Good Christian Méens, Rejoice!

The kir to the left came into my life at Paul Bocuse's paean to Paul Bocuse, located outside Lyon in Collonges au Mont d'Or at L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges. Very shmancy meal, very classic techniques used in its preparation, a little much, in terms of both quantity and richness and certainly price (thought not always enough in terms of service). Not so much my thing, but an experience I appreciated having. And hey, we saw PB himself!--here he is on the right.

So here we are in Paris. Our apartment is lovely, beautifully decorated with what I imagine to be art from Cambodia, where the owner lives and owns a hotel or two. No air conditioning, but as we seem to have crossed the season barrier from summer into fall as we drove here from Lyon (l'iPhone américain says it's 55º F in Paris right now!), open windows provide more than enough ventilation. Living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, small office, nice bathroom, toilet across the apartment from the bathroom. We're pretty centrally located, within five-ish minutes' walk of about five subway lines. I have [no-longer] secret dreams of living in the 4th or 5th or 6th arrondissement (Paris is divided up into 20 of these districts), but that's just me being bratty; the 3rd is quite nice. An eye is kept on our building during the day by a concierge, who, rather than getting us restaurant reservations or last-minute theatre tickets, is a sort of doorman type who hangs out (lives?) in a little hut in our courtyard, where he has a fridge, a washing machine, and maybe a TV. His name is Dominique and he collects our mail and provides other such helpful logistical services, among the most essential of which is wagging a finger at me if Graham, our younger dog, pees in the courtyard. Oops. I brought down a pitcher of water to rinse away the evidence, and so hopefully he won't hold a grudge, although our apartment's owner told us that Dominique wasn't a super-nice guy, and so it's hard to know. My plan had been to overwhelm the guy with kindness and adorability, always saying bonjour and wishing him a bonne journée, so that he had to like us, but that was long ago, before the Unauthorized Urination.

On the progress-in-getting-established tip, we finally have a bank account! We ended up choosing BNP Paribas as our bank, because our landlord has an account there and got us in touch with one of their bankers. He, in turn, made us an appointment with the fabulous Christian Méens, who set up our Esprit Libre (Free Spirit) joint checking account. Monsieur Méens (sounds like may-awnhce) is a funny, funny dude. Short-sleeved button-down, comb-over, glasses, tie, mustache, a hunt-and-peck typist and all-around sweetheart. After telling us that people said he didn't look his age, he made me guess how old that was, and when I guessed 40 (I first tried 23, but he wouldn't let me off the hook with that one) and he couldn't get me to budge any higher (he's 52), he supposed aloud to Nick that I didn't have any experience with such things. He shared with us a French saying about marriage (being no-longer-married himself)--that it constitutes a choice to have worries and problems that you wouldn't have on your own--but assured us that, over three years into it, we were probably good to go. We spent over an hour in his office, signing papers and actually writing out the words "lu et approuvé" several times, to indicate that we had read and approved whatever we were also signing our names to. Monsieur M provided us with the much coveted RIB (relevé d'identité bancaire, the string of numbers that identifies our bank number, account number, etc. to anyone who is planning on whisking our money away to, for example, pay a phone bill). He also informed us--had only we known a couple days earlier--that BNP stands for Banque Nationale de Paris, and it is a fully national bank, which means that we could have opened an account in Lyon and accessed it in Paris with no problem. Ah, well.

We walked out of BNP, RIB in hand, ready to finally make our iPhone dreams come true. But alas, you need not only a RIB (and proof of residence and proof of identity) to get a phone contract, you also need either a bank card or a cancelled check, and we wouldn't have either for a week or so. They don't give you temporary ATM cards when you open an account in France...or at least BNP doesn't...or at least M. Méens didn't. Which wouldn't be an issue (given that there's no money in our account yet), except for the phone situation. After being turned away by the guy at Orange, one of the main cell service providers here, we called M.M. to see if he could give us a temporary card. He offered a letter stating that we have an account with BNP, but still no dice; apparently, the Orangeman needed to input our card or check number right into his computer, and so there wasn't a lot of flexibility. Boo. And so we limp on, iPhoneless, for another few days.