Entre Les Murs

Moving Out

All things considered - and in retrospect - moving out went quite smoothly.  The movers arrived bright and early on Monday (earlier than expected, in fact) and started packing; being France they departed precisely seven and a half hours later, but they hardly paused in that time.  The next day they arrived as early, finished packing and loaded everything in the trucks.  For some reason they left behind every toilet brush, but if that's the worst complaint we have once the whole move is finished, I think you'll be able to consider us very happy customers.


We decamped to a friend's apartment, with poor Emma in her bag, a short walk away in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt.  The next day we stuffed her in her bag again and took her to the vet.  The administration requirements for importing a pet to the US are not nearly as onerous as those for France, but we still needed to get a certificate of health.  For some reason there was a valet to park cars and open doors at the vet's office, a change since our last visit and one that is hard to understand based on the sparse traffic in the waiting room.  But I guess that's the sixteenth.  The vet was charming, and helpfully post-dated the certificate so it would be closer to our actual departure, still a week off.


The last major task in the administrative disentanglement of our affairs from France took place the following day, where we walked through the apartment with our landlord's representative to establish the "état de lieu" (literally, the "state of the place" - yet another of those phrases that sound so much more impressive if left untranslated), and return the keys.  This too went very smoothly, since the agent was not very experienced in this task and was really more concerned about figuring out how to fill out the forms correctly and scarcely looked at the apartment itself.  I think she might not have bothered to walk through at all if we hadn't suggested it.

That attitude nicely encapsulates French administration.  In another example, when Janet called to book our flight home (on Lavion, selected for its all business class airplane and willingness to take cats in the cabin) she was asked Emma's weight.  She replied that it was 5 kilos, whereupon the operator discovered that there was a limit of 4 kg.  Oh, I've made a mistake, said Janet, she weighs 4 kilos.  The operator said "D'accord" and carried on happily.

After a couple more days winding things up in Paris, including for me a farewell run in the Bois de Boulogne, we hopped on a train for St. Malo, our last French excursion.  It proved a pleasant enough few days but far from a highlight of our trips in France.  St. Malo is known for its seafaring history and its beaches.  As the place from whence Jacques Cartier set sail, the history is particularly significant to we Canadians; but the seaside attracts so many tourists at this time of year that it was hard to appreciate the charms of the town.  As in so many such places, the streets of the old town are walled by t-shirt shops, ice cream sellers and "art galleries", and strewn with buskers, caricature artists and costume jewelry merchants.  Added to this is the fact that eighty percent of the "old" town was destroyed in the second world war, so that what one sees is actually mostly reconstruction, the place has a decidedly Disneyland flavour.

We rented a car for one day, and drove up the coast a few miles to Mont St. Michel (a UNESCO world heritage site).  Naturally it is even worse in terms of the package tour swarms, and it was often difficult to walk on the tiny medieval streets up to the abbey.  But it is one of those spectacular places that simply has to be visited once.  I visited once before, over ten years ago, but was glad to have dragged my wife, claustrophobic as she is, who had not yet seen it.  One remembers the unique splendor; the tourist crush is shrugged off in memory.

posted 19.7.07