My appointment was at 8:30, but I knew I was going to be in for the long haul when I got there around 8:05 and the line was half-way down the block. Sure enough they didn't open the doors until about 8:35, so I was stuck in the cold for a good half an hour. But I'm glad I got there when I did, since there were loads of people who arrived after me. By the time they let us in, the line was down the block and then some.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the residency card procedures is that now that most of Europe is covered by the Schengen accords, there are very few white people who actually have to go through this procedure. Sounds terrible to say it like that, but it's true. In fact, the only other white people who were there were gaggles of stupid American undergrads who didn't speak French and didn't even try. They were visible a mile away with their enormous Longchamps bags and vapid conversations about the bar scene. I pretended not to understand and ostentatiously read my French book. Too bad it was an atrociously bad book that I'm embarrassed to be seen in public with (Houellebecq, Les Particules Elementaires, I thought it would be a good idea to read it since it's so controversial, but I ended up deciding over the course of the morning that it sucked too much, so I threw in the towel and moved on to a much better one I had brought as a spare).
Anyway, we finally get in around 8:40ish, and the students are separated from everyone else. Which I found both a relief since it shortened our wait and also rather disappointing, since it made the rest of the morning significantly less interesting. All the African women in their amazing headdresses went one way, we went the other. And I was stuck listening to the aforementioned stupid Americans discuss how they don't understand why French people don't understand their massacred French.
So they finally called my name, and you go into one room to get height/weight and eyes checked. Then the fun begins. In Colmar when I had to do this last time, they put all the women in a line, told us to take off our shirts, and proceeded to march us through the chest xrays (for TB) assembly line style. Paris is way classier, we actually had three individual dressing rooms that opened up into a master xray room. So they'd go room by room, bringing one person out, telling us to take a deep breath, snapping the xray, then sending us back into our room and calling the next person. So the awkward topless moment wasn't exceptionally awkward, in the end. The problem was they were kind of slow so we had to freeze our asses off in our individual rooms before they called us. There was also a fascinating sign on the wall about French secularism, of which I managed to take a cell phone pic. But I can't seem to get the pic off my phone, haha, so that will have to wait.
Once the xray is done, you wait some more until they call you to see a second dr, who reads the results and checks your heart and bp. All that checked out fine, so then I had to wait again for a stamp, then go hand my form to another office, wait some more, and then get my official titre de sejour. Which is posted backwards because I was too lazy to use my real camera and just used photobooth. Hence the mirror image:
All that took about 2.5 hours in the end, which I thought was pretty amazing. In Colmar we had to deal with three separate visits--one for the medical stuff, one to drop off our forms, and one to pick everything up. That this was all streamlined in one visit was thus already a big deal. I was thrilled that I only had to sit around for 2.5 hours, haha. And now I'm officially legal!
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