I liked the lines. . .
This is the first picture I took in Aix-en-Provence since arriving here, at our new home in France. The weather has been very hot and we have both been rather stressed out. Christine has been overwhelmed by the amount of work there is and I have been doing what I can to help out, as well as wrangling with my own problems, both mental and physical. Physically, my feet have swollen to strange proportions and my head/stomach seem to play alternating tricks on me as I acclimate to the climate/region. Mentally, because I still have to figure out what going on with my dog, my house, my life etc. . .
I suppose I should have had photos of the house ready for a virtual tour, but it’s been difficult just finding time to address the day to day necessities, much less the creative stuff. Take the experience of picking up our trunks in Marseille for instance. Christine and I packed up some things and took them to San Francisco to have them shipped over. We thought that is would be a more cost effective method of sending our winter cloths and heavy items. Not including our personal labor and expense in getting the items to San Francisco, the total cost to ship our stuff to Marseille was $530.00 dollars. That wasn’t all that much stuff, but we figured it still saved money because of the weight, so we said O.K. and shipped it. Once here in Marseille, we learned that is would cost $412.00 to pick up our items, which were now essentially held captive. Let this be a warning to you. If you can make the shipping company give you a “not to exceed” guarantee of the cost to pick up your stuff. Otherwise the crooks at the port have absolutely no problem looking you in the eye and charging whatever they want. I even watched the guy behind the desk sit there and manipulate the numbers until they matched the fax we had received from the office. Which brings me to the experience of getting our stuff. I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures, but it was a trying experience by itself without taking any photos. On the fax we received we were given a street address and instructions that it was a cash/cashiers cheque only business. The first problem came when the TomTom indicated that it could show us the street, but when it came to street numbers we were on our own. Previously I had only experienced this in gated housing communities, but OK you get us to the street and we’ll read the numbers. We did find the number, but it was not on the side of an office building, but at the gate to an office park. After wandering around and looking stupid for a bit, I suggested we climb a flight of stairs that I had seen others going up. Sure enough, written in marker felt on a small piece of scratch paper taped to the door was the sign “Con-freight.” Once inside the dirty hallway, we were greeted by suspecting glances and mumbled half-hearted “Bon jours.” Luckily Christine had a man’s name handy, so we were eventually directed to an office with three people sitting at folding tables in front of some beat looking Dell computers. Being that I understand limited portions of the French language, I am usually struck by how many words are needed to convey and receive simple ideas and answers. What should have been something like” hello, we are here to pay for and pickup our items. Here are the required forms and money. . .” and “. . . could you please let us know where we have to go and what we need to pick up are things.” Somehow turns into 45 minutes of cascading vowels punctuated by many ‘uuuuhs’ and ‘aaaahs’ that almost seem like people are making things up as they go along. “This is how much you need to pay, this is where you need to go and here is a map to assist you.” (would have been sufficient in english) Alright everyone’s got their own bureaucracy to deal with, but we hadn’t even got to customs yet. Once the sing song had ended, we left the office with two pieces of paper that roughly looked like mapquest maps, but here in France Michelin (yes the tire company) is so huge that it controls all that stuff. Both maps gave approximate start and stop locations, but this time street numbers were not part of the information. Like before, the TomTom could get us close, but it was up to us to scan for relevant building signs.
Well, after some confusion and ending up in what appeared to be an abandoned factory, we figured out that we had chosen the wrong Michelin map and had ended up close to the warehouse where we would eventually pick up our belongings, but we had not yet cleared ourselves through customs, so first things first. Christine had trouble getting the TomTom lined up with our destination so I pulled over and entered the address myself. BIG MISTAKE!! I say this because I am clearly not tuned into addresses here and I chose to tell the TomTom to take us to the district in Marseille, not the street. Remember, there was no street address, so I looked at the thing that had a number in front of it and used that instead. I’m glad no one was seriously hurt in the course of our detour. As we got to watch, first hand, how European thugs navigate a narrow busy city street. You see, I was stopped behind a car that had double parked and I was waiting for an opening in the flow of opposing traffic to pass the car. While waiting for a large dump truck to pass, I was confused why this large dump truck was stopped. That’s when I noticed that someone behind us was trying to pass the rest of us waiting our turn. A small little car, no bigger than ours, had managed to intimidate a dump truck into waiting so I waited with a WTF look on my face. This angry young man smashed into the double parked car and just pushed it until he was able to get past the dump truck. I know he left the bumper scratched up and broke the rearview mirror during this exchange. The woman that double parked got back just in time to see the excitement, though I had mixed feelings about whether or not she deserved this kind of treatment. We managed to get past her car only to catch up to the thugs who had now double parked their car. The mood was quickly growing sour and having Susan (TomTom) announce that we had reached our destination felt like a bad sign. We pulled over and Christine tried her hand at the navigation instructions.
We ended up going back through the same neighborhood, this time on the way to the freeway. So after a 10 minute ride downtown we got to the street we wanted to be on, and started hunting for the Customs building. After pulling into the correct parking lot, but the wrong side of the building, we ended up walking around and waiting in a stark hallway with ominous worn counters in front of the sliding windows. Luckily, Christine came equipped with all sorts of forms, notarized and in triplicate. The first gentleman seemed to indicate that this appeared to be in order and went off to do the rubber stamp thing. Or so I thought. Even though the paper work was in order, Christine said the two men were talking whether or not to detain us. What fun 😉 A hint to those of you that may find yourself in this position. . . go right before lunch. Not too close that you end up waiting through lunch (lunches here are 2+ hours,) but in our situation I think the men didn’t want to screw up their lunch schedule so they just stamped the form and sent us on our way. So back to the abandoned factory we went. At least we had been here once before so it felt a little familiar, instead of a film set for some Hollywood FBI serial killer flick. What we didn’t know was where we were supposed to go in this complex. I wish I had some photos to show you just what kind of nightmare we had ended up in. Some expletives later, we decided to call the “office” and get a clearer idea of where we were supposed to go. Over the phone, our instructions were simply to go to the end and find some IMM. Apparently, IMM was the abbreviation of the company that formerly occupied the abandoned factory, so driving to “the end” resulted in us asking some forklift operator who indeed indicated that we were in the right place and that we should go to the office. The office was not clearly marked, but by walking to the back of the warehouse we found a cage with another piece of paper taped to the metal with IMM written in pen. OK. So after handing over the papers we received from the office and the forms from the customs office we received a stamped piece of paper that we were told to give to a forklift operator that would retrieve our stuff. At this point we were hectic, just hoping that we could get our stuff before the lunch break. Although we were both ready to strangle someone, we waited patiently with a distinct look of desperation on our faces. Eventually, an operator took our sheet and reappeared with our belongings still wrapped up on a palette, which he deposited next to our car leaving us to figure out how to take it apart and make it fit into our little car. A few more expletives later, we had the car loaded and were following TomTom back to our little house in Aix-en-Provence.
Well, I hope that wasn’t too much information. Maybe some of you will be able to use this information to your benefit. Until next time. . .cheers 🙂
-G
