Bureaucratic France

Today I visited the sub-prefecture of Antony. I did this in hope of securing my Carte de Sejour. I was foolish to think that there was any possibility that I would walk out of there with my ID card before lunch.

I will start by saying that the whole journey of attaining the proper legal papers for my stay in France began with the quest for my student visa. This required a number of documents that I made sure I had by simply always counting that I had six of them. They ranged from proof of finances to proof of studies and a plane ticket. Though it turned out that they also wanted my transcripts from EMU I managed to attain the visa.

The long stay student visa allows you to enter the country and then apply for a residence card. Along with the visa I was in need of five other documents along with photocopies and id photos (3). Upon securing I had gone to the prefecture in Paris but they informed me that since I lived in one of the suburbs I needed to go to a sub-prefecture in a neighboring suburb. I went to the sub-prefecture at 11:00 am one morning about a month after my arrival. Here I found out that unfortunately as I had come in so late in the morning there were so many people in front of me that I should come back on another day. They informed me that I needed to be there by 9:00 am to take a number as all the numbers they served in a day were normally given out by that time.

So this morning I got up at 5:45 and arrived at the sub-prefecture a half hour later to be the 21st person to get in line. The office opened at 8:30 as the number of people in line reached 150. Unfortunately of the two people who could handle my specific case neither were there as one was sick and the other was stuck in the metro. Finally at 10am my I got to meet with the man who had been temporarily stuck in the metro and after five minutes I had managed to secure an appointment for the 9th of January.

On the 9th of January I will now go with all of the documents that I have accumulated in hopes that they will be enough for me to finally after 5 months receive my residence card which will have 7 months left of its year long validity.