Pizza and the Perfect Tour

Spend enough time in a country and you find out things that make that country unique. But even a casual tourist can spot some things right away. For instance in Italy, literally everything you want to take a picture of, has scaffolding on it. In some cases I think the scaffolding could be old enough to warrant being called an historic structure by itself. In France, everything is futuristic and cool and broken. When I try to buy a rail ticket to visit downtown Paris, I confidently walk up to the spiffy electronic ticket machine. There is a sign taped on it that says it is broken and only accepts the TravelGo debit card. Visa/bankcards aren't accepted. Looking around I see all the ticket machines have the same sign taped to them. I fiddle with it for a while, but eventually break down and join a long line of people waiting to talk to a human ticket vender. Apparently nobody has a TravelGo debit card (good only for french rail tickets) as I watch a steady stream of people attempt to use the machines and eventually give up and join the queue to talk to a person. Along the same lines there are debit cards designed to solve very specific needs. There are debit cards for phones, the metro, the trains, and even a bike debit card designed to operate the downtown rental bicycles.

On Thursday, Monica and I set out to visit "the prefecture" to get our long term visas approved. We've been calling it the "perfect tour." There is a note in our passports that says we have eight days in which to go there and knowing we'll probably get bitten by delays and the weekend we figure it better get done today. Our receptionist says the prefecture is easy to find - it even has its own Tram stop. We head over to the train station to get a packet of Metro tickets. The automatic metro ticket machines are down and there is a large line forming for the closed office which should re-open at 2:00. This looks like a good time to stop for a late lunch. Monica orders a pizza and when it comes it is gigantic. She can only eat about 1/4 of it, so she asks for a To-go box. They don't really do that sort of thing in France. Maybe it's some macho thing or tiny refrigerators, but you eat everything given to you and if you can't do it you shouldn't have ordered that. Fortunately we're in the train station, so says "we'll eat it on the train." Then Monica, I, and the pizza head over to buy tickets. We get some amused looks standing in line to get the tickets. Then more looks when we're standing at the tram stop. Ok, maybe we look a little weird, like we're delivering a pizza, but we're not THAT strange. The stop gets more crowded and we're the only ones carrying anything large and it's not like I can tuck the pizza under my arm. Boarding the tram it gets VERY crowded and warm. You can smell the pizza throughout the car and where I am wedged in, the pizza box is taking the place of another person. But I think I would look even weirder holding it over my head to make room for another person. We get to our stop and there is a big old fancy building - the prefecture. It's now about 3:00 and we have to circle the building to find the entrance. Around the back we find it, guarded by a few police who kindly inform us we are at the wrong prefecture for visas. We need to go to a non-descript building by the water and they close at about 3:30. It's now 3:15. One of the gendarme gives us directions, but his "lefts" and "rights" don't match up with his gestures. I ask if he can draw a map. He whips out a pen and I hand him the pizza box. Map in hand we jog along, eyes glued to our pizza box. His directions are wrong and we head into the nearest building to try for new ones when we see that we have, in fact, entered the prefecture. It looks like a rundown DMV, but without so much happiness. The other building must be for show, this must be where the actual work gets done. A little later they lock the doors to newcomers. We go through various lines and talk to the personnel who seem amused that we have brought a pizza with us to our interview. The result of our visit is that we've advanced our visa to the next stage of (I kid you not) its SEVEN life stages. We're now in what I call the "crawling" stage where we can go back and forth to the US as much as we'd like for short periods, but in March our visa will enter the "pupa" stage where we must hunker down in France, but fortunately that will only last 7 days before another stage begins, etc. Actually, it's amusing how complicated things can get. Well, we've finished our visit to the perfect tour and we can walk around downtown carrying our pizza to the bus stop and on the bus home. Oh, and the pizza? Although we had grown attached to it and its incorrect map, we still ate it.