This week, I was lucky enough to experience French culture at its finest. Unfortunately, the culture I was experiencing was France’s love of bureaucracy and unnecessary paperwork.
Everyone who moves to France on a visa is supposed to go to a medical exam within the first month or so of their stay, to prove that they don’t have TB. As my experiences with French immigration officials go, this one was pretty bearable. When I had to apply for my visa, the ordeal included crying in public, a four mile walk across Washington, DC in 100 degree heat, and a touch of heat-related illness followed by a very long nap. This time, at least I escaped without tears.
The morning started out with forty-five minutes in a tiny plastic chair waiting for my name to be called. I always enjoy hearing French people read my name, because they always laugh when they realize that it is White, like the color. I have had several people ask me if it is my real name. A few of them were holding my passport at the time. When they called my name, I was granted the privilege of going to sit in a different room, waiting to be called in for a medical evaluation.
I was eventually called into a room where a doctor took my height and weight, asked me to read a couple of sentences in French, and asked me not if I was pregnant, but if I was waiting for a baby. At this point I was tempted to respond that in fact yes, I was waiting for a baby and had no idea what was taking it so long. Maybe there was a strike on the metro. I thought better of this when I imagined the mountain of paperwork that would result from joking about pregnancy with a doctor in the immigration office.
I was then asked to stand behind a line of tape and read an eye chart. I have been aware for several months now that my contact prescription is less than perfect, and I was completely incapable of reading one of the lines. I made up a few letters, and the doctor told me I was wrong. I made up a few more, and he said no again. I opened the eye that was supposed to be closed, took a step forward, squinted, and read the line. The doctor gave an assenting nod and told me to go sit back down.
After another hour of waiting (during which the group of BU students I was with was hushed sternly after an apparently unwelcome outbreak of laughter), a chest x-ray, and another half hour of waiting I was presented with a misspelled sticker to put in my passport. When I told the woman behind the desk that Anna has two n’s, not one, she looked very flustered and ran off to talk to her supervisor. She came back and told me that if I didn’t care, she didn’t care either, so I allowed her to affix the offending sticker to my passport and walked out of the building more convinced than ever that the whole exercise was designed solely to waste the time of visa holders while ensuring full employment for all the doctors of France.
