Another Take on “French for ‘Customer Service'”

Unlike Stephen’s article on French customer service, my experiences have not been nearly as rosy. It’s interesting that one or two specific events can stick out in our minds as indicative of an entire system. There are enough tales and tropes about French waiters and service in restaurants that I’m not going to address that genre of customer service here. Rather, I thought it’d be helpful to share some of my experiences of French customer service via the telephone, as I’ve had the joy of sorting through various appointments, banking mishaps, and healthcare struggles.

Be Prepared

One of my most memorable customer service experiences was with assurance maladie. I’d called to check on the status of my carte vitale – my application had already been rejected twice for reasons unclear, and I wanted to confirm that it was finally being processed.

In order to verify my identity, they asked for the last four digits of my IBAN. This is not something I have as a handy PDF on my computer, and it took me a while to access my account. While I explained to the woman that I was in the process of finding the number, she coldly told me that she would hang up if I had to keep looking. I managed to keep her on the line, and we worked through my request despite her hostility. Clearly in France, it’s the agent not the customer who’s always right.

Practice Patience

The answer to many of my customer service questions has simply been to wait. After months of waiting, I’ve called assurance maladie about the status of my CSS only to receive an update in the mail later that week. Generally speaking, it takes several months for the French government to do anything.

At the same time, follow up on important appointments. At my visa appointment in October, I was told I’d be convoked to sign a contrat d’integration and never received that notice. When I was emailed about my titre de séjour being ready (in March) I mentioned this, and was immediately emailed a convocation. Although this all seems like it should be automated, my sense was that if I hadn’t said anything, I never would’ve received a summons, and I would have been French toast at my next visa appointment.

Your French Will Never Be Good Enough

At one point I asked my partner to call the office of immigration for me, and he succeeded in having a conversation (what a concept) with a secretary who had previously told me to send an email, then repeated this as the answer to every question I asked. She understood my French, and I was being polite, but somehow a native speaker got further. Or maybe Fred is just more charming than I am.

Pick up the Phone (Or Your Pen)

As I will mention in an upcoming post about the DELF B2, in my four years since arriving in France, I’ve sent more official mail than in my entire American life. The technology of virtual chatting or even filling out customer service forms is still being implemented in France. In general, the easiest way to get an answer is to call. Even with my fluent French, this usually means explaining myself multiple times and hacking my way to an answer. Often, this also means sending a letter –– it took six months of calls until I sent a letter to my phone company demanding they change the address on my bill. (An address change which I needed as proof of residence for my visa). And I’ve even had to send letters to get concert tickets refunded.

My advice when it comes to French customer service is also useful advice for the world at large: be polite, prepared, and persistent. It may take that (and more) to get what you want.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

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How to Become an Au Pair in France

Posted by Molli Sébrier

After I returned home to the United States after my semester abroad, I knew that I eventually wanted to go back to France. But, before I could do that I knew that I wanted to finish my undergrad degree. And so, in the way that life sometimes “happens,” I graduated, got a job in my field, and while I never really forgot about my goal to return to Paris, I will admit that it was put on the back burner as I did what most Americans are taught to do from a very early age: I started working.

Fast forward about a year and a half and I was miserable at work. There was something missing and as I stared out the window, wishing I was anywhere but my hometown, it clicked: that something that was missing was Paris. I quickly logged into Facebook and started typing a message to a fellow study abroad-er who I knew had stayed in France after our semester and was working as a jeune fille au pair (a fancy French way to say a live-in nanny, usually between the ages of 18-25).

I asked her how she did it. While I didn’t have dreams of being a live-in babysitter, I knew that it was a simple way for a non-European to get a visa to live in France. And, to be honest, I felt that I could use the break. Again, like most Americans, I had been working since I was 15. At the time I had just turned 22 and a year abroad with a low-stress gig sounded ideal!

In one of those pinch-me-I’m-dreaming moments, the person that I messaged for advice had plans to leave her au pair position at the end of the school year. I had plenty of babysitting experience under my belt, I was a native English speaker, and I was willing to put the rest of my life on hold for the time being so that I could return to my favorite city in the world. I had an interview with the family over Skype and the rest is history!

I was really lucky in that I already knew someone who was living as an au pair in the Paris area. I could ask her advice, and in the end, she even hooked me up with a job. For those of you who don’t have those kinds of connections, I know that the search for a quality “au pair family” (sometimes called a host family) can be confusing and overwhelming.

If you’re interested in becoming an au pair in France and aren’t sure where to start, or how to find the perfect-for-you family, I created this step-by-step guide to help you along the way.

Step 1: Determine where you’d like to live

It’s unfair to assume that everyone who wants to come to France wants to live in Paris, so I wanted to include that you can consider another town in France! Here are some of my personal recommendations:

Strasbourg: a mixture of French and German culture
Bordeaux: one of the most famous wine-growing regions in the world
Marseille: if you want to live by the sea

Step 2: Start looking for families

Before you start looking for your dream family, there are a few things that you’ll need to consider:

How many children do you want to look after? I looked after three children and things were hectic at times. But, if you come from a large family that might be a breeze for you!
How many hours per day/week do you want to work? Some families will require you in the morning and the afternoon, others just after school. I was happy to have my mornings off.
Do you want to live with the family or in a separate apartment? I lived in the home with the family and, to be honest, I would have preferred my own apartment for extra privacy. However, living with the family helped us become closer!
How long do you want to stay? Most au pair contracts are for one year — at least. I ended up extending my contract twice.
Do you want to speak in English or French? I was required to speak in English, but this will differ by family. If you want to learn the language, opt for a French-speaking family.
Do you want to be responsible for household chores as well as the children? I was responsible for making dinner and cleaning up after myself. I know some au pairs who had to do laundry and ironing (for the whole family) as well.

Each host family is different. I personally worked Monday-Friday, from 4 pm until whatever time the parents came home. I was required to speak only English with the children. I was responsible for:

Picking the three children up from school
Snacktime
Homework help
Dinner
Cleaning up the kitchen after dinner
Bathtime
Bedtime

I know others who were required to wake up the children in the morning and take them to school as well as after-school care. Some others I know even had to give the kids their lunch (most French schools allow the children to go home to eat lunch). Legally, you are not allowed to work more than 30 hours per week.

Another important aspect to consider is your salary. I was given free room and board (I lived in a private part of the family’s home), a cell phone, unlimited access to public transportation, as well as 80 euros per week as “pocket money.” 80 euros per week, or 320 euros per month, is the minimum salary for au pairs, legally.

Don’t be afraid to be selective and hold out for a family that fits your needs. I know many people who said “yes” to the first family that they found, no matter the working conditions, just because they wanted to come to France. There are hundreds if not thousands of families in France that are looking for an au pair — be picky!

Here are some websites where you can find au pair families:

Step 3: Apply for your visa

Now that you’ve found your perfect family, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of coming to France to be an au pair.

All non-Europeans who want to be an au pair in France for longer than 90 days must obtain a visa in order to do so. You are required to apply for a specific visa just for au pairs. It’s called the stagiaire aide familial étranger et jeune au pair visa.

Here’s what you need to apply:

A valid passport
An authorized au pair contract (your host family is required to come up with a contract that must be approved by DIRECCTE (Direction Régionale des Entreprises, de la Concurrence, de la Consommation, du Travail et de l’Emploi))
A visa application form that you can find here
Clean criminal record (this technically isn’t required but many families request it)
High school diploma
Private health insurance that is valid in France
A cover letter explaining why you want to come to France specifically to be an au pair (it’s important to mention why you’d like to learn French)
Proof that you’ve signed up, have been accepted, and have paid for French language courses

Don’t be afraid to ask your host family for help when applying for your visa.

Once you’ve found your family and your visa has been approved, it’s time to start preparing for your new adventure abroad!

Molli offers private consultation services which range from help with visas and adjusting to life abroad to Paris travel itineraries. Fill out the contact form to learn more.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

What Is a Contrat d’intégration Républicaine (or CIR)?

Posted by Gracie Bialecki

As with many things involving French bureaucracy, when I received my vie privée et familial visa, the process was not truly over. In addition to coming back to pick up my titre de séjour, the administrator told me that I’d be summoned by OFII to sign a contrat d’intégration républicaine, have a language proficiency interview, and take four days of civic training.

What is a contrat d’intégration républicaine (CIR) you ask? I wondered the same thing even as I was waiting to sign it. A CIR is an agreement between any non-European foreigners who wish to live in France permanently and the French government –– you’re agreeing to attend the courses on French government, society, and culture, as well as attain an A1 proficiency (the lowest level) while they’re agreeing to provide you with language classes, as well as employment and other integration services. The concept of such an arrangement is very foreign to me, and I’m not sure if any such thing exists in the US.

The Process

The process of my CIR technically begin in October 2020 when I received my VPF visa, however, I wasn’t summoned by OFII until March 2021. Five months after the appointment, when I was in contact with the prefecture to pick up my new carte de séjour, I mentioned that I hadn’t received a date and they immediately sent one. Never trust French bureaucracy to function as they say it will — it’s always best to follow up since you’ll still be required to have the paperwork, even if they never sent it.

Once I had the interview scheduled with OFII, I knew there would also be four days of civic training where I learned about France.

There is also an exit interview which no one mentioned to me throughout the process, and I only discovered it when doing research for this article. Since the civic classes are typically scheduled a month apart, and the exit interview is done within three months of completing those, it’s best to assume the entire process will take 6-8 months.

OFII Visit

The OFII visit took place at their office in the 13ème, a different location from where I’d gone to have my medical exam for my first long-stay visa. No one gave us an official explanation of the afternoon’s agenda or why we’d been summoned, which made the experience even more Kafka-esque. After waiting for what felt like a long time, we were given a basic French proficiency exam which, along with the spoken interview, would assess if we were at least A1 French.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken a written exam, so while it was very easy, it was also surreal. My French is fluent thanks to French classes from middle school through college, a study abroad semester, and my French friends and partner. That said, I don’t have any degrees to prove this (in France or the US) so the proficiency exam was both required and necessary for my visa. In fact, in order to have French citizenship, you must have passed a level B1.

After the test was over, we were called one by one for our language interviews. In a moment of foolhardy optimism, I’d left the apartment without a book. Thankfully, I still had a notebook and pen — the wait was so long I wrote my friend back home a letter. When the man who was interviewing me asked what I did, I told him about my writing and he pulled up my website. We talked about literature for quite a while, and he was clearly pleased to be having a fluent, interesting conversation. Before leaving, we scheduled my first two civic courses at OFII and he printed me convocations for two Fridays in May.

Day One

I arrived at the OFII office of the twentieth arrondissement. It was across the péripherique which I’d always thought meant the address would be outside of Paris and the arrondissement numbering. Enough of us were puzzled by this that we asked the teacher who explained that this street managed to make it “into” Paris while the next block hadn’t. Like French grammar, there are the rules and there are the exceptions.

The classroom was fluorescent, unpleasant, and had tightly sealed windows. None of the twenty-or-so other immigrants looked particularly thrilled to be there either. I’d been intrigued by what they’d serve us for lunch but it was a sandwich, apple sauce, and bottled water. I’m not sure why I thought it would be something more interesting.

The day’s lessons were divided into the following sections:

The Nation: General information about geography, population, economic standing, and government structure
Health: Emergency phone numbers, health insurance, mutuelles
Employment: Searching for jobs, national employment agency or pôle emploi, CVs and letter de motivation, starting your own business
Parenthood: Parental rights, protecting children, types of childcare
Housing: Types of housing, finding housing, requesting government housing

Since I’ve lived in France for over three years, most of this information was a review to me, though in each section, there was at least something I didn’t know. For example, I never learned any of the emergency numbers here. And whenever I saw the phrase “France mêtropole” I’d translate it to “French metropolitan” in my head without knowing its second definition as “parent state of a colony.”

Reflections

As tedious as these days of slideshows and infographics were, I’m grateful the French government offered them. Or rather, required them. Maybe I’m still used to the United States form of capitalism where nothing is free, especially in terms of services. The cynical part of me thinks these courses wouldn’t exist in the US because they focused in large part on government services, and we don’t have many of those.

Featured photo is of my contract: I can’t say I ever expected to have to sign a contract with France… 🙂

To Know the Place Again for the First Time: TAIP’s Soft Reboot

Posted by Stephen Heiner

Eight years and one week ago, I penned my first ever blog post on a website I called The American in Paris. It talked about my plans to leave the US and some of my thinking that led me to leave the country I had called home for 25 years at that point. At the time I alluded to what I envisioned as the goal of the blog: telling people about my adventure moving to and living in France. At the time I was telling everyone that I was going to stay a year and see what happened next, in part because I didn’t know what would be next or even how to renew a visa.

How it Started

As time went on, I shared the experience of getting my first visitor visa, how I changed to a profession libérale visa, and all about the French agencies that were now part of my life. These were important parts of my immigration journey. But I also wrote about getting robbed (the first time), the critical summer that changed my immigration path, and the thoughts on my mind the night we “lost” Notre Dame. Turns out moving to a new culture and country offers endless points of reflection and the blog gave me a platform to share those reflections.

At first people told me they printed out my articles, followed them step by step, got their visas, and offered to buy me coffee when they arrived in France. Before long I was doing private consultations to help others get the visas they wanted. Eventually the outlines for those consultations got turned into video courses for visitor and prof lib. I even decided to create an official logo with the help of the team at Circle Sideways who have been at my side for design for projects since 2011.

As 2020 gave all of us more time to reflect on our lives (like lockdown in Paris and flying during a pandemic) and the various projects and endeavors we were involved in, I conceived the beginnings of pivoting TAIP away from solely my particular and personal journey to more of a platform for fellow Americans to share aspects of their journey that overlapped with mine but also covered areas that I had no experience in whatsoever. Knowing that I no longer had to shoulder writing all the articles meant that not only could there be more articles on more subjects, but those articles could come more frequently.

How It’s Going

Hence over the summer, during the transition to this planned day in October, the tagline for the website changed from “My Adventures in the City of Light” to “Helping You Adapt to Life in France” and two of the writers, Gracie and Molli, penned their first articles for the site which started to fill in some gaps in the information the website was offering. After those successful articles (some of which were also syndicated by Dispatches Europe) and many coffee and tea-driven meetings talking through our shared values and vision for TAIP, they agreed to come on board as part-time writers. If you’d like to learn more about them and the values that undergird our writing, click here.

On a practical level, preparing for this soft reboot meant going through every single one of my nearly 150 existing entries since 2013 and editing them to make sure there was a unified style which the entire team (and any guest writers) could use. It was a very long (but useful!) trip down memory lane. By the way, if you are interested in writing for us, we do pay for every article and you will retain publishing rights for other platforms of your choice. You can click here to learn more. While we do unashamedly write from an American perspective, with all that implies, you don’t have to be an American to write a guest article for us, and writing one article doesn’t commit you to an ongoing engagement.

So it’s a new chapter for TAIP and you’ll be hearing a lot from the newer members of the team in coming weeks. To commemorate eight years of the blog you are going to see eight articles between the two of them in the next two weeks. Expect to see a regular publishing schedule with articles coming at least once a week, if not more frequently! We’ve also stood up Facebook and LinkedIn pages for the site (please consider liking/following). Share the site with friends who you think could benefit not just from help immigrating to France, but on how different Americans see long-term life in France. Between the three of us we’ve been here twenty years and counting.

Thanks for all your support reading hundreds of articles, leaving thousands of comments, and sharing our advice and articles all over the place. This would never have become the fun passion project that it is without you. Here’s to many more years helping people from all over the world adapt to life in France. 🙂

Photo by Thibault Penin on Unsplash

How to Get a Long Term Stay Visitor Visa (VFS and Covid-19 edition)

Posted by Luke Middleton

Note from the editor: In light of new guidance on remote working in France as shared by the official French tax office in June 2025, we have also officially changed our stance on remote working for a US company while living in France under the visitor visa. Read more here, and contact us with any questions or concerns. We’re here to help! — MS

Those in our Facebook group know that for some time I have been seeking an updated version of my 2013 article on how I got my original visitor visa. While that article was one of the cornerstones of this site and while certain principles of it still apply, since the advent of VFS taking over not just France’s, but other countries’ visa processes, and with Covid-19 limiting in-person meetings, I wanted an updated article from one of my visa clients who went through the process very recently, knowing that this would become an article that would be referenced for years to come. Luke Middleton was kind enough to do just that for me and I enclose his very detailed story below. For my video course that breaks down some of these steps in even more detail, click here. If you’d like to read more of his writing you can do so here.

I also note that Luke got his visa while explicitly stating that he would be working his US job remotely, which once again undermines the misinformation peddled by Allison Lounes, that you cannot have a remote job on a visitor visa. I stated as much when I applied (and renewed) such a visa almost a decade ago, long before remote work was something everyone knew about, and Luke has just done the same last month. Alas, that means you don’t have to accept her narrative and drop $2000-$4000 using her services to get a Prof Lib visa, but I don’t suspect you’ll be upset about that. -SH

How to Apply for a Long Stay Visitor Visa

After a long period of disruption due to Covid-19 the French authorities in the United States resumed processing all categories of visa applications in June 2021, including the visiteur category that Stephen has discussed so many times on this blog.

The application process has changed from the one he encountered in 2013. Probably the biggest difference is that the French have now partnered with a third-party service provider which handles a portion of the application. While this arrangement may have streamlined things on the backend, some initial amount of confusion may result from having to interact with two completely different websites that have no evident connection to each other. And neither of these websites happens to be the website for a French consulate, which is where you might have started your Google search. In fact, there are nine consulates (and one embassy) in the US and each has its own page, presenting information in a slightly different way. All the information you need is ultimately out there but it certainly wasn’t as plainly presented as any might like.

Let’s start with the two websites I mentioned earlier:

The first is france-visas.gouv.fr (I will call it France-Visas going forward). This is where you will fill out and submit your visa application form.

The second is VFS Global. (I will simply call it VFS after this). This is the third-party provider with whom you will make an appointment to hand in your application form, passport, and other documents. Note that VFS handles visa applications to and from a wide variety of countries, not just for Americans going to France. So when you are on their website, make sure you are looking at the correct information.

**Here is the recommended order of steps as described by France-Visas:**

Create an account at France-Visas.
Fill out the online visa application form. Until you have “submitted” this form it can be saved and you are free to go back and edit it (well, you can edit some of it). You can even download a PDF version which will have a large “DRAFT” watermark on it. Once it has been submitted the DRAFT watermark will be removed and importantly at this point you are unable to edit, delete or recall the form. You are supposed to submit the form before proceeding to the next step, but I recommend you wait and will explain why shortly.
Next we need to go to the VFS website and book an appointment at one of the 9 VFS visa application centers. Here again they will ask in ALL CAPS if you have already submitted your form on France-Visas. I recommend you proceed with scheduling the appointment and only afterwards go back and submit your application at France-Visas.
Attend your VFS appointment where you will hand in your application form, various supporting documents as well as your passport, and have your biometrics taken.
After your appointment VFS will mail your documents and passport to the consulate in Washington DC (the only time the French authorities get involved). At this point your application is either approved or denied and your passport is mailed back to you.

That is the recommended order and the one I followed but here is a potential problem: when you fill out the visa application form on the France-Visas website, you must specify which VFS application center you will be going to. I live in Kansas so I chose the center in Chicago since various internet searches told me that Chicago is the “consulate for my region” (in fact that is true, but it doesn’t matter as we will see). Having completed the form on France-Visas I submitted it and only then went over to VFS to book my appointment. That is when I discovered to my dismay that the Chicago office had no openings available for as far forward as it would let me look. But once the application form on France-Visas has been submitted it can no longer be edited, and I had already told them I was going to Chicago! Also I wasn’t sure if I was even allowed to go to a different office.

In the olden days, including when Stephen applied, you had to book an appointment at the French consulate for your region — you couldn’t just choose any one you felt like. But today we are not booking an appointment at the consulate, we are booking an appointment at a VFS Global Visa Application Center. These application centers just so happen to be located in the same cities as the French consulates (with the exception of New Orleans), but they are not the same thing! For example in Chicago the VFS center is about seven blocks away from the French consulate.

With this change it no longer matters what VFS center you go to, you are free to choose whichever one you prefer. There are nine located in the following cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.

Since you have to tell France-Visas which VFS center you are visiting, and you won’t know which ones have availability until you book an appointment, I recommend the following:

Go ahead and fill out the application form on France-Visas so you are sure you are able to answer all the questions, but don’t submit it yet — just “save” it instead.
Now go to the VFS site and book an appointment.
Then return to France-Visas and “submit” your form. If you had to select a different location, you will actually need to fill out a new form on France-Visas since it will not permit you to edit the location field. At least you will already know the answers to all the questions, and after you submit the correct form you can delete your earlier draft.

This is not the recommended order but you will avoid what happened to me: since I couldn’t change my submitted application for Chicago, VFS instructed me to create and submit a second application. I managed to reserve an appointment in Houston and prayed I hadn’t hopelessly confused their computer system (it all worked out in the end).

I am told that VFS posts new appointment availabilities on their website once a week, and they don’t open appointments more than a couple of months in advance. So if you really must go to a specific city you can also just keep checking back each week.

Now let’s look at each step in more detail.

Step 1: Begin the France-Visas Application Form

Create an account at France-Visas and start a new application. Most of the form is self-explanatory but I will highlight some important items here:

Place of submission of application: for many TAIP readers, this is going to be the United States of America
City of submission of application: this is where you select one of the nine VFS cities, make sure you can get an appointment there first!
Visa type requested: we are applying for Long-stay (1 Year+)
Your plans: this is actually where the visa type is specified. We want to select Visitor
Main purpose of stay: there are two options, Visitor (adult) or Visitor (minor). Most of us are presumably going to be adults, unless you are bringing your children with you in which case you will be creating a group application that includes forms for each person.
Planned date of arrival in French territory: remember that you can not submit your application more than 3 months prior to your planned arrival date. You don’t have to arrive in France on the day your visa begins, you simply can’t arrive before that day.

Further into the application you will be asked to give your Host person or organization. Since we are visiteurs, I selected the option to provide the Name of hotel or place of accommodation. And since my place of accommodation is an apartment I just typed in Appartement for the name, and then provided the address. If you don’t have a residence lined up yet enter the name of the hotel or other lodging you plan to stay at.

Another section is titled Funding of travel costs. Once again we see various options that make more sense for visa types other than the one we are applying for, here are the ones most relevant for our purposes:

Credit card
Cash
Other

I checked Credit Card, Cash, and for Other I put USA Employment Income since I am keeping my US job while living in France. There is also an option to give them the name of a French guarantor, which I suspect most of us will not have.

Note: in several places you will need to provide a US address (for your current residence; where you were born; the address of your American employer if you have one, etc). Of course this form having been designed by the French you will only be given a City field, but not a State field. Type both the city and state in the City field.

Another note: pay attention as well to date fields and remember that the French put the day first and then the month. I found that the VFS website also used this French convention.

Ok, we’ve made it through the application form, but as discussed above let’s just “save” it and hold off on “submitting to the visa center” until we complete the next step.

Step 2: Book an Appointment at a VFS Global Center

Next, create an account at VFS Global and schedule an appointment. Hopefully you created the account from the correct section of the site in which case you will be relieved to see that it knows you are an American applying for France, and not something else. During this process you will select which VFS city you want to go to. It will also ask you for your Appointment Category which in our case will be Long Stay Visitor.

In general I found the VFS website to be unrefined and buggy. When it asked for my US location it forced me to select a city from a predetermined list which strangely did not include my actual city, the largest in the state. The list did however include several obscure towns out in the boonies that no one has ever been to (I just selected one at random, it doesn’t seem to have mattered in the end). Multiple times the site croaked, showed errors, or just directed me to blank pages (maybe this was to prepare me for French life?), and I had to fortify myself with whiskey before I could log back in. But persevere and eventually you should be able to make an appointment.

Note: at the conclusion of this process VFS will provide you with an appointment receipt or “appointment letter” which will also be emailed to you. This letter will indicate the time and date of your appointment as well as the address of the VFS office. You need to print this letter and bring it with you to your appointment.

Step 3: Go Back and Submit Your France-Visas Application

Now that you know where you are going for your appointment, return to France-Visas and “submit” your application form for real. If you have to change your appointment city from what you originally specified, you will need to create an entirely new form. Save a PDF copy of your first draft so you have your prior answers, delete that application, use the draft to help you fill in the new one, and when done, submit it.

Download the PDF of the final, submitted form and print it out (it should have no “DRAFT” watermark). This PDF will include three things — the completed application form, an application receipt, and a list of required documents to bring to the VFS appointment.

Note: depending on how you answered certain questions when filling out the application, there may be additional required documents not listed on the receipt, but which will be described nonchalantly in a wall of text on the confirmation page after you submit the application. So read that page well, because once you leave that screen you will never see it again.

If you, like me, answered “yes” to the question “Have you previously resided for more than three months in a row in France?” bring a copy of that previous visa.

Step 4: Show Up to Your VFS Appointment

Now you need to present yourself to the VFS office at the appointed hour, bringing with you all the supporting documents required. Don’t worry, this meeting will be in English and your documents can be in English as well. As Stephen often reminds us, the visa interview is in the language of the country you are applying from. They don’t assume you already speak French.

As already mentioned the required documents are listed in the same PDF as your France-Visas application form, but let’s go through them one by one:

VFS Appointment Letter
This is not actually on the list, but I am repeating it here because you need to bring it.

Signed and dated application form
This is your France-Visas application. In my case the VFS person I dealt with already had a copy of this form on her computer and she preferred to use it instead of mine. All the same, bring your own copy since that’s what they tell you to do.

Receipt France-Visas
This is included in the same PDF file as your France-Visas application form, so you should already have printed it out.

A travel document
The exact wording follows: “issued less than 10 years ago, containing at least two blank pages, with a period of validity at least 3 months longer than the date on which you intend to leave the Schengen Area or, in the case of a long stay, at least three months longer than the expiry date of the visa requested. Be sure to transmit (scan) ALL PAGES of your travel document containing visas, entry and exit stamps or any other inscription.” is included in the same PDF file as your France-Visas application form, so you should already have printed it out.”

Clearly you need to bring your physical passport, which you will hand over to VFS and which will be returned to you later by mail. The language about transmit and scan I believe refers to the option to submit some documents electronically.

Although it is not explicitly stated, I remembered that Stephen was asked to bring a photocopy of his passport in addition to the original. Just to be safe I did the same thing (making copies of the title pages as well as all other pages with entries). The VFS lady took my copies without seeming to think that was unusual, so I would recommend you do the same.

ID photograph
They are referring here to a passport photo. In my area of the country the usual place to get these are pharmacies. Your mileage may vary, but I went to two Walgreens stores and got terrible pictures both times (low resolution), but the ones from CVS were sharp and clear. White backgrounds are common so do not wear a white shirt or they may decline to take your picture as your head will appear to be floating in space.

As it turns out VFS will also be taking your photo as part of the biometric collection (in addition to your fingerprints). The photo that ended up on my visa is the one VFS took, not the one I provided. However it is listed as a requirement and they did ask me to hand it over, so whether they want to use it or not, bring one (I brought two but they only asked for one).

Letter from the employer or proof of business ownership/business license (if self-employed). If retired, pension certificate.
I am employed by an American company and I got my boss to sign a letter that made the following points:

so and so is indeed an employee at our company
we are aware that he is seeking French residency
he has our approval to do so
his relocation to France will not cause any change to his employment status since he is free to work remotely
his salary is $X which at the current exchange rate equals Y€ per month.

I had my boss sign multiple copies of these letters in case I need them for something else later, and gave VFS an original. I am less able to speak about the other cases, though presumably the student category should not apply to those of us applying for a visitor visa. What ramifications self-employment might have for the next item probably depends on what you do; if you need advice I would suggest posting your questions on the TAIP Facebook group.

Promise not to exercise any professional activity in France
I provided a signed letter declaring on my honor (as the French like to do) that I would “not exercise any paid professional activity in France.” The fact that this follows directly after “letter from employer” means that the French do not consider your remote work “paid professional activity” for purposes of this visa.

Travel health insurance certificate
The text continues: “issued by the insurance company (covering any possible costs for medical repatriation, and emergency and/or hospital treatment, for a minimum amount of 30,000 €, valid in France for the whole stay. A copy of your American health insurance card is not acceptable proof of adequate coverage).”

For this requirement I chose to purchase an International Health Insurance plan from Cigna Global as Stephen did so many years ago. This is a process in itself, but I will try to restrict my comments to the basics. They offer three levels of coverage which they call Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Even the lowest Silver level offers 800,000 € coverage for inpatient and emergency care, which is 30X above the French requirement. Gold and Platinum have increasingly higher coverage levels and also include maternity care. In addition to selecting the three coverage levels you also specify your desired deductible ($0-$10,000), percentage of cost share (0%-30%), and out-of-pocket maximums ($0-$5,000). Higher levels of these selections will reduce the price of your premium but will of course increase the sticker shock if you ever actually ever use the insurance. You can also choose to pay monthly, quarterly, or annually, with the latter two options offering a slight discount. Even without the discount it makes sense to buy a one-year policy since you need to show coverage for the full period of your visa.

After these selections you will be presented with various optional add-ons such as outpatient coverage, vision, and dental, etc. but don’t glaze over this section because you will absolutely need to purchase the “International Evacuation & Crisis Assistance Plus” add-on to meet the French requirement for medical repatriation coverage.

While the cost may vary based on your age, gender, and other factors, as a point of reference I chose the absolute cheapest Silver plan, maxed-out deductible, cost sharing, and out-of-pocket levels, with no other add-on except the international evacuation feature, and earned the discount for paying for an entire year upfront. My total came to $900.

Several minor frustrations are encountered during this process. At the beginning of the insurance application they ask what country you will be living in, which is obviously France. Later you have to provide your mailing address and at this point the form will only accept a French address. Even if you know this address in advance (and some won’t), by definition we are not living in France yet and we may not want mail going there. However they do provide the option to receive communication electronically which solves the mail problem. If you don’t yet know your future French address you can just put down the address of your hotel.

A second frustration is that Cigna will not allow you to schedule your coverage start date more than 45 days into the future, but it is entirely possible you will need to buy it more than 45 days prior to your departure. This means your one-year policy period may not overlap exactly with your one-year visa; in my case it was off by about one month. But ultimately that’s no big deal. You may, like Stephen, end up ditching Cigna immediately and buying a much cheaper private French policy.

Finally after having forked over your money and waited several days for your Cigna account to populate, you will be able to download a one-page certificate of insurance. What concerned me is that this certificate does not explicitly describe the coverage levels: it showed that I had purchased the “Cigna Global Silver” plan, but who knows what “Silver” represents? I wrote several emails to Cigna asking if they could give me a more detailed cover letter, and never got a response. Afraid this would be a problem I printed off the entire 40-page Cigna Customer Guide and brought it to the appointment. I discussed the issue with the VFS representative and she thought the basic cover letter “should probably be enough.” My visa was approved so apparently it was.

Proof of accommodation in France
The text continues: “property title deed, tenancy agreement or any other supporting document. Or proof that accommodation will be provided by a person residing in France, or if not, a document explaining the accommodation arrangements planned for France.”

By various undeserved miracles I was fortunate enough to have an apartment lined up in advance and was therefore quite pleased with myself to be able to hand over a copy of my French contrat de location (rental contract). But my self-congratulation immediately ended with the next question: “Do you have a copy of your landlord’s identification?”

Uhm no, I did not. To my relief the lady once again said, “That’s ok, I think the contract will be sufficient.” And it was, but if this applies to you and you are able to obtain a copy of your landlord’s ID and electricity bill, it definitely won’t hurt.

If you don’t yet have housing arrangements made you will want to write a small letter explaining your plans to do so.

Proof of enough resources to cover all expenses during trip
The requirement says bank statements and that is what I was asked for, so bring them whether they prove anything or not. Thankfully having now met the literal requirement I was permitted to provide other documentation as well; I gave them pay stubs from my employer and my savings account statement. If you’re a pensioner that statement will come in handy.

If, like me, you decide you need to move funds around to present the best possible financial picture, make sure to plan ahead for the time it will take to make those transfers as well as for the statement to be produced from whatever account you move them to, since all of that will need to be done prior to your appointment.

After requesting each of these items in turn, my interviewer finished by asking “Do you have anything else you want to give me?” I did not. You don’t have to volunteer anything that is not requested, but by all means if there is something you think will help your case then provide it. As Stephen often notes, have more documentation than you are asked for with you, but don’t hand it over unless they ask for it. More does not necessarily equal better.

All that remains at this point is to pay for three things which will be combined into a single charge to your credit card (cash and checks not accepted): the visa application fee, a service fee to VFS, and the cost of overnight FedEx service to return your passport. Unlike in Stephen’s day you do not need to bring a pre-paid envelope with you, you will purchase it at the appointment. For me the total cost came to roughly $200 but no doubt this will fluctuate.

Step 5: Wait for Your Passport to be Returned

At this point VFS will forward your application, passport, and documents to the French embassy in Washington DC where your case will be approved or denied. The VFS agent informed me at the time that they were currently very busy processing student visas (my appointment was in August) and she could neither guarantee nor estimate how long it would take to receive a response. She did say the consulate typically strives for a turnaround of two weeks.

She also said that if the French authorities needed any more information they would contact me directly and if I didn’t want my application to end up in a forgotten pile somewhere I should respond as quickly as possible.

In the end the French never asked for anything else and my approved visa was in my hands a mere seven days later.

The visa appears as a large sticker on one of the pages of your passport. It will have a start date which in my case was two weeks earlier than the planned departure date I put down on my application.

Included in the envelope with my passport/visa were two miniscule slips of paper:

The first informed me that upon arrival in France I would need to go online and register and validate my visa. This will be the subject of a future blog post.
The second referred to current Covid travel regulations. Since these seem to change from week to week there is no point discussing them here, just check before you go and hope for the best.

Whew! If you’ve made it this far and your visa was approved, congratulations — you’re going to France!

Final Thoughts

Start preparing early and try to think ahead as much as you can. Since you can’t submit the application more than three months prior to departure, and the recommendation is to schedule your VFS appointment at least 1 month prior to leaving, it can start to feel like a lot of activity is getting crammed into a very short period of time. Needless to say, these last few months are already going to be hectic with moving preparations. But there is nothing stopping you from starting to gather documents prior to the application process, and you will thank yourself for any groundwork you were able to do in advance. Bonne chance!

The process may be different now but the sticker in your passport will still look substantially similar to the featured photo above.

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How to Get Free Money for Your New Electric Bike in France

Posted by Stephen Heiner

One of the aspects of life in French that is perhaps underappreciated by its citizens is the number of benefits on offer at any given time. Sure, the French will brag to you about all that’s available, but often, they are conquered by the paperwork before they ever begin. I alluded to that in my article about free money for French classes some time ago. The hundreds of euros I recently got rebated from various agencies to cover the purchase of my new electric bike only underlined the lesson: if you are willing to do the paperwork correctly, you’re usually going to get what you want in France.

Start with Your City

So I know that there are other municipalities that offer money towards your electric bike purchase, and even though I’m writing this as a Paris resident, the same principles I’ve outlined here are applicable to other areas of France. That first principle is that all other reimbursement programs for an electric bike purchase look to how your municipality of residence dealt with your purchase.

Parisians start here. You’re going to create an account. Before you start excitedly filling out the application, make sure you have digital copies of the following:

a receipt with your name and address on it (I bought my bike at Decathlon and they are familiar with this process; once you finish checking out you can go with your receipt to the customer service window and have them print a formal receipt for you which has your name and address — remember to bring something that proves that address)
a certificate from the place that you bought the bike certifying that this model meets the EU standards for electric bikes (you can see the one I used for my bike model here)
your electricity bill or attestation de hébergement (this proves your residency)
your ID (either passport or carte de séjour; no preference)
your RIB (reimbursements are, presumably, only to French bank accounts: one more reason you should get one)

It took me half an hour to fill out the paperwork for the City of Paris. You have to keep in mind that this isn’t entirely “free money.” Paris wants a lot of data from the people they are giving money to, specifically, data about your mobility habits. They are wondering how often you take public transportation and how getting this bike is going to affect that, and whether you will be riding the bike in all types of weather or just on the weekends, etc. They also ask whether you would have bought a new bike if this subsidy program did not exist. I checked “no,” as I would have bought a used electric bike at half the price rather than a brand new one.

They also ask for a full itemization of your purchase. I knew that the program offered reimbursements up to 500 € in total so I decided to max that out by also buying a helmet, basket, and lock, all of which are included in the programs.

The bike itself had cost 799 €, so when you add 56 € for the lock (one of the most expensive I could find), 35 € for the helmet, and 52 € for the saddlebags and basket, the total was 942 €.

I submitted on March 17th and got a response on April 23rd: 219.72 €. They didn’t give any reasoning for the calculus. While the email told me the money would hit my account within a maximum of two months, it ended up hitting within two weeks.

Also, I didn’t idly wait for the City to rule on my dossier. I waited a month before sending a follow-up via the electronic system and Twitter. Whoever is running the City’s social media account is paying attention and made sure that my request got answered more quickly and that’s why I think I got my response in five weeks instead of the six to eight you might read about online. Use social media to your advantage!

Then Try Your Public Transportation Provider

After I submitted my dossier to the City of Paris, I started a simultaneous dossier with IDF Mobilités, which is the agency that is in charge of all the public transportation in the Île de France region (start here). While you cannot get a final decision from them until you include the decision from your municipality, you can do every other step of the process in the meantime and submit an incomplete dossier. Your dossier will then get flagged up for missing this documentation, but hopefully by that time you will have the decision from your municipality and can respond to the flag with the documentation.

While I had correctly done everything else, I had incorrectly submitted my RIB. I had typed in my personal bank account information but had inexplicably submitted the electronic RIB for my business bank account. Instead of letting me resubmit, they just trashed my dossier because the numbers didn’t match and made me start over.

So I started the process over with IDF Mobilités on May 10th. The process and dossier are almost identical to the one for the City of Paris. The second time I applied I was able to submit proof of the aid I had already received from the City of Paris, which was simply an email informing me of the decision. While that didn’t strike me as “official” enough, I submitted it anyway. I didn’t get immediate pushback.

Since I had already submitted before, I knew the time to a decision, once they had a complete dossier, was 17 calendar days. Judging by the file number from my original application in comparison to my second one I calculated that they are getting 300+ applications per day. That sounds like a lot, until you realize there are 12M people in the region, and not all those dossiers are complete or acceptable. I submitted on May 18th and hadn’t heard by June 4th and so I sent a gently-worded tweet to their official account. Three days later I got a decision: 251.28 €. The notifying email gives an even longer lag time for the funds to hit your account: four months. But again, that was just to give them a wide margin of error. The money hit within 12 business days. 471 € towards my purchase meant that thanks to these two agencies, exactly half of my bike had been paid for.

When some people (who don’t pay taxes here) expressed dismay at these programs, I noted that not only am I an annual Navigo holder at IDF Mobilités, paying north of 700 € each year for my pass, I also pay various types of taxes to the City of Paris. I saw these funds as customer/tax rebates for myself which, all told, only took a couple of hours of my time, including the actual purchase of the bike in the first place.

But Wait, There’s More!

There’s also a program called Bonus Vélo that operates at a national level (but you apply within your specific region: Paris is “Grand Est”) and, unlike the previous two programs I mentioned, is means-tested. If your French income was below 13,489 € in the previous year, you can qualify. You must also apply for the program within six months of the original purchase. I happen to know someone who had applied for this program and asked him for the scoop.

Unlike the other programs, which are entirely online, this one operated in the old-fashioned way: a printed dossier sent by registered mail. You will need all the same information that you did for the other two dossiers, along with a copy of your previous year’s tax return, but note that the email that you receive from the City of Paris informing you of a favorable decision isn’t considered sufficient “proof” by this agency. That’s fine. If you email the City and let them know you need proof for the Bonus Velo program they will send you a more “official” document than an email that conforms to what the Bonus Vélo program demands. You will then have to print that up and include it with your dossier.

This process seems to be faster because if you have a completed dossier you will get a decision within one month of mailing it in. The person who applied for this program also went through a similar process with the other two agencies (for the same model bike!) and got 200 €. The money arrived within two weeks.

That meant he got 671 € of an original 942 € reimbursed, bringing his effective total for his brand new electric bike, helmet, lock, saddlebags, and basket to 271 €. Not bad! This is a perfect example of taking advantage of programs that many French people don’t even know about, much less apply for. The processes just take a bit of time, but immigrants are so used to having to do paperwork just to legally stay in France, that doing paperwork to get money is almost fun, especially when you’ve come to understand how French bureaucracy works at every level.

There are several reasons why I got an electric bike in the first place (although, as I noted, the incentive to get a new one was the free money) even though I’ve been almost exclusively a métro rider and walker in the City for years now. But I’ll talk about that more in another article.

Photo by Christian Dubovan on Unsplash

This article also appeared on Dispatches Europe.

French Tax Season Concludes

Posted by Stephen Heiner

It’s that time of year when French accountants have closed their offices, put do-not-disturb autoresponders in their email inboxes, and have fled town to relax. Tax season is over. I never expected to write so much about taxes on this site, but enough people ask me about them that I have to pretty consistently write about the topic, as I did in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020 (twice) and this article adds 2021 to the list.

Yesterday was the last day this year that personal income taxes could be filed in France. The Fifth Republic gives paper filers the least amount of time. This year that date was May 20th. After that only online filing was possible. May 26th was the deadline for departments 01-19 and non-residents of France (if you have real estate or a business that earns income in France you have to file even if you don’t live here). June 1st was the date for departments 20-54, and yesterday, June 8th, was the deadline for all the rest of the departments, from 55 to 976 (Mayotte), including those of us here in Paris (75).

I’ve not filed my own taxes in any country since my early 20s, before I started to own businesses and learned how favorable the US tax code was to them. Even then, I always took cues from paid accountants who spent their entire working lives learning about the tax code and were always up on the latest regulations. I carried that same attitude over when I moved to France. I hired my French personal accountant in 2014 and she’s taken care of me every year since and works in concert with my US firm that handles my business and personal US returns and specializes in location-independent businesses. My French accountant sends her engagement letters out to her existing clients early each year and that guarantees you a spot for the year’s filings. If you’re not a pre-existing client, you’re going to pay much more to file a return if you reach out to her or her colleagues even in mid-season. You’ll pay progressively more each week closer to filing time, and double or triple what I pay if you contacted her last week, if she was even willing to pick up the phone then.

Hence, when I get panicked emails from Americans in April and May asking if I know anyone who can help them, I often say, “I don’t know.” There are a very limited number of firms that work with Americans filing taxes here in France and because of that, the rates are significantly higher. Then the immediate retort to the price I quote, which is usually from someone on visitor status is, “But I don’t even PAY taxes here.” But the problem with that statement is its lack of anchorage in reality: you don’t pay your accountant based on how much tax you pay. The accountants don’t work for the French government. You pay based on how complicated your return is. While Americans who are tax residents in France don’t have to file particularly complicated returns, no one would classify those returns as simple. They get additionally complex when you add in French income from rentals and/or businesses (as I have had to over the years).

Americans forget that there isn’t some equivalent of H&R Block here offering tax returns at cut-price rates done by people who went to a clinic for eight weeks. Hence they have unreasonable expectations.

One way to adjust your expectations appropriately is to educate yourself. I recently came across a book written by someone I met in Bangkok at the end of 2019. He runs an international accounting firm and the book is called US Taxes for Americans Abroad. It’s not an exciting page-turner (no financial book is) but it’s very helpful for understanding just how complicated life for a US citizen abroad is. I suspect the estimated nine million of us who live outside the US have no idea how complicated it is, even if, like me, they have been filing in their country of residence for years.

Just a few helpful concepts Vincenzo (himself a non-resident American) includes in his book:

how renting a home abroad can lower your US tax burden
the ins and outs of the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE)
how to avoid paying state taxes if you are no longer resident stateside
the tax implications of marrying a non-US citizen
retirement and investment challenges

And the topic du jour among Americans abroad in recent years: renouncing US citizenship, and all the costs that come with it.

The moral of the story, as always: living outside the United States comes with some amazing opportunities and benefits. It also comes with at least double the paperwork of a regular life in the US. Stop your complaining and get to work. At least one benefit for those of us filing in France this year? No need to report any of the aid we received for our businesses due to Covid. One more thing to be grateful for as the weather turns warmer, ever so slightly, day by day.

Firing SFR Mobile

Posted by Stephen Heiner

This is the unwitting third in a series of “firing” articles. Once you realize that it’s definitely more difficult and hence, more satisfying, to fire service providers in France, you are far more willing to do so. Some time ago I shared the experience of firing Société Générale, my very first bank in Paris, but a luxury afforded me because I already had a business account at BNP Paribas. A telemarketing experience late last year gave me the opportunity to much more easily fire EDF in favor of Engie. When I saw that cost savings in banking and electricity, I wondered where else I might trim the fat.

SFR

I walked into SFR within 24 hours of arriving in France in 2013. My French was impossibly lacking in confidence and vocabulary. Thankfully, two of the staff there spoke English fairly well and gave me a list of the documents I would need to get a mobile phone line. One of those was the banking details (what is known here as a RIB — relevé identité bancaire) of my not-yet-in-existence French bank account. Thankfully, I was able to get a bank account set up the following day, and bank details in hand, I made my way to the SFR store once again.

I knew that I would be calling the United States and I didn’t want to have to switch to Skype all the time to make those calls. But, unlike cell phone plans in America, cell phone plans in Europe are not only fairly inexpensive with large data packages, but those plans include international calling.

The plan I originally signed up for offered hours and hours of free calls to the US as well as dozens of gigabytes of data. I was also allowed to roam around the EU on that data. Total cost? 60 €/month.

Over the years the plan continued to upgrade and/or I would upgrade when I saw new features available. The plan I ended up abandoning recently had unlimited data and calling to the US and Canada and the EU. It also meant that whether I was physically in the United States or here in Europe, I really had no worry about getting additional charges, as that roaming was included. I would only get charged if I made calls to countries not designated in my plan, or traveled to places outside of my plan and wanted data.

Unfortunately, SFR’s data packages in Asia, South America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were always prohibitively high, so I ended up getting a local SIM when I traveled to those places and put that SIM inside an unlocked mini wifi device, which then allowed me to tether multiple devices, including my French phone.

Free

Xavier Niel, who has an estimated net worth of $9.3B USD, is the founder of many businesses, including the ISP and mobile phone provider Free. A year before I arrived in France, in 2012, he created Free Mobile, which was offering unlimited text, voice, and data for 19,99 €/month. Over the years this plan continued to upgrade until it essentially matched my SFR plan. The highest tier plan didn’t offer unlimited data, but 150 gigs of domestic data and 25 gigs of foreign data per month was going to be more than I would use. When I discovered this plan I checked with a friend who had Free to ask about the service. She said that in the city and in the United States it had been fine. The only times it had been iffy was in some parts of rural France, but that made sense, given that the company wasn’t even ten years old and was still building out its infrastructure.

Still, it seemed to be too good to be true! In addition to use in France and the EU, the Free plan gave me use of my phone and data plan in Australia and New Zealand, places where I normally spend at least $100-$200/month on data. But who was I to argue with what would be a 600 € savings a year from what was at that point a 70 €/month charge (the price had risen slightly over the years) from SFR? I checked with SFR to make sure that I didn’t have a contract in place, then picked a day to go to Free.

I brought all the items I needed to open an account at SFR: passport, electricity bill, RIB. The woman who helped me smiled and said that I wouldn’t need any of that: just my debit card. The way number portability works in France is simple. You call 3179 from your phone. You will hear a recording that reads a number to you. That is the RIO (relevé d’identité operateur). The recording also states whether your number is free of a contract (and if not, what you will have to pay if you choose to port your number anyway). You receive a corresponding text message with all that information.

The person helping me at Free typed in my mobile number and then this RIO. She then asked whether I preferred to be billed on the 1st or the 15th (I chose the latter). Then she scanned a card that held a nano-SIM and handed it to me. She told me that I would get a text from SFR sometime in the coming days telling me precisely when my number would be ported.

The Switch

Sure enough, about a week later, SFR notified me that my number would be ported on the 26th of the month between 11h-15h00. I thought that I would see the coverage drop at some point during that window and when it did I swapped SIMs, changed my voicemail recording, and went on with my day. A couple weeks later, SFR refunded me for the portion of the month that was unused due to my cancellation.

I’ve now had Free for almost two months and heartily endorse it. I’ve not noticed a change in my service quality but have certainly noticed the change in charges to my bank account each month! That’s to say nothing of the growing confidence that comes with choosing your service providers based on price and quality, not by default and laziness, which is something that is instinctive in America, but not-so-normal here in France.

My Change of Heart on Picard

Posted by Stephen Heiner

In December 2015 I authored a (perhaps too indignant) piece slamming the frozen food chain Picard (and even questioning its raison d’etre). It’s Spring 2021 and I have to take back at least some of my words due to a series of events that led to my first (and second, third, and fourth) visit to the chain.

Mailers

Picard regularly drops mailers into just about every mailbox in France. I have had a habit over the years of using any sale flyers, be they from grocery stores or sports shops like Decathlon or Go Sport, as free language learning supplementation. I will leaf through them, looking for words or phrases I don’t know. If I see anything interesting, I’ll tear that sheet out and add it to my “look at later” pile. Then I’ll message my French friends and clarify things (an example from the past: “You guys call any sports shoe baskets, even if they are for tennis?”) In early March of this year a mailer landed with the title Hello America featuring a number of “limited-time” special items.

“Hmm, what do the French consider quintessentially American,” I thought to myself, and started leafing through the mailer with a smile on my face. The cover had a “Big Fried Chicken Burger” for 4€50 as well as a banana bread cupcake for 2 €. The next page featured something called “American box” which gave you 11 pieces each of mac and cheese bites, mozzarella sticks, and pulled pork bites: 33 in total. That was 8€95 and thousands of calories.

There were also the 3€50 “Tex-mex burrito” and 2€95 “Hot-dog à la New-Yorkaise.” They even had bottles of Sam Adams beer for 2€50 each. But the one that caught my eye was on page 3 of this version: 400g of “American chicken wings” for 5€40.

Chicken

Those who know me well know that I am a great lover of chicken in general and even more so of chicken wings. It’s traditionally classified in the “American food” category for me (even though people all over the world enjoy chicken wings in their own style and cuisine) which I generally stay away from while here in France to make the visits to my family that much more enjoyable: combining people I miss with food I don’t often eat. But when this mailer landed in my mailbox it was the middle of Lent and I had been fasting from meat for some weeks. I also considered that I wasn’t heading back to the States anytime soon and that given that these were frozen wings, they could be broken out on Sundays or after Lent was finished. “Well, for scientific purposes,” I reasoned, “I should really check out these Picard chicken wings and make sure they are good.”

I can’t say I eat frozen chicken wings regularly (or ever, that I can remember) but these were really good! Could Picard have other frozen food that is good? Again, in the name of science, I decided to find out.

Subsequent Visits

The Paris stores aren’t very large. You just have large freezers everywhere and some cardboard boxes in the front you can help yourself to if you don’t have one of your own “keep cold” bags. The other limitation Parisians often deal with is freezer space. Most of us in the city have smaller fridges with limited freezer space. I could pick maybe 3-5 items to bring home, assuming that I had an empty freezer at home.

I pretended that I knew what I was doing, but having never really been inside one of these before, I slowly went by every single freezer, making mental notes on what they had. I even picked up a few things on those subsequent visits, including:

a 20-pack of breaded Alaskan pollock filets (really good)
some snack-size ham and cheese calzones (decent)
the aforementioned “American box” (honestly, not bad but only meant to be consumed in one sitting if you want a food coma: I’ve been away from the States too long to take down so many calories at once so I took it in parts)

In my eighth year in France, I still love to cook multiple times each day (more than ever, actually) and I still find it unacceptable that many people choose to make Picard a regular part of their lives rather than just an occasional one. But, almost six years after I penned my last article on Picard, I’m happy to admit that I understand a bit better why the French might choose it: there are some quality flash-frozen fruits and vegetables in addition to the pre-made food I treated myself to, all at reasonable prices. There’s even the bakery section where someone can grab frozen pain au chocolats that they can warm up in their own oven and make-believe they put the effort in to make them.

While it’s not very French of me to admit that I was wrong, perhaps that’s why the Hello America campaign so brilliantly ensnared me. Bonjour, Picard. You got me. 🙂

Photo from the Facebook page of Picard.

USPS to France? Be Prepared to Wait

Posted by Stephen Heiner

Covid-19 has shaped many parts of our lives in the last 12 months. One way that wasn’t entirely expected (at least not by me) was the performance of the United States Postal Service.

While the USPS has never been a world-beater, throughout my years abroad I’ve come to expect a fairly reasonable level of service. If a package was sent to me from the US I could sometimes get it as early as a week, but more often than not it took two weeks. Not anymore.

I still maintain a US address for various administrative reasons and every now and then I have some of that mail forwarded. Sometimes it’s routine stuff like a new credit card to replace one that has hit its expiry date. Other times there are some important bits of paperwork I need to deal with. In 2020, I also got “free” money from the US government in the mail.

In late October 2020 I had a package put together with some of these important items as well as a couple Christmas gifts I wanted to give to friends in Paris. Not only did the package never arrive, but it was returned to sender in late January of this year.

The USPS does provide tracking, but there was no update for that number beyond its first original scans. According to the website, it didn’t appear to have ever left the state of origin.

I wondered if it had been delivered and my local post office had simply forgotten to give me a delivery notice, as the box would not have fit in my mailbox. I showed the tracking number to a clerk at La Poste. A few taps later he told me in French, “It’s in customs in Chicago.” Of course the French knew where my package was, but the USPS seemingly didn’t.

It was late December by that time, so I was able to file a claim for the package, but I had given it up as lost. I pictured it somewhere in the warehouse you see at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But just when I had given up hope, I found out it had been returned to sender. On cue, the USPS called me to follow up on my claim three days later.

The woman on the phone sounded so kindly I had no heart to turn on my customer-service indignation of the US variety. Indeed, I was so relieved to not have lost the contents of that package (which included a ring I had resized) that I just thanked her for following up and verified that I would get a refund given that I never actually got the package. “Yes, no problem,” she said.

When a friend went to get the refund the clerk blamed the French. “It was delivered,” he insisted. True enough, the package did look like it got stamped/stickered through customs. But somehow or another it never got to my post office. It came to France, hung out, then was returned.

I didn’t want to take any chances on the next package so I stripped out everything that wasn’t critical (I’ll get those things some other time, I figured) and focused on only sending something business envelope-sized. That envelope was sent on February 9th and I’m happy to say it arrived just before the end of February. “It’s a Christmas miracle,” I typed to my friend as I sent a photo of the envelope in my hands.

Three months for a non-delivery. Almost three weeks for something the size of an envelope. Thanks to the tracking I was also able to see that of the 17 days it spent in transit, 12 of them were in the United States, and 11 of those days were spent getting from the origin, in the middle of the country, to New York.

“What is going on?” I asked a friend of mine who I suspected might occasionally mail herself things from the US. She didn’t have a ready answer, but did tell me that her mother had attempted to send her Halloween candy both in 2020 and 2019. Both times the package never arrived: once it was returned to sender and the other time it disappeared.

The USPS has been underfunded for a long time and unlike what I’ve experienced in Europe and Asia, routinely undercharges for both domestic and international packages (while managing to charge a FORTUNE to ship to Canada, which is closer to 48 of our states than Hawaii or Alaska). It seems to have caught its own strain of Covid-19 and is, for the moment, not to be relied on for timely package deliveries.

For comparison: a book I ordered from the UK on Tuesday arrived on Thursday of the same week, which is even faster than I’m used to receiving packages from across the Channel. Clearly not everyone has the same Covid problems.

Over the years I’ve often sent small packages to friends who were flying into Paris. This allowed, in some years, for nearly half a dozen “courier” deliveries that I paid off with bottles of champagne. That means is currently not as available.

So, if you’re in France and awaiting packages from the US, adjust your expectations, file claims, and be prepared to wait. It is, after all, a First World problem.

Photo by Pope Moysuh on Unsplash