Bonjour, Paris!

Bienvenue! For those of you who I haven’t updated (shame on me for not being in touch!), I decided to go to back to school last October and now I'm off to France to get an MBA in International Luxury Goods Brand Management at ESSEC (École Supérieure des Sciences Économiques et Commerciales). Here I have created a little web site to stay in touch with everyone. It seems a bit bizarre to be writing so much about myself and what I’m doing so I hope you’ll comment and email me often to tell me what you’re doing too.

Getting accepted to school and then getting “accepted” by the French government was hard enough. Obtaining a visa required two unsuccessful visits to the New York French Consulate and a drive down to Atlanta. Apparently, I didn’t register with the secret web site correctly. Conversations went something like this:

You need to have the email confirmation.
What email confirmation?
From Campus France. Did you Register?
Yes.
Did you pay?
Yes? No. Huh? What are you talking about?
You have to pay the money and get the email with the stamp on it.
Okay.
After running to Kinko’s and back. So this is all I have.
That? No, that’s no good.
Then how do I get what you need?
I don’t know.

The second trip back to the consulate wasn’t much different. You see, the thing I didn’t have from the web site that wasn’t clear was the only thing on the list of the 50 necessary things that the consulate actually needed to accept my file. Confusing? Quite. Finally, I went to the Atlanta consulate with the email confirmation in hand and walked out with a visa, which really only gives me permission to complete more paperwork to get a residency card.

To prepare for school, I enrolled in a French class at the Alliance Francaise. I liked to tell people about it because I liked to say “Alliance Francaise” as much as possible. One day when I was telling my friend Farrell about my Alliance Francaise-ness, she said, “You know, you should really just rent a bunch of movies.” To that I replied, “But of course! At the Alliance Francaise, they have a library and I rent two Alliance Francaise movies a week from the Alliance Francaise library. Unfortunately, they are in French and I can only understand about 10% of what’s being said. Thank goodness for subtitles.”

As I sat there being all proud about my Alliance Francaise French movies, Farrell looked at me and said, “No. I meant you should rent movies in English set in Paris.” Brilliant. I started with Funny Face and, I’ll admit, didn’t get much farther because Funny Face was enough for me. Judging from the movies I rented, American movies set in Paris really are much better than, well, French movies set anywhere. My French movies always left me feeling a little despondent without really knowing why. Am I supposed to be happy at the end of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg? Everything was so colorful and there were umbrellas and they sang the whole time. So why do I want to curl up in a ball on cry? Other “films” like Un Deux Trois Soliel just made me think that filmmakers are evil people.

From my diligent film research, I’ve concluded that my life in France will either be beautiful and poetic or destructive, confusing and ending with me dead in a gutter. Since the latter is unacceptable, I’m going to use Audrey and Fred’s musical (hence the title picture) as inspiration to make my life here the former. So I expect that things here will be lovely and harmonious with a few cute miscommunications and strategic conflicts thrown in. Soon I will be singing and dancing around Paris in emerald green and white dresses and no one will even notice because everyone sings and is pleasant and happy all of the time in France.

Of course, I know it won’t be as simple as all that, but I’m still going to hope that one day I, too, will stand romantically on the train platform with my petit chien, both of us surrounded by mysterious smoke. Maybe I’ll be heading down to my place on the Riviera. Most likely, I’ll be heading to work.