Exciting French bureaucracy

 

I had been dreading it because it is the sort of thing I dread a lot, not because it has a difficult reputation. And that is the French Visa OFII medical examination required certificate process.

Yes, I know you are on the edge of your seat, but don't worry. I am going to tell you all about it today!

For background, we applied for a one year visitor's visa. This is the basic visa for people who have enough money to live on according to the French standard of living for a year. It is the easiest visa to get and they will generally let people in on it without much fuss. For a fairly hefty fee one makes an appointment with some difficulty in one of a few cities in the U.S.  Then one gathers a mighty dossier of documents involving finances, identity, proof of insurance coverage for the year in France, and sworn promises not to work in France and brings all this stuff in person to a meeting in another (usually) U.S.city. You have to do this meeting in person, we did it in Boston, but you don't really do anything much at the meeting except hand over all the paperwork, oh, and your passport. Then, some unspecified time later they send you back your passport with, hopefully, a brand new awesome French one year Visa page. It has an identity picture and everything. It is very official looking.

We got ours super fast, like in a week.

Then, at the appointed time, you go to France.

There are other steps involved in completely dismantling your entire life and posessions and everything, but that is neither the purview nor interest of the Nation of France.

Once you get to France you have three months to validate your visa. This, thankfully, is done online. It is pretty important, we understood, to have a permanent address to do this with, so we waited until we had our apartment rented.

After this they send you notice of a meeting you have to go to at Ofii, the French office of immigration and integration. It is the one closest to where your address is.

This meeting was mainly a medical exam to make sure we don't have tuberculosis or something.

Spoiler alert: I've been to this meeting and have the required official medical certificate and, well, I don't really know what it was for exactly. But no one in my family appears to have TB so, cool.

Here's how it played out:

We took the tram to a particularly ugly part of the city. Then we walked to a kind of multi building adiministrative government compound that is completely secured and required a full security entry. After the entry we were met by a security person and checked on a list. Then with a few other people we were taken inside a large institutional building very nearby. We were shown to seats. We sat there. Other people were shown to seats. Many employees came and went.

There were a lot of employees!

After something like 12 or 75 minutes our names were called by the security man. We were gathered by a wall with a few other people. We stood there for awhile. Then we were led down a hall and given a line to stand in. It was a line going into an office.

Eventually our turn came in the office and a nice lady at a reception desk looked at our passports. We were sent to a narrow hall to sit in. There were four other people in our hall and two offices. We got a clipboard with some questions about mental health to fill out.

We were called into the Doctor (I think) together. We handed over the paper and maybe our passports? We answered some questions about vaccines, surgeries, hospital stays, height and weight, what medicines we take, and our glasses. The literature about this meeting suggested we could ask a few small questions and it would be okay. It was okay, but all our questions were answered with "That's not Ofii", pretty much.

Oh, by the way, while there was a bit of French in this, it was basically done in English.

We were sent out into the hall to wait for the nurse.

We were called into the nurse who was a lot like the Doctor only a bit less warm and friendly, so, not at all warm and friendly, but not really mean. There might have been questions there. I forget. Then we were given our health certificates and were told not to lose them because we will never ever get replacements and we'll absolutely need them for our visa renewals.

Then we were sent out into the morning, where we headed back to the tram which we took all the way to the port.

And we were very happy it was over.

Then it rained a lot out.

Here are some pictures I took of the ocean: