Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

We covered the very simplest case last week ie that of Europeans from established European countries intending to work. This case is almost as simple but does involve some paperwork.

If your spouse is from a country that’s been in Europe for less than four years then transitional arrangements may apply and will almost certainly be applied if there are any as France really loves documentation.

As before if you have “sufficient resources” (generally 1000‚€ a month or more) you are treated as though you were intending to work.

If you are from a country which requires a visa to enter France, then you still need to get it from the country in which you are living. However, they aren’t allowed to charge you for it and they can’t refuse it either. Once you reach France, you should go along to the mayor’s office (mairie) in your commun and apply for a Carte de Séjour Européenne. You’ll need to bring along your passport, that of your European spouse and proof of relationship (eg marriage certificate) plus two passport photos of you (none are required for the European citizen). Within 90 days, you should receive the Carte de Séjour (residence permit). These are the only documents that they are allowed to ask for but in practice they will often ask for considerably more; if this is the case you aren’t required to provide them but will probably need to quote the European law. You can get the same permit for the parents, grandparents, children or grandchildren of either you or your spouse regardless of their nationality. Before you bother to go down this path, bear in mind that if you have parents or grandparents who were Irish or born in Ireland pre-1922 or the Republic of Ireland after that then you are Irish and can therefore apply for an Irish passport which in turn means that you come under the simple case covered last week.

This section is one that doesn’t apply if you are French (unless you have dual/multiple nationalities) as the European law being used only applies if you are moving countries. Actually, in theory you could apply if you had lived in a European country other than France: there are always exceptions in immigration law.

Next week we’ll venture out into the more complex circumstances that can arise.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was writing the first post of this blog to say that we’d gotten the mortgage for our place in France yet that was 199 posts ago, hence this retrospective on life as a blogger since then.

Those of you who have been reading this since the start may remember the days when it was Mas Camps News. At that time, the bulk of the postings were on topics relating to the preparations for our move to France and later on various aspects of settling into life in France. We’re gradually collecting the fruits of our experience of this on our Buying a House in France postings so that others can learn from our mishaps and mistakes.

Eventually we managed to pass the hurdles that the French administration put seemingly at every step of our journey though it wasn’t really as bad as that. In fact, most of the time all we needed was a “roadmap” to guide us as to where to go at each point and hopefully the reference version of our series on moving to France will eventually amount to that for those who come after us.

The end of the hurdles seemed to come all of a sudden and y’all can see when that happened by glancing at the number of posts per month. One day we looked and found that there’d been nothing written for months! It wasn’t that we weren’t busy but that there wasn’t much particularly new or striking to write about after we’d broken through the barrier of French administration, or nothing that would fit within the confines of Mas Camps News at any rate.

But over that time of nothing there was quite a buildup of topics that we should have been writing about and so the blog was reborn in its new home just last Summer. No more is it “Mas Camps News” for we’ve pretty much settled into life here and though it retains aspects of its incarnation as “Living in France without a TV crew” it’s quite a different beastie these days touching on pretty much everything that we come across here and when we’re out and about.

The main thing that has changed though is that it’s living as a proper blog these days rather than a hi-tech newsletter for the folks back home. That’ll probably change things a lot over the next 200 entries as we’re attracting readers from the outside world these days. Indeed just recently we were asked by France24 to contribute our views on the upcoming French election.

We’ve also recently given birth to a second blog where Wendy’s getting started on discussing life from an Australian perspective and we’re even considering a third (’tis an addictive hobby).