Foreign Perspectives

If you cast your mind back to 2004, we had an appointment for the medical visit for the residence card for Wendy just before Christmas. After sitting for around two hours we told them that we couldn’t wait any longer as we’d guests coming. They said they’d make another appointment for us.

We just received a phone call saying that the appointment is for September 29th. Yes, almost three years later!

Still, at least they’re making up for it now as it’s an all day affair rather than the brief visit that it was supposed to be last time.

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Got a phone call early this morning in slightly dodgy French from a Spaniard in Barcelona saying that they’d like a double room for this evening. No problem really, as the French had all left this morning and we’d only a few people in this evening. They even got someone to call back in slightly less dodgy French to confirm that the reservation had been made and that they’d be here around 4pm.

Bit of an awkward time really as they were to be running the bulls through the streets of Millas around then and we’ve been meaning to go to see that for the last two years. Still, it wouldn’t take long to get them checked in and the bulls were sure to be late anyway (well, it is France after all!).

4pm arrived and we saw a whole lot of cars parked across the road from us. Nothing really unusual in that; a lot of people stop there to check the map or whatever. However, a whole lot of people headed over. It wasn’t one double room they wanted: it was NINE!! We gotta get another floor added to this place someday to cope with such things. Couldn’t keep all of them ourselves but we were able to put enough of them up at the auberge round the corner to satisfy everyone.

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The ongoing saga of the residence permit continues…

A little over a week ago we called in to the mairie to see what they’d received from the prefecture. Well, it was a document listing a whole heap of documents that they required me & Wendy to provide before they would give us the residence permit. It was illegal under European law for them to ask for every single one of the documents that they wanted! No surprise there really as they’d previously told us that European law doesn’t apply in France.

Anyway, we pointed that out to the poor girl at the mairie who, once again, called the prefecture for us and pointed out that we had applied for a European residence permit, not an “ordinary” one and that they were breaking the law by asking us to provide them with those documents. We also said that we wanted an appointment with them to sort this out properly; Muriel was to call us back the next day. That was a week ago.

In the meantime, we thought we’d drop the SOLVIT people a line to see what they could do. August isn’t a great time to do anything in France as most places are closed but we received our first reply from them today so, who knows, perhaps we’ll get the permits this month after all.

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