Vide grenier is french for I’d rather give my stuff away!

Early morning at our town square with everyone setting up for the Vide Grenier and Brocante.

Today was our village’s garage sale (vide grenier; translation: empty attic) and brocante (like an antiques market). We decided to pay 10€ and purchase 2m of space at the sale. Our primary purpose was to sell off the nespresso machine we bought when we arrived. But when we started to pack this week we realized we had lots of things we could sell.

Filling out the application form for the vide grenier required almost as much detail as registering our girls for school. A few weeks ago I got an urgent text from Chris asking me for the i.d. number on our car! We had to provide this information to purchase a simple spot. We also had to swear that we would not participate as sellers more than twice  a year, we’d only sell things that were used and commit to other vows far more serious in intent than our ‘hey we want to sell our posh coffee machine’ mindset coming into this day.

First world problems indeed: how much can we sell our nespresso for?

We were told that set up began at 5h30 and that by 7h things would be nuts. Around 6h15 we were surprised to find out for our 10€ we got 2m of space on the sidewalk and the road – for some reason I thought we also got a table. No bother, down went the picnic blanket. By 6h45 we’d already made our first sale – a rather aggressive negotiator bought 9 pairs of kids shoes from us for less money I think we should had held out for. But saying “yes” got rid of him and put some money in our pockets – well worth the extra 10€ I think we might have haggled for. His purchase quickly made me realize why I’ve probably never done a garage sale before – I hate dealing with people in this kind of business transaction.

A year ago right now we were fervently working to purge our house of things unnecessary and unwanted. We were making many trips a day to the storage locker and Goodwill. And for days on end we put tonnes things to the curb for others to take. We sold a handful of things on kijiji but really, in the end, we were both ok with just getting the stuff out of our house and into the hands of other people.

Flash forward to this weekend – two weeks before the end of school (July 5) and our departure not too long afterward. Packing is top of mind. We’ve tried this year not to buy too many things but we are cursed/blessed with children whose bodies and feet are rapidly growing and our daily desire for espresso exceeded our tiny village’s resto capacities. So in addition to the coffee machine we had a blanket full of goods to sell.

Notre trucs. Les trucs is one of the most useful words I’ve learned this year. It means “stuff”. Kids use it _all the time_. It is a helpful word when your mental database of nouns isn’t as stocked as you might like it to be.

As things got going this morning, I soon realized that our ‘almost new, brand name’ stuff wasn’t going to fetch much, if anything, at all. One man returned 5 times to negotiate with us to buy the nespresso – his opening offer was 20€. No way. We had it listed for 75€ – I set that price to be under the prices that other nespressos were fetching on the le bon coin (like kijiji). By 9:45am I sold it for 60€ to a much nicer woman. Then I began texting village friends to see if we could bundle up the best of the remaining clothes to recirculate to their kids. By 10:45am all that was left was an Ikea reusable bag full of skates, horseback riding boots and a few clothes that I will donate to the local charity which is now sitting downstairs in my sejour.

As I write this post the sale is raging on. There is not a parking spot to found in our village and people are still haggling at 16h like they did at 7am. From travel in East Africa, I learned how to haggle but today confirmed for me this garage sale gig isn’t my thing. I don’t enjoy it as a buyer or a seller. If the price is fair, I’m happy to pay it. And if we don’t need it, check the 14 feet of sidewalk in front of our house in Toronto.

What happens when you drop your house & car keys down the sewer?

I have often joked that I have a wee bit of Lucile Ball in me. If there’s a ridiculous way to do something clumsy I will find myself doing it.

Our kids fight over the chance to do all kinds of things. Pressing elevator buttons is an especially heated opportunity but it’s the opening of the front door of our house that is a daily “Can I do it?” request in stereo.

When we are coming home after being in the car the kids often ask for the house keys which are attached to the car key fob. EVERY time I hand them over I say “put them in your pocket so you don’t drop them down the sewer”. This advice, it turns out, is a bit of know-thyself prescience because today it was me, not my lovely daughters, who dropped the keys down the storm sewer.

We have extra car keys in our house but the house was locked. The extra house keys were with R. at school because this morning the kids walked to school on their own when I was leaving for french class in Aix. And I couldn’t turn to Chris for ideas or help because he’s away for work.

So what does an english-speaking renter do in a small village when she can’t get into her house? She calls the very kind people who look after the house for the Canadian owners for help.

Luckily Eric is an intrepid, well-connected and kind person who just happened to be working on the apartment next door. So I tell him about my stupidity, he comes to take a look and calls somebody to see what to do. Five minutes later he’s opened the storm sewer access, retrieved a ladder, climbed down and along, found my keys and passed them back to me. Then he came back along the sewer, climbed up and we closed the whole thing up. Lickety-split all is good and well.

Needless to say I am deeply appreciative of his help, glad it wasn’t the sanitary sewer, relieved I don’t have to attempt to order (and pay for) new keys from the car-lease place and am all around just plain happy to share this ridiculous mishap with its happy ending.

I’m going to start wearing the keys on a retractable cord attached to my pants. I guess I need to add this to my Christmas list!

It’s official: we’re really allowed to be here

On Wednesday September 19th at 15h54 Chris, the girls and I received official permission to stay in France until July 2013. The picture above shows me with my shiny OFII final sticker that, when coupled with my also very fancy long-stay visa from my passport, allows me to legally stay in France longer than 3 months.

Our process of seeking legal permission to stay the school year began in January 2012 when we assembled a dossier of many official documents proving our births, citizenship, marriage, incomes, employment to which we’d return, our place of residence in France, permission from the Mairie (the mayor) for our girls to attend school, sworn letters stating we would not seek work in France and health insurance. Next, we had detailed visits and exchanges with the french consulate in Toronto, gave them money, then we waited and waited, submitted more paperwork, waited some more and then got our passports back with fancy visas in them.

BUT, these visas were not the final confirmation of our long stay status. When we arrived in France no one really even looked at our passports BUT within 5 days of arriving we had to submit more paperwork by registered post in order to initiate the process finalizing our permission to stay. That process ended last Wednesday with our being summoned to Marseille for an appointment and a second round of fee payments.

The one step in this lengthy process that caused me the most stress was the requirement, in Marseille, that we see a doctor. At home I’m lucky. I have a great family doc whom I found within weeks of arriving in Toronto in 1996 (thanks MB!). She’s about my age and also has two daughters. I’m ok to see her but some strange médecin here? Let the hand-wringing begin. Google was no friend here as searches turned up all kinds of things I didn’t want to read about.

In the end, all of my worrying was for naught. The experience was very civilized. So, for the record, and other unnecessarily anxious long stay visa (OFII) applicants, here are the details of our final visit.

1. Purchase of les timbres – in a country where we never know if our payments will work until they work, this online fee payment system is brilliantly simple and effective. It took 2 minutes, it worked the first time and everything was honky-dory. Apparently you can also purchase the stamps at a tabac or post-office and what you get is a really small stamp. Too much money for something so small!

2. The visit – our visit had three parts: a chest xray (screening for TB I’m told), a visit with a nurse (we were weighed, our height measured, our BMI calculated, and our vaccination records checked), and then a visit to the doctor (who took our blood pressure, listened to our hearts and asked a few questions). On other sites people wrote about creepy experiences during the xray because there were no paper gowns. Marseille had gowns but I had my xray done in street clothes. There’s no blood taken, there’s nothing in cups, it was all very simple, professional and pleasant. All of the medical staff were patient when at first I didn’t understand their questions and all of them asked genuinely how we were doing and how our kids were adjusting.

3. The grande finalé – With all of our paperwork in hand and visits complete we were called up to the final desk. Everything was reviewed and we got new fancy stickers and proper permission to stay the year. Fait!

The entire visit took less than 1h30. When it was over I felt like cracking open the champagne!

This experience of seeking formal permission to live somewhere outside Canada has really opened my eyes to what it might be like to immigrate somewhere else. We’re pseudo-immigrants as professors on sabbatical. We’re here for a short time with a return ticket but we still had to jump through lots of hoops. I’ve read and I’m told the process to come to Canada is lengthy, challenging and frustrating, even for a situation like ours.

Being ‘from away‘ hits home in surprising ways. When we were filling out the back-to-school paperwork here (MANY forms, just like at home) I came to the part where we had to fill in our emergency contact information. At home it’s easy, we list grandparents and our friends who actually carry and answer their mobiles. But what do you do when you’ve picked up and moved somewhere new and don’t know anyone? Who do you list? We’re lucky. We have good friends in Aix (about 20 minutes away) but the request made me think about what we would have done if we’d gone somewhere where we knew no one?

I’m delighted this process is now complete. For the kids we have one more step. We need a letter of circulation for them. They were exempted from the adventures in Marseille but we need to visit another government office that oversees minors to get a letter that allows them to return to France during the duration of our stay. We don’t have to pay the OFII fees for them but they are bummed – we got to keep our chest xrays!