Carte de Sejour

I'm finally a legal resident of France! Today I finally received my titre de séjour, the visa-like document that acts as a national identification card and which allows me to stay in France, unemployed, for up to a year. It's a dinky little thing, looks a lot like a driver's license, and doesn't in any way seem appropriate to the enormous amount of effort I had to go through to obtain it (as is apparently the case for most official titles in France).

Today is December 15th. I started applying for my carte de séjour in early September. That's four months of démarches before I can finally, say, open a French Bank Account. I can't imagine what it must be like for people trying to move to France for good - for people who need the carte de séjour before they can be given a job or health care and other such niceties.

Not to mention how frustrating and time-consuming the process was... lots of waiting in lines, only to discover that it's too late in the day and I must come back tomorrow, or that no, this isn't the office you need to speak to, or that sorry, your documents aren't ready yet, try back in a few weeks. And for the privilege of experiencing that painful inefficiency, they charge you a couple hundred dollars.

In America, we don't think of the French as tedious bureaucrats. Our image of them is more Laissez-faire and such... but REALLY. It's sort of like the Anglo-Saxon love of order and rules was co-oped by well-intentioned Latin types who care enough to insist on process, but have a general disregard for time or for carrying through what they started, because - Hey, Ciao. But I'll stop bashing the French - they did, after all, just agree to let me hang around for another 12 months.