The Bank

Having a bank account is important for a million obvious reasons. In France, it’s even more important because you need one in order to do crucial things like get the internet or apply for discounted rent. However, because it is a necessity, the French make it hard to get.

Personally, I’ve been trying since June. Within days of arrival I marched into a local bank in St. Tropez with a check in my hand and opened an account—mostly because I wanted the cash. The banker told me that the carte bleu—the most treasured component of a French bank account—would arrive in the mail.

That’s when I realized there was no key to the mailbox, so I couldn’t receive mail anyways. From this spurred an incredible series of adventures at the post office, which eventually led to the facteur (a very powerful man of some sort… mostly because I still haven’t figured out exactly what his role is) unlocking the box and leaving it open. Still, no card came.

I returned to the bank, and my banker told me that in fact I couldn’t yet receive my carte bleu; the bank needed a copy of my carte de sejour—a highly coveted document that proves foreigners like me are actually legally residing in France. For the carte de sejour, I had to give an incredible pile of documents and my first born child to the local Préfecture, a bureaucratic branch whose soul job is to make lives miserable.

First thing in the morning I went to the local Préfecture in Toulon. A half hour after the office opened, the line was already 512 minutes long. I found the information booth instead.

There, I learned that because I'd be living and studying in Paris and NOT the Var, I needed to go to the Préfecture in Paris to get the carte de sejour to get the carte bleu to get the internet and whatever else I needed to live. For crying out loud.

We already know how swimmingly the trip to the Paris Préfecture went.

So today the banks that are partnered with the school arrived on campus to guide ignorant Americans like myself. I explained my situation to my elusive bank’s representative, and he told me to go to a special branch down the road.

I did. And I explained the situation. Again.

“Oh, well, you must go to St. Tropez to tell them to mail the carte bleu here. It’s at that branch. It's the only way.”

Figures.