Lovely Awkward: A Year of Wine, Romance and Life Among the French

Lovely Awkward: A Year of Wine, Romance and Life Among the French

Wednesday 11 May 2011

The Frenchness Exam!

I went in for my French interview this week and left with an X-ray of my lungs -- a frameable item, I suppose, that proves I can now breathe freely in France.

Really, the X-ray is proof that I don't have tuberculosis, but when it comes to immigration, that's one step close to acceptance. It's all part of the same process.

So here's what happened:

My "class" included people from different cultures, who spoke different levels of French, and had been in France for a varied number of years. And together, but without talking to each other, we sat and listened to a few presentations about what to do with our driver's licences, what to do if we had babies, how to find jobs, and who to talk to if we needed help understanding this country.

Then we got our chests scanned, individually.

And then, we were told about which "formations" we were going to have to take. There was a course for people who needed to learn more French (which included the test -- and I was exempted!!), one about civic duty, one about life in France, and one about looking for work in France.

What interested me the most, however, was simply the group of people that had been called into this office with me. We'd all come from different places, but in some way we'd all done the same thing: We'd all made the leap to France. And more than that, we'd all moved past our tourist visas, our wide-eyed traveller days, and we'd all been brave enough to embrace the less romantic part of moving to another country --the paperwork.

The result of all of this listening, reading, signing, and stamping? I'm in!

1 comment:

  1. Congrats on being exempt from the language test! The perks of being Canadian :-)

    I had to take a full medical exam when I applied for permanent residence, and yes, it included X-rays for TB. I didn't get to frame it though ;-)

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