First Days of Work

Mary is now a productive member of French society! She's finished 3 days in the office, and thankfully a lot of her French has come back to her. If the conversation gets too in depth or if it's about a topic that she's not very familiar with, she begins to get lost, but she's thankful for what she does understand! Her coworkers are very nice though, and ALL of them speak better English than she does French!!

The office is similar in most ways to her office in the US, but she's noticed a few differences so far:
1. There's much more of an open floor plan - no cubicles - the desks are laid out more just as flat desks with no dividers. Mary's in a smaller room with only 3 other people, but everyone seems very nice!
2. Free coffee, tea, AND hot chocolate!! I guess they only took this away in the US!
3. It seems the employees here are in the office longer, but they also take a lot more breaks! Coffee and a smoke in the morning, lunch, coffee and a smoke or two in the afternoon... I guess if you're regularly going to be in the office for more than 10 hours, you need little breaks to keep you going! Mary`ll need to discover this lifestyle... one of her coworkers commented today on how he's amazed the English expats can focus for so long without a break!
4. Mary's biggest frustration so far... the French keyboard is different from the English keyboard (basically q w a z x and m plus several of the punctuation keys are in different spots!). She switched the setting to an English keyboard for part of the day today, but decided that was too confusing! Amazingly, her mind has started to relearn the keyboard... but we'll see what switching between an English laptop at home and a French keyboard at work does to her mind and fingers!! The good news- the !! is in a very convenient location on the French keyboard, and anyone who knows Mary well at all, knows she does use it a LOT!! ;)

Though the days are long, they seem to fly by!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our friends and family! Eat an extra helping of pumpkin pie for us!! :)

A' Paris

We flew out this Monday night and arrived Tuesday afternoon. After a short 12 hour nap we were up and looking at apartments all Wednesday. We think we found one, but more on that when we move in, hopefully Friday.

   Mary starts work on Monday so in the meantime we have been exploring the city. Yesterday we visited the Musee D'Orsay and today Montmartre. On Thursday Dave insisted on visiting a local game shop but jet lag pretty much wiped us out after that and we didn't too much until we met one of Mary's coworkers at a restaurant. There we were serenaded by a quite good country/southern-rock band, save for the occasional lyric that slipped into spirited humming.

   The city is actually fairly small so we have been walking pretty much everywhere. It would be super easy if the streets weren't so crazy for two people used to New York's convenient grid system or the signs where in English. Dave picked up an audio dictionary and an offline map of Paris which have already proved helpful. Mary's French has proved very serviceable and she coaches Dave so he gets a giddy thrill asking for "l'eau' in French.

Dave in front of Notre Dame

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Dave and Mary on the Seine with Ile de la Cite in the background

Mary at Montmarte

Leaving for Paris

 

 Here we are after our visa interview in front of the French consulate.  We had visions of talking over our visit to Paris with a stern Frenchmen in a little office, turns out it was more like the DMV; present your papers at one window, sit down, get your pictures and fingerprints taken at another when called, and pick up the visa later that day. In the end we were just happy to be finally on our way... 

Mary in front of Central Park