French bureaucracy at it's finest

At 6:30 this morning we woke the girls up for an exciting adventure to Bureaucratland to get our green card equivalent. We arrived in middle-of-nowhere Nice before 8:00 to stand in a line, so that we could stand in another line, so that we could stand in another line to get a number. It took us 1.5 hours to get the number. Had we arrived 10 minutes later this morning we would have been told that they ran out of numbers and to come back another day...goodbye.

It took 2 hours to get to number 137. The girls were champions. It was not small miracle that we got a nice lady. Our stamped, self-addressed envelop was too big, we needed a copy of our visas but only brought copies of our passports, and I was supposed to have my own number...all good reasons for any French government worker to tell us to come back another day. We handed over a stack of paperwork, the same one we handed to the French embassy in San Francisco before we came, only we had it translated into French...a requirement. It took 45 minutes at the window getting all sorts of papers stamped and stapled and put through a machine and stamped some more and stapled again. It made a DMV visit seem like a summer's breeze.

Yesterday we had "tea" with a British couple who live here (who we met through the owners of the villa we rent) and they said that 51% of the population work for the French government. This labyrinth of buildings with horrendous architecture and dirty-as-anything windows (adding to the gloom) full of cubicles and paper was so depressing! It made me more grateful than ever for my life. With this kind of mind-zapping doldrums it isn't likely that there will be another French revolution any time soon! Maybe that's the point. This British couple has a 12-year-old daughter who has been in the French school system. From their experience French children do not have a voice, nor freedom to express ideas. The teacher is always right. (Can you think of any French entrepreneurs?) The children are trained from a young age that they don't have a right to speak up. One day this couple's daughter came out of school showing her mom a piece of art she had made during an art class. The mom oohed and aahhed then looked around and noticed that every single child's art was exactly the same. Not much different in the cubicles. The French government says things must be just so and there isn't any way around it. Good news...we passed. We are officially legal residents in France.

We went to old town Nice and ate lunch at a fun restaurant called La Zucca Magica (The Magic Pumpkin). It was a small but very crowded little place right on the harbor. It was decked out in pumpkins and gourds. The plates and napkins were green and orange. Very Halloweenesque.

It was one of those places were you don't order, you just get what is cooking in the kitchen. It was a unique and very delicious 4-course lunch followed by a yummy desert. By the time we finished I felt like Geoff might have to roll me out. This big, hairy guy is the chef. He wandered around the restaurant, peeking at people's opinions of his food.

On the way back to the car we stopped in a flea market where we saw old army jackets and boots, baby christening gowns and a whole lot of other random stuff. We walked through a small candy factory and saw a few guys making candied clementines, and sampled candied flowers. Lastly, we walked slowly by a row of enormous yachts where young staff were scrubbing railings, unloading food/supplies, and hosing off decks. Unbelievable!