

And then- a lot of things happened. Mari came and visited me on her way back to the states, and got to hang out with our IFE group on a walking tour (even the famous Thomas!) I went to the horseback riding spectacle in Versailles, where Elena does her internship. They were probably the most fashionable horses I have ever seen. I gave an oral presentation of my paper topic, and had technical issues with my presentation but generally managed to survive.  Last weekend, Dana and I went to the Comedie Francaise for uber-cheap tickets with a partially obstructed view of the stage. As a run-in with a rude ticket salesmen left us on opposite sides of the theater, we each got to see a different half of the stage- so between the two of us, we saw the whole play. It was Racine’s Phèdre, and Pierre Niney was playing Hippolyte. He’s been my desktop background for the past month, so this was pretty exciting for me.

This happened on my half of the stage, by the way

My internship has been going pretty well, too. On Tuesday I accompanied someone to the prefecture, which roughly translates to… A cold, intimidating, unfriendly administrative place. Kind of like the DMV.

But before I could get to this magical land of rude government employees, I took a grand tour of the Parisian metro system. My coworker asked me to go with her on the accompaniment on Friday afternoon, a time when I am essentially brain-dead. So I thought that I remembered her saying that we’d meet up at the Place d’Italie metro stop. When I was almost there, I received a text that said she was waiting at Place de Clichy. This is essentially on the other side of the city. When I finally stepped off the metro at Place de Clichy, I called her again- only to find that she had gotten the wrong information from the guy we were meeting, and that the prefecture we needed to find was actually at a metro stop called Gaité.  This translated to over an hour and a half on the metro, which did leave me feeling much gaiety.

I was supposed to be there for translation purposes, but the man we were helping actually wasn’t much more fluent in English than he was in French. He came to Paris from Bangladesh over 10 years ago as an asylum-seeker and stayed here after his demand was refused. This is not an uncommon story. For some reason, a lot of political refugees don’t fill their suitcase with evidence of their persecution when they flee their home country.

Having often spoken over the phone about the procedure for demanding a residence permit, it was interesting to be there to see someone actually deposit demand for legalization. The employee who took his paperwork was new to the job and actually forgot to ask for several documents, which we realized when we went back to get the birth certificate that he had failed to return.

Tomorrow, I’m going to a different prefecture, this time without any pretense of serving a practical function. It should be interesting, if a little sad. We’re accompanying a woman who had a residence permit for medical treatment, but let the permit lapse while undergoing chemotherapy.

Another important thing that happened this week was the first of May, also known as French Labor Day. I was off from work, along with the rest of France. I had originally planned to work all day on my research paper. Instead, I baked chocolate chip cookies with the Tollhouse chips that mom brought me when she came to visit. The wit was a rainy day and I didn't really get out of the house, but I did read a little about the holiday online, and especially about the tradition of lilies of the valley (muguets de mai). Lilies of the valley are traditional for the start of spring because they symbolize good fortune.  On Paris.fr, I read that the first of May is the only day when everyone is allowed to sell these flowers on the streets of Paris, with or without a permit. 

I haven’t bought my own muguet yet, but the vendors are still out there. I’ll need all the luck I can get if I’m ever going to get this research paper done.

À bientôt,

Laura