Paris Day One

Three days of freedom from classes and I'm so excited I can hardly stand it. I got to the train station way early because I was just ready. I ran into another exchange teacher, Annmarie, at the hotel, and we roamed the neighborhood and had lunch together. Then we headed down to our rendezvous point to get ready for our official immigration medical visit.

I'd forgotten what a delight these were. The good parts: reuniting with all the other exchange teachers. I feel about these folks the way veterans feel about their platoon mates: we've Been Through Stuff that no one else will ever understand. We were all positively giddy to see each other.

The doctors took us in pairs-- I was with Joanna, and let me tell you, these docs have the system down. They shuffled Joanna and me around the room like magic; we never once ran into each other, and somehow we both managed to be weighed, measured and given an eye exam within about two minutes. The doctors were cracking jokes-- at one point, Joanna made a big production over the doctor asking her if she were pregnant, which he thought was just hilarious. Seriously, he almost fell down laughing, then he opened various doors to tell everyone what she'd just said.

After the doctors were finished with us, they hustled us into a hallway with three doors, told us to each pick a room, strip down to the waist, and wait for someone to come get us. Ah yes, the chest x-ray. I'd forgotten about this little delight. What's that you say? Drapes or paper shirts to protect one's modesty? Surely you jest. What are you, some sort of prudish American who's so ashamed of your own body you're not comfortable parading around naked in front of a bunch of lab techs? Some people have the craziest hangups.

I tried to brazen my way through it, but it's just a godawful experience. Someone comes to get you and walk you in to the xray room. This is the standup variety, so a helpful lab tech will walk up behind you and smash your boobs against a cold metal wall. At this point, the lab tech decided to pull my hair into a clip of some sort, and that kicked my discomfort level through the roof. After all, scientists have identified hand-to-head as pretty frigging high up on the human intimacy scale, and I felt like Nurse Ratched was rushing me a bit.

After we got our handy souvenir chest xrays, we were called individually to another doctor for a medical history. This is where I lie a lot, because it's so much easier to just answer "no" than to deal with follow-up questions. However, I was so proud to actually know the French word for "arthroscopy" that I eagerly volunteered that bit of information. He then asked what the doctors found and I had to feel stupid once again. It wasn't even a vocabulary deficiency; I remember I asked my knee doctor three times what they did to me, and he told me, but it all went over my head.

Finally we worked our way back out to the main office, where we were given our official visas:

Here we are in the Place des Vosges admiring our lungs:

That night we had a cocktail party with the Agency in charge of our exchange, and we shared the time (and wine, and food) with a group of college students who are spending a semester in France. They're newly arrived and a little petrified, and it was so nice to talk to them about living in France. Honestly, my confidence has been absolutely decimated since school started, so I was thrilled to be able to feel knowledgeable and capable again.

We also got to meet several high-level bureaucrats, including the director of the Commission, a Frenchman with a longish aristocratic name* who was quite friendly and knew me immediately because he'd spent so much time looking at our files. Which have photographs. And my hair makes me easy to identify. Go figure. I also met a very nice lady from the Embassy who travels the world with her daughter and lived four years in New Orleans, so that was fun to talk about.

Maureen (my favorite third world denizen) and I had dinner and a glass of wine, then we went back to the hotel to prepare for our first day of meetings.

*This is foreshadowing. This man will appear in tomorrow's post.