Nous nous adaptons

We have settled in. We have met the femme de ménage (cleaning lady), who is now on a month-long vacation, so we have also met her substitute, Anna, a university student who picks up extra money cleaning for people. I was musing on the fact that this almost never happens in the US -- college students cleaning for money -- then realized that back home, "clean" looks entirely different to a 20-year-old than to a 40+ year old. Somewhere between 18 and 30, there must be some kind of (female) brain transformation that takes place, forcing us to suddenly notice soap scum on the bathroom walls. Here, the French mamans must make sure that happens earlier, because Anna does a very good job.

The weather has turned beautiful, though still very cold most days, and it's hard to confine myself to the apartment, where I have the best of intentions of getting some writing done, including this blog. Instead, I let it languish and run outside to walk along the river or wander through the serpentine medieval streets for hours, just looking around. I never seem to tire of this. (There are museums, but I saw most of them last May when I was here for a brief visit.) A near-daily adventure is grocery shopping in the street market, where they are starting to get to know me. I enjoy admitting my ignorance about most of what they sell and ask for their guidance, which makes them puff up with pride and become quite talkative. When I told my vegetable lady I was planning to make a chicken soup, I got practically the whole recipe from her, including some free celery (they are often popping presents in among the things you actually purchase), and instructions to be sure to use the radish tops in the soup, not to waste them.

I have discussed the American elections with postal workers and farmers at the market, all of whom have forts opinions. They get so impassioned about it that I start to have a hard time following. You would think we were electing the President of the World, and in some sense maybe we are. I have heard French people say that they feel they ought to have a vote, and in this globalized world who could blame them? In the meantime, Steve and I managed to waste our votes by choosing John Edwards and posting our absentee ballots a week before he bowed out of the race.

While things are undoubtedly more exciting at home with Hilary and Barack battling it out in the streets and on the airwaves, we have been having our own much smaller adventures here...

Adventure #1: getting two cell phones that work over here and trying to figure out all the different plan details in French. Did you know that here it costs nothing to receive calls, only to place them? The very kind young man at SFR, who helped us muddle through all this, looked perplexed when I asked him if making and receiving calls cost the same. Of course not, why should one pay for a call one does not initiate? Bon question.

Adventure #2: getting a French bank account. They do not give them to just anyone who happens to have money, mais non. You need to prove you are employed in France (Steve's colleague at the university had to accompany him to the bank, along with a letter stating he is a professeur invité), and you have to prove that you live here, by showing your lease and utility bill. Then, once you have successfully convinced them that you are indeed a legitimate candidate and you have managed to open an account, they present you with a dossier of about 100 pages in a plastic binder, stating all the rules and regulations of the establishment. Ironically, it was the same week that French banking lost face around the world when the Société Générale lost nearly 5 billion euros through the investment shenanigans of one of its young go-getters. So we were less intimidated than we might otherwise have been...

Adventure #3: seeing a French doctor. As many of you know, Steve has serious allergies and needs shots on a regular basis to keep his Menière's Syndrome in check (a nasty condition that gradually destroys your hearing and causes debilitating vertigo). His US doctor had kindly packed a tiny vial of Steve's special anti-allergen formula, which we had to keep on ice till we got here. Then began the search for a French doctor who would be willing to administer the shots. (Steve can't give them to himself, because there is always the risk of an adverse reaction, in which case someone has to give him the antivenom, so to speak.)

Our Toulousian friends Geneviève and Jean-Michel helped us make an appointment with their family doctor, a generalist. When we presented ourselves at the address, the doctor himself answered the door! He asked us to have a seat in the waiting room because he was, at that moment, still busy with another patient. Steve and I, speechless, took our seats in the tiny, empty waiting room, which was one-half of a 2-room suite on the ground floor of an ordinary apartment building, not a clinic or hospital. There was no receptionist or secretary (Geneviève had warned me the doctor answers his own phones, which she said can be annoying during your visit). An emphatic feminine voice rattled on and on behind the closed door of the consultation room; it sounded as if monsieur le docteur already had his hands full. After about 15 minutes another patient appeared in the waiting room, sniffling and coughing and regarding us with disguised curiosity.

The doctor was perhaps in his forties, extremely gracious, spoke only French, and listened courteously to why we had come. Then he stated with complete certainty that Steve did not have Menière's Syndrome. I just gaped at him. I thought by now I'd gotten used to the way the French always know everything immediately, but this took even me by surprise. Oh, no, he said: if the allergy shots stop the vertigo, then it is not Menière's but some other problem. I just shrugged and looked baffled (never argue, it gets you nowhere) and mentioned that by the way, Steve was also going deaf. That brought him up short. He took the chart and looked it over while we struggled to translate some of the medicalese and explain why he needed extra shots now, because several had been missed due to a power outage in the US and consequent spoiling of the serum. (Needless to say, this was putting some strain on our language abilities.)

The longer we talked, the clearer it became that the doctor actually wanted to help us, though legally he was on shaky ground, treating a condition he wasn't convinced of and administering a medicine not even available in France. He said that though he had never heard of treating Menière's with allergy shots, the real problem was that since he was not a specialist, he did not have on hand the meds needed if Steve happened to have a bad reaction to a shot (this has never happened). So he got on the phone right away and called an allergy clinic for us. When they could not give us an appointment within the necessary timeframe, he called a professor at the university hospital, a high-ranking specialist, and left a message with him. Then he told us to call him back on Thursday to find out the time of the appointment he would set up for us. Fumbling with gratitude and culture shock, we thanked the man profusely and tried to pay him. He'd spent at least 30 minutes with us, but he refused all payment. Mais je n'ai rien fait, he said ("But I have done nothing!")

Too bad we didn't have Michael Moore filming us!