Foreign Perspectives

Archive for March, 2007

This section very briefly covers the variety of circumstances that may apply and how you might go about moving to France if they apply to you. There are just too many combinations and special circumstances to adequately cover all of the possibilities so hopefully this will give you a feel for how you might ease your transition to France.

If you are a visa national (ie a citizen of a country requiring a visa to enter France), then your first hurdle is the French embassy in your country of residence. There are many visa categories but the simplest lie in the areas of family reunification or if you already have a job offer in France.

I imagine that for most people the “job offer” option is most likely to apply. Obviously if you already have a job lined up there’s no problem but if you’d like to organise one, see our section on employment coming soon.

Finally, don’t forget that if you have parents or grandparents who are Irish or were born in Ireland pre-1922 or in the Republic of Ireland after that then you are Irish and can simply apply for an Irish passport and thereby come under the very simplest case which we covered at the start of this segment.

The French author of the, largely, anti-American blog SuperFrenchie called us anti-France in a recent post.

As usual, he takes an aggressive tone but let’s look at what we’ve said here in the past.

We criticised the local education system for choosing not to educate children who don’t speak fluent French at age16 and not providing any means for those children to learn French. Are we right to be critical? Yes. Are we just wanting France to be like the UK? No, because most European countries provide these facilities for immigrants ie we think France should be more European.

We said that the French need to start using toilets. They are the only country I know where you can’t drive for a day without seeing someone peeing beside the road. It gives France a bad image and that’s why we’re critical of this practice.

We’ve been critical of French labour laws because they limit employment for the French. These days service type companies can work nearly anywhere and thoses jobs will just flow away from France if the employment laws don’t change which can’t be good for France.

We’re critical too of the really bad customer service in France. It’s not that we want France to be more like the UK but more like everywhere else in the world. The French do themselves a great dis-service by not demanding more.

I don’t think we’ve said yet but we’re also critical of the practice of French politicians always backing down in the face of any protests. As we said recently this gets the people what they want, which is often not what they need.

Of course, SuperFrenchie goes on to take quotes out of context as when he says that we’ve said things when we’re just quoting one of the election candidates.

So, yes, we are critical of France in a number of areas but we praise it too. I think it’s sad that we’re not writing this on a souped up version of Minitel and that, in general, France didn’t look outside the country to sell that and other French developed technology. For that matter, it’s a shame that we aren’t all using the Dvorak keyboard layout.

As we said recently, being critical of the government does’t make you anti the country because if it did then all politicians would be classed as being against their country. After all, their job is to change things.

Ordinarily the ill-will between America and France simply passes us by but with venturing out into blog-land a more than usual of late I’m that little bit more conscious of it from seeing the likes of the ever present anti-American sentiments of SuperFrenchie (ironically living in America).

That makes it more unusual to read of the thoughts of Nicolas Sarkozy who is very much pro-America and, in many ways, against seemingly core beliefs of his native France.

He is openly critical of the anti-work ethic of the French and the related anti-capitalism too. For him, the holding back of the entrepreneurs through excessive regulation and taxes has merely served to enpoverish everyone.

On the whole he would seem to be the ideal selection for France but his ideas run so much contrary to the cozy status-quo that I just can’t see him getting elected when there’s the opportunity to elect Royal and get even deeper into that spiralling cycle of increased regulation, benefits and taxes.

Perhaps next time around it will be his turn but by then the social costs of the turnaround from Royal’s policies will be enormous.

Belfast has always had a slightly rural feel about it. The countryside isn’t far from anywhere in the town and you can almost always see the green fields that surround the city. In other ways too it has never been terribly cosmopolitan with nightlife being relatively quiet for many years.

All that is changing though. For a number of years the nightlife has been getting considerably more lively and the city centre remains busy in the evenings these days with the increasing number of nightclubs and the like opening around the city not to mention the massive increase in city centre apartments that have been constructed over the last ten years or so.

A striking example that I found in my recent trip was the appearance of Anna Lo’s face on an election poster. You’d never have seen her before not because there was discrimination against non-whites here but rather because there weren’t any non-whites. Yet another welcome indication of the settling in of peace.

We seemed to go directly from Autumn to Spring this year in the Pyrenees and the fruit trees have already started to flower as you can see.

Something of a disasterous year for the ski-ing, at least for us, as we’d have needed to go much farther than usual to find snow. Having said that, we’re incredibly lazy with the ski resorts and don’t look for anything much further than 90 minutes or so drive. If we were a bit more keen, we could have ventured further afield and went to one of the higher altitude resorts though going by the snow on Canigou, they had a much shorter than normal season too At the current rate of going, I don’t think we’ll ever finish off the heating oil that we bought two years ago! We’ve not had that much in the way of wind (usually the thing that really chills things down locally).Even the river running through the village has never filled up this year and we never had to take the long way round to avoid the flooded bridge. The local habit of building “bridges” that just skim over the top of the water makes for cheaper bridges but normally the result is complete chaos for perhaps 10 days or so during the Winter when you find what “route submersible” means.