More interactions with the French

Summer is winding down here in France, but the sky is always blue

I bought a small pepper grinder to carry in my backpack when we were traveling last year. None of the Airbnbs we stayed in around the world ever had salt and pepper let alone a decent chef’s knife, which I also procured and carried in a protective sheath in one of my backpack’s interior zipper pockets. The grinder fit in my palm and it was fire engine red, practically daring me to use it, but it was a piece of junk. Every time I turned the mill, the top would unscrew itself on the metal post and the coarseness of the pepper coming out would increase until it was like gravel. I’ve been in Nice for six months now and I’ve finally had enough it, so I went to buy a good one today. I like this kitchen shop on Rue de la Liberté called TOC (Trouble Obsessionnel Culinaire, which translates to Culinary Obsessive Disorder. I know I’ve mentioned this in a post a long time ago, but I just love this name—it resonates—so I am mentioning it again.)  They have everything and there is a young woman who works there who is always so nice to me. I practice my French with her, but she speaks perfect English just like all the young people in France do. When I took the grinder I’d picked out up to her counter to purchase it, I said to her, “J'ai besoin d'un nouveau moulin à poivre.” (I need a new pepper mill.) She smiled at me, and I thought she was proud of my progress.  But no, she told me that I had brought her a special mill for grinding salt. I told her in English that I was glad I said something. On a shelf near the register, I spotted some real vanilla extract. I have been looking for some for quite a while because the grocery stores only carry the fake stuff. I said, “Moi aussi j'ai besoin le vanille,” as I placed it next to the pepper mill I had now, and she said la vanille. Apparently, vanilla is feminine, which somehow makes sense. Unlike the word moustache, which believe it or not, is also feminine. She told me not to worry, most of the French don’t know which words are masculine or feminine, either.

These small interactions and the smiles and laughter that accompany them are what make us feel like we are somewhat assimilating, and they become a great source of pride when we navigate them with success. The man who owns the little hardware store around the corner from our apartment is recognizing us now. We were in there this afternoon in need of drain cleaner. My wife loses more hair in the shower in a week than I have had on my head in my entire life. Anyhow, he asked us in broken English where we come from and we told him Seattle, and he asked us if we moved to Nice because of Trump. He said there are a lot of Americans in Nice now, and he has a lot of them as customers and apparently, they tell him they have moved here because of Trump. I told him no, we’ve been planning to retire to France for quite a few years, and we were able to retire early, so we did it earlier this year. It’s only a coincidence that we are here. Earlier this week I was having a coffee on the terrace at a brasserie while people watching and I overheard a table with three younger people. The man was speaking to two women and he was saying something or other about how he couldn’t believe Trump was still alive. I was surprised. Honestly, we rarely hear anything about US politics here. We are often asked by Americans back home what the French think about everything that’s happening in the States, but the truth is, they don’t pay that much attention. They have their own lives and French politics to contend with, which is full of its own drama and intrigue. Anyhow, it was rare that this store owner actually brought it up.

I was also buying some other things, in particular these fake foliage railing covers for my balcony that expand open accordion-style and allow me to cover the view of some ugly things I have on my balcony that I use to support potted plants. The man told me that the drain cleaner was now free as well as these plastic zip ties that I would need to attach the covers to my railings, and then he said, “I welcome you to Nice!” He said, “You will love it; it’s a great city.”

The figs are ripe this time of year so I made an almond fig tart

The big accomplishment for the week was our success in opening a French bank account. Let me tell you, this is no small feat. I’ve been avoiding it out of a great deal of fear. I’ve read so many blogs and seen enough YouTubers talking about how hard it is to find a French bank that will open an account for you. A typical story is someone walking around to various branches and being repeatedly turned down when they tell the banker that they are American. It’s not that banks are all Anti-American, it’s that they are paperwork averse. As one of only two countries in the world, the other being Eritrea, the United States requires every citizen to file an annual tax return no matter where they live in the world. The US government also has put in place certain measures with international banks that are an effort to stop fraud and money laundering in and out of the US. All well and good, but it places a very heavy bureaucratic burden on any bank that is willing to let Americans open new accounts, so most of them just say, “Non!”

We’ve been getting by thus far by using Wise, which for those that don’t know, is an online money transferring service that allows us to move money between our US bank accounts and anyone we need to pay using an EU IBAN number, kind of like a SWIFT code in the States. We use it to pay our rent, our utilities, once for a long-term car rental, etc. The trouble with this is that I am finally ready to go onto the French health care system and I am applying for my carte vitale (health card), but in order to do so, I need a French bank account number so I can receive my reimbursements directly. The French health care system reimburses you up to 70 percent and then we maintain what is called a mutuel policy, a form of private insurance that is incredibly affordable, to cover the last 30 percent. The Wise account won’t work for that because Wise is headquartered in Belgium and the account needs to be French. It also looks a lot better when we file our paperwork at the end of the year to extend our long stay visa. It demonstrates commitment. That’s more than you probably wanted to know, but the account becomes this thing that hangs over you until you finally face the music and go make it happen.

Some Reddit feeds and Facebook groups suggest that BNP Paribas is a bank that expats have had luck with. They are a huge French bank with locations throughout the country. So, I put on some pants (as opposed to shorts) and a nice shirt, rounded up all of the documents I read I would need, including many that I just paid to have officially translated into French, and headed over to the big branch on Avenue Jean Medecin, which is the largest commercial street in Nice proper. There is a concierge desk in the lobby and a line of people waiting to make it past this gate keeper. When we finally made it to her, I said in my best French that I wanted to open a new account. She asked me if I paid taxes in France and I told her I’d only been here six months so far, so not yet. She directed me up a flight of marble stairs to the international desk. Hmmm. Okay, great. Progress!

There is another woman at a desk in the lobby there helping an older gentleman. When she finished helping him, she waves us over and, again in my best French, I tell her that we were Americans, we live in Nice full time now, and that we need to open a new account. She said in English, and I will never forget this, “First of all, thank you for speaking French. I really appreciate your effort.” But that I needed to go back to the desk downstairs and open the account there. I explained that the person there had just directed me to her, and she said that she understood this, but the person at the desk did not understand that we lived in Nice full time, or more than six months a year, making us tax residents. The International desk was for foreigners who had opened international accounts, probably in the UK, so the right place to open the account was with a counselor in the office down there. She was very friendly about this.

So, we rejoined the line we were in before and waited to repeat the effort. When we got to the desk again, the woman who had directed us upstairs was perplexed, not angry per se, just confused. Once I explained, she began tapping on her computer keys telling me that we would need an appointment. I was expecting this because this was part of everyone’s story that I had previously read or watched. I said to her, “Pas de probleme.” Her face began to contort until finally she said that the next available appointment was not until…[a long delay]…more keys being tapped… and I am thinking, what? Like, February? After an uncomfortable silence she said, “deux minutes”… and so we waited on pins and needles until finally she looks up at me and she says, “How about right now?” We do our best at conveying our lifelong thanks, our disbelief that she was able to somehow help us, and we tell her that now would be “Parfait!”

Having made it past her desk, we were asked to sit at a small couch and wait. After a few minutes, a stunningly beautiful woman fetches us and asks us to follow her to her office. This is a Assala, probably 30, and as I said, disarmingly pretty. Assala is so kind to us and makes us comfortable as we sit in front of her. She speaks fairly good English and so we bump along back and forth in French and English making small talk. When we finally get down to business, we explain, again, that we are American, and we need an account for the carte vitale. Her face drops. Uh oh. I can see her eyes are filled with angst. She asks to see our passports and our visas. She asks us where we live. Finally, she agrees to help us, but she explains the paperwork will take a couple of hours and that we need to come back in two days. She prints off three copies of a stack of paperwork that we are to fill out and return with along with a list of documents we will need, which as I said, I was already prepared with.

We walk home and when I look at the paperwork, it is literally name, address, date and sign. There is a US W-9 document that each of us needs to fill out. Again, name, address, SS#, date and sign. The rest of the stack is just instructions. We are done in five minutes.

We return this morning and Assala comes out of the back and greets us warmly and walks us back to her office again. She starts asking us questions for the screens she is filling out. Name, address, email, phone, what we used to do before we retired, proof of funds, our marriage certificate, our lease, our utility bills, it goes on for quite some time. She is clicking away like a mad woman, and I can see she is growing frustrated, as she seems to be receiving error messages forcing her to reenter lots of information. She is scanning many of our documents and signing things. And you know I was just waiting for the rubber stamps to come out, but they never did. When she finishes about 40 minutes later, she smiles at us and says, “Well, that was part one.” Holy cow.

But Assala is professional and maintains her composure. She asks us why we moved to Nice, as almost all French people do when they meet us, because she is really interested, nothing to do with our account. We tell her we love it here and that the Niçoise lifestyle is everything we hoped it would be—slow, sunny, healthy, and easy to travel from. Church bells ringing and gentle breezes. Old world. She likes the answer. She never asks about politics, which we appreciate.  She sees a visa in my passport from a work trip to India in 2019 and asks me how I liked it. I tell her it was an amazing experience, and I would love to go back, that it was life changing. All this is happening as she continues to click away on drop-down menus, and she scans, and she signs. When she finishes, finally, we miraculously have bank accounts. BUT, I wasn’t going to be walking out with the document I needed for the carte vitale today. All the paperwork still needs to be reviewed and verified (No doubt, somebody with a stamp) and then once approved, she will receive the much-needed document and then email it to me in a couple of days. Our ATM cards will come in the mail. Happily, she said our documents were in good order and she didn’t think she would need to come back to us for anything else.

I ask Assala if there are a lot of foreigners moving to Nice now. She said, “So many.” I say if you open three accounts per day your entire day would be taken up doing this. She says there were three other families waiting in the lobby for her to open new accounts right now, but for people from other countries besides the US, the process only takes 15 minutes. This explains why no banks want to open accounts for us Americans. Again, we profusely thank her for her monumental effort, her friendliness, and for her help. And this time, we truly mean it.

Success! My happy wife in front of Maison Margaux