Advice Post

At last, friends, we have come to the end of my TAPIF experience. Though I never saw a lot of the adventures coming - most of all the way I would leave TAPIF - I'm glad that I've taken the time here to reflect on my experiences and record them in a somewhat meaningful way.
While I would be the last person to over-inflate the importance or utility of this little blog, if it could do one thing, I would hope it could inform and advise others who are considering spending a year doing TAPIF themselves. To that end, I have taken notes throughout the year on things I wish I had known or that someone had told my less globetrotting comrades. I've tried to organize and sensibly present them here, so that others can enjoy my rich wisdom.
While I myself didn't enjoy my year in Martinique, I know the experience could be fulfilling and insightful for others. If you're considering TAPIF or study abroad, I think it's generally a great idea. I also think it's generally a great idea to keep the following in mind.

Enjoying your Life Abroad

• Try to think of the things that are different as interesting aspects of a new cultural experience. Things work differently wherever you go, and adjusting to that system takes time and will involve mistakes made, time lost, money wasted. Learn to laugh at yourself and try to take a neutral perspective on the culture / bureaucracy. You'll have time to form your judgments when you get home / go online to whine (like me!)
• Take photos. This isn't New York City, everything is not, in fact, online.
• When (not if) street harassment and generally unwanted gestures from men become a concern, talk to French women about it. Part of the gender warfare of harassment is that it makes you feel ashamed and frustrated and effectively silenced. Learn the culturally appropriate ways of dealing with it from the locals.
• If you see something in person / online that you're interested in doing, do it right then or write it down to do it later. Foreign countries are filled with exciting and wonderful sites, and you think you'll have plenty of time to do everything. You have plenty of time, then you have plenty of time, then you're gone and you never did it in spite of the fact that you lived next to it for months. 
• At least at the beginning, avoid dishing out money for the food you normally eat at home. Pay attention to what locals eat and which local products are affordable. Try to adapt the local diet to your dietary needs. Eventually, you're going to miss home so much that you're willing to dish out 5 € for a tiny jar of peanut butter, or whatever your comfort food is, but at first it's worth making a habit of trying the new stuff. Even if buying a cookbook is not your style, when you look for recipes online, search in French and look out for regional websites or blogs.
• Find your balance between the routine and the adventure. On the one hand, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take advantage of Europe / France / your region / your city, with plenty of free time on your hands to Do All the Things. On the other hand, seven months is a long time to drag yourself along from party to international foray to work unprepared to night at the airport. On the other, it's easy to get sucked into a routine and never get around to all that stuff that seemed so cool the first week once you're neck-deep into work. Everybody's process will be different, but I suggest two simultaneous routes. One, set yourself small, weekly goals. Go check something new out that's easily accessible, be it a party, an attraction, or even a cafe. Two, work your way out. See all the shit in your town while it's new and exciting. Then, once you have your gills, check out the region on day trips. Next, try a weekend in Paris or another big city. This gives you air out of your little town as you get tired of it, and gives you a chance to look forward to and save up for bigger trips.
• Rather than giving your opinion about French / local politics, instigate a local to talk about it. You'll learn a lot more that way.
• Once you've packed your bag, unpack it and throw out everything that you're not 100% positive you need (unless it's paperwork - see below). This applies both coming and going.

Getting Here and Handling the Bureaucracy

• No matter what it is, when you think, Oh, but it'll never come to that, it can't be that complicated: it will be. The bureaucracy is a nightmare. After all, miss, this is France. Check and double check that you have a physical and digital copy of every document you've ever owned concerning your visa, your bank account, your job offer, all that shit.
• Write shit down. When your phone dies or there's no Wi-Fi, you're gonna be fucked.
• This is a carry over from literally my entire undergraduate career: THE SQUEAKY WHEEL GETS OILED. I'm not saying you should be a jackass, but I'm saying a) it doesn't hurt to ask, especially if they're your contact person / there to help, b) remind people about their obligations to you, responding to emails / references phone calls as necessary - obeying the bureaucratic process is taken very seriously here, and c) ask for clarification until you understand. I can't tell you how many opportunities I missed because I didn't want to be a bother. There won't always be an exception for you, but sometimes they'll make one.
• If you apply to the CAF, fill out all the paperwork to the best of your ability, then check your account every day for notifications. They won't email or call. If nothing is moving after a couple weeks, call. If you can't get it sorted out, gather up your paperwork and go to the office. Get this sorted out ASAP. It can be worth hundreds of euros a month, so it's worth getting it settled that first month.

French Bureaucracy X Caribbean Pacing: A Sketch

Early on a Monday afternoon, shortly after the 1 p.m. opening of Bibliothèque Schoelcher, the only public library in the capital of Martinique. I finish my current library book and return it to the Nice Librarian at the front desk. Then I go to a standing computer and, using the library's online catalogue, find another book off my list. The listing in the catalogue indicates that one of the three copies of the book book is in the magasin, the stacks of the library accessible only to librarians. Having played this game before, I meticulously note the books exact title, author, and code, knowing that an error will result in a refusal of the book. Then I get a magasin request form and copy all this info, in addition to my name, library card number, and profession - yeah, I have to tell them my profession as a part of a potential interrogation as to why I want the book.

I then proceed to the magasin desk, where the Mean Librarian is stationed. I say, "Bonjour*", because in French culture you can't ask for anything without saying hello first. She does not respond, only glaring at me. "I would like to borrow this book, please," I continue after a moment, handing her the form. She glances at it for a second then tosses it back at me, saying, "Fonds antillais, first floor", without smiling. Though I know that there is, in addition to the copy in the fonds antillais, a copy in the magasin, and that the fonds antillais are more likely to refuse to lend me the book than the magasin, I smile and thank her before walking up to the fonds antillais.
When I get to that desk, I smile and say, "Bonjour", because in French culture you can't ask for anything without saying hello first. The librarian behind the desk does not respond, only glaring at me. After a moment, I continue, "I would like to borrow this book, please. Should I get the copy in the magasin or in the fonds antillais?" The librarian snatches the form at me, rolls his eyes, and, without answering my question, gets up and walks to the publicly-accessible shelves of the fonds antillais. Of course, I could've found the book on the shelf if he would have answered my question, but he seemed to prefer the opportunity to render an unnecessary service to a library patron so he could sulk about it to my face and complain about it to his colleagues later.
After quickly doing a tour of the wrong shelf, he comes back and announces that the book isn't there, speaking in a voice so low and so muddled that I can hardly understand him. "The catalogue says there are three copies," I insist. He mutters something to the effect that the only copy must be in reserve, so I can consult it at the desk but I can't borrow it. I specify that the library catalogue said there was one in the fonds antillais, one in the magasin, and one in reserve, using a tone to indicate that I wasn't going away just because he was no longer looking at me but at his computer screen.
"The book isn't here," he tries again.
"None of the three copies?" I doubt.
Angrily jumping up, he mumbles as he goes through the door to the magasin that it isn't here but he'll look anyway
Using my original copy of the books details, I turn and, in less than five seconds, find the book on the shelf of the fonds antillais, exactly where it's supposed to be.
A few seconds later (in no universe enough time to have looked for the book), the librarian returns, announcing matter-of-factly that the book isn't there. I hold it out in front of him.
"The book isn't here," he repeats.
"Here it is. It was on the shelf," I answer.
He responds by muttering something about the book having not been shelved correctly.
"No," I counter, "it was right where it was supposed to be."
"It was mal-classé," he insists, "and since it wasn't in the right place, it's in the computer as checked out and so I can't give it to you."
"The computer said there were three copies available," I remind him, causing him to turn and bury his face in his computer again.
I keep standing there until he barks at his younger (woman) colleague that he can't check it out, she has to do it. She completes this task calmly, though with a surprised look on her face. As she tells me what day the book is due, he loudly rips my magasin request form into many pieces.

Fare Frights

This photo has nothing to do with
this post, I just liked the art
commissioned by the board game
store too much to not share.

A word to the wise: when it comes to flights, you get what you pay for.
Don't get me wrong, I fly as cheaply as possible. I am a member of countless airline rewards programs, but I never receive any rewards, because I'm completely un-loyal. Money is a tool, not a good in and of itself., but I just don't think that paying for access to a lounge or to three more inches of legroom for three hours is a sensible way to spend it.
As I have recounted here before, my flight from NYC to Martinique was a nightmare. Fortunately, since the cheapest flight in this case was serviced by Norwegian Air, it fell under European consumer protection law. Unfortunately, even Norwegians have the gall to argue that snow at JFK in January constitutes an "unpredictable" disaster, meaning that, despite my hours-long trials, I did not get a refund. The airline did nevertheless agree to pay me back for my travel costs to the airport and even for my $163 phone bill that I racked up when I called the Norway-based helpline they texted to me at my U.S. number.
Here's the thing though: my mysterious hair loss has responded faster to my complaints.
I finalized my complaint on February 11th for both costs. They responded to my complaint about the travel costs on February 2nd, twenty-two days after, and to my complaint about the phone bill (which I understand is probably stranger) on February 21st, 41 days after. Both emails assured me that my money would be wired to me "in a reasonable amount of time". But the money has yet to appear in my account.
Then, this morning, I received an email saying the travel costs will be reimbursed in fourteen days, 68 days after I filed the complaint. No word yet on the phone bill costs.
Is this normal for corporate business? Does everything European work at a French escargot's pace? Does all of being grown up require this much patience?

Savoir vivre, savoir faire avec

My students are basically the
center of my life, which is extra
sad given that I'm with them for 12
hours or fewer a week.

I just finished reading an article from the Guardian about the radical ways in which our lives are almost certainly going to change as our economy transitions due to both automation and ecological deterioration. (Caution, it is a very good, but long, read.) Essentially, there's no way we can continue the consumption-centered, hectic, all-consuming 40-hour workweek we currently suffer under, nor will it make economic sense to for long, given explosive advances in robotic technology and AI. Whatever political changes or dramatic re-structuring of our economy may occur to power the change, we will likely be soon working a fraction of the time we're currently accustomed to. All of us, indoctrinated in near-workaholic ethics, are going to have to figure out what to do with a lot more free time.
Obviously, this resonated profoundly with me. A recent college grad, I inculcated and pathologically lived a bootstraps ideology, forcing myself through extra classes, extra clubs, and extra volunteering in high school and work in the summers to get out of my boring home state. Then I barreled through four years of Columbia undergrad, holding myself to high standards in a full load of Ivy-League courses while also holding down at least two jobs and dragging my ass to church on Sunday morning. And now? My visa prohibits we working more than twelve hours a week. There are no Episcopal churches, only Catholic and evangelical, from what I can tell. In spite of my weekly visits to the community center, I've yet to find a volunteer organization to be involved in. I'm geographically isolated from my old friends, who, quite frankly, are living far busier lives, and I don't even have a secure enough internet connection to work teaching English clandestinely online.
Alors, quoi faire?
My original plan was to live in the library and do all that reading for fun that I've been putting off for ... the better part of a decade. But I ran in to a series of problems. First, there's one library in this town, and it has absurdly restrictive hours to begin with, besides mentioning late openings and basically no-warning unexplained closures. Then there's the fact that tourists file through noisily and the scary librarian won't let me (very carefully!) snack while I read for hours in the straight-backed wooden chairs. So, I brought my books home to read. Except that, at home, I can hardly read! I constantly feel compelled to do something, whether it's clean something, obsessively read the news online, or study creole. I can't manage to calm my mind enough to read for fun (which is terrifying) and don't have a comfy place to sit even if I could.
Of course, I'd love to go out and hike and swim on this fucking gorgeous island. Too bad that would require either a functioning public transit system, which Martinique lacks, or else a car, which, even with  all of my saving and English lessons, I still have yet to save up the money for. (Though I do hope to rent one soon.)
In general, being cultured is important, so I decided to check out the local cultural centers. All two of them. Which have websites designed no later than 1993, I'm telling you. And only sell the theater tickets two days a month-? By phone-? And take two weeks to respond to emails-? And whose staff won't answer questions during regular business hours or accept payments on-site-? In short, I've had a hard time trying to figure out how to get out here, without even mentioned how the heck to get home; the taxi line outside the theater last night was a lie, and the only thing that saved me from trekking up the hill at 21:00 alone on the dimly-lit sidewalks in my business attire was a kindly old lady from my creole class, who offered to drive me home.
I'm not saying it's a total loss. The play last night (Les Hommes, about a group of women imprisoned by the collaboration government in 1942) made me cry, i.e. was pretty good. And the tickets were so much cheaper than theater in NYC! In the fall I took to cross-stitching while listening to the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, which is apparently the right level of busyness for me to avoid feeling guilty.
On a more fundamental level, I worry about what sort of psychological damage I have endured that doesn't allow me to relax and read for fun, and if it'll ever go away.
Then I remember that, starting in June, I'll be working in a school full-time and taking classes at night, and won't need to worry about having free time any more. At least I'm dabbling into that French savoir-vivre a little bit first.

Movie Review: Les derniers maîtres de la Martinique

A fellow assistant sent me a link to this video, telling me that she had learned a lot about how this island runs and answered a lot of the questions we'd been dwelling on since arriving here. I didn't get the chance to watch it until just now, but since I have I agree with her - it answers a lot of questions.
First of all, context. This video was produced in 2008 for a series called Spécial Investigation, which ran on Canal+, a major player in French news television. The show ran until 2016, when all of its episodes were apparently made available on YouTube, hence the free link. Canal+ isn't exactly what one would call academic, purely journalistic television - a lot of what they do is about scoops and stories that would strike Americans as celebrity gossip. Yet, the culture of uncovering dirt on politicians is much stronger in France, and such discoveries are more likely to have real effects there (thinking of the American president exposed on film bragging about groping women before being elected ... ).
Though it can seem at times to have been filmed on a home camcorder, the show is well-filmed, with punchy editing, beautiful views of Martinique, and unexpected access to private meetings and interviews on reclusive béké estates. The creators start at the funeral of Aimé Césaire, leading author of the négritude movement (which could be impiously summed up as, "Oh, black people aren't intellectual / rich / analytic? Maybe so, but we have more lyricism / agriculture / spiritualism than whites, so we're equal to you."), largely thanked for the psychological liberation of the descendants of French slaves. Césaire was also at the center of the legislative move to integrate Martinique as a department of France, and the film moves quickly to introduce, from among the crowd at the funeral, the main players in Martinique's contemporary story. The békés, dry-eyed and aloof, are the white descendants of slave owners, never dispossessed during the French Revolution thanks to British protection, and still massively rich and influential in the Martinican economy. The majority of Martinicans are black descendants of slaves, suffering from a far higher rate of poverty than the rest of France and struggling with unusually high costs of living.
The bulk of the film attempts to explain this high cost of living. In spite of French anti-monopoly laws, békés collectively control almost all agriculture, retail, wholesale, distribution, and imports. In spite of special défiscalisation laws in the DOMs allowing business owners to invest what they would pay in taxes in their machinery, almost all food products are more expensive here than in the mainland. In spite of the fact that bananas and other produce are grown here, they cost more in Martinican stores than they do in the mainland, to whence they had to be shipped. The working class insists that this is because of the béké monopoly, and the békés, interviewed on their centuries-old estates on the north of the island, insist that production costs are simply higher here.
The editors also lay bare a startling contrast of political priorities. Towards the beginning of the film, banana farm workers protest, threatening to prevent the export of bananas they say they were underpaid to pick and are overpriced in their home. The békés are unperturbed except by the risk of bad publicity, with a careful mix of (white) national guardsmen from the mainland and (black) local police, get their trucks through. Towards the end, the E.U. considers dropping high tariffs on South American bananas, and the békés successfully form a coalition with European and African leaders in Brussels to maintain their bottom line. The profits of the békés merit the attention of Quai d'Orsay ministers, who are surprisingly friendly with the békés, but the protests of their impoverished employees does not. Békés and reporters alike maintain that the békés have no political sway, yet photograph the békés seated with international agricultural advisers in closed-door meetings.
Near the end of the film, an early-2000s controversy surrounding a now-banned pesticide is invoked, and the filmmakers verge on the conspiratorial, suggesting that the French government allowed the békés to produce and use a banned pesticide beyond the date it was disallowed in France because they didn't care about the health risks to Martinicans, who do appear to have an elevated rate of certain kinds of cancers compared to the mainland. To my knowledge, the first study confirming this suspicion actually came out a couple of years later. Again, the filmmakers had surprising access to former and current ministers in producing this piece, and this adds to the overall informational value of the film.
If you can follow along in French (as of yet, English captions don't appear to be available), I would recommend watching this report if you have any interest in the history of the French DOMs or certainly any interest in coming to Martinique. It clocks in at about a hour but is relatively fast-paced and treats several different subjects that are important to understanding the quality of life and the political life in Martinique. And it will certainly dissuade you from trying to come live here on a low salary.

Cultural Preservation: You were so busy asking yourself if you could that you failed to ask yourself if you should (or by what discursive means you might)

During creole class yesterday, the class read an excerpt of Maupassant translated into Martinican creole. The professor mentioned in passing that many of the phrases were clunkier in creole because creole is not yet "enriched" enough to express many literary ideas He often mentions that creole was developed in plantation fields and not, as of yet, in salons, so it vocabulary and usage are necessarily less superfluous. However, this time he used a phrase that struck me: translations between European languages are horizontal, but translations from European languages into creole are vertical.

Of course, every fiber of my being revolts at the implication that any language is "lower" than another. First of all, some people, especially those who favor more "primitive" aesthetics (a term whose usage here should not imply a lack of criticism), might prefer the long phrases that use simpler words to express complex emotions or ideas. More importantly, though, creole has a smaller vocabulary and fewer usage patterns for a reason (or a few), and it's worth exploring why.

Creolophone Martinicans are working quickly to codify their language, to work out in writing its grammar, orthography, and idioms. A few teachers I know are on teams that study particular issues in grammar to determine the "correct" usage to be written down and published. Creole organizations regularly host dictation contests (what could be more French!) in which creolophone guests are challenged to write down what they hear in "correct" creole. The authorities on correct creole (including my professor) tend to be authors of works, either original or collected folklore, printed in creole. 

Why such an effort? Well, of course, on this island there is a dominant and an oppressed culture. The dominant culture in French, in terms of finances, in terms of social authority, in terms of government authority, and, most obviously, in terms of cultural pretension. Can you even conceive of a people more stuck up about their own cultural achievements? In such an atmosphere, creolophone Martinicans, and creolophones around the world, appear to have two options: aggressively codify, put into writing, and sharpen your creole, or watch it be completely overtaken and disappear, replaced completely by the dominant language.

In this particular case, the dominant language has a real ax to grind about "correct" language, too. Everybody knows that the Académie française dictates what is and is not "correct" French, and has been doing so for a few centuries now. What many people do not appreciate is that the French people haven't been speaking French for nearly as long. Even as the French tried to impose French on Arab subjects in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century, many people in the mainland, out in the countrysides neighboring other countries, spoke what we might curiously call a mix or accurately call a different language. Through schooling and various other arms of the government, the French administration developed a state-run linguistic Leviathan to impose "correct" French on its own citizens. Nowadays French speakers feel pressured by encroaching anglophone culture - and post-colonial immigrant cultures cultures, too - and react by fighting to "preserve" their "correct" language, from anglicisms, from creolization, from foreign vocabulary, you name it. How could we expect creole to stand up against the full machinery of a paranoid culture that feels its fetischized culture and language threatened by an outside enemy, mobilized to preserve some fleeting, esoteric ghost of its own authenticity, trained in the battlefields of national development of the 1800s?

So creolophones have to choice but to buckle down and preserve their language from the aggressive slip into French - recording and decimating creole vocabulary so that speakers don't pepper their creole with French words, memorializing and enforcing creole grammar so that speakers don't just speak French sentences filled with creole words, and distinguishing and banishing any in-between forms of usage. If they don't, they know their language will be replaced, and no one will be able to tell their stories, recount their history, share their art of living in the language forged in conditions so intense that there's no word for "happiness".

Where's my beef? Precisely in the fact that this process, the only way to fight French dominance, totally accepts and reproduces the structure of French cultural hegemony. In reality, there is no "correct" or "official" language, not in any language; all languages are constantly evolving according to the needs of the people. Dictionaries and grammars are essential tools for sharing and describing a language, but using them as constraints are total artifice, and, by the way, a habit picked up from the dominant culture. In order to stave off the erasure of their language by French, creolophones have had to learn to fight like the French. This reinforces false - and Western (again, a term not here used uncritically) - dictates about what constitutes a "real" or "high" language.

So, what's the practical alternative? There isn't one. Creolophones are doing what is fundamentally necessary to preserve their language in the current climate, and not just for the sake of the language, but for the sake of their history, their identity, and, quite frankly, for the sake of not letting the French off with their own, pretty version of their colonial history. In order to do this, they have to replicate, more or less conscientiously, French / Western cultural hegemony and linguistic artifice. When you get down to it, they aren't liberated. The choice to abandon French standards of a "real language" to maintain their own cultural standards is as false as the choice to separate from France to do so - it just isn't feasible.

And that, friends, is what we call postcolonialism.

As an epilogue: I'm taking advantage of the local library to read the works of my current favorite author, Dany Laferrière, who speaks of his own mother above. I met him at a talk in February where, confronted by a Haitian students complaining that she had to learn a white man's language (French) to study her people's history, insisted that French was his language, too, not some white man's. He, as a Haitian, lives in a universe where creole is spoken and French is written, and anything else would be artificial. Do other creolophones feel such an ownership of French or of their dominant language? Does Laferrière worry about the disappearance of Haitian creole? Does the independence of Haiti inform that mindset?

Today's Level of Inferno: Immigration

During our orientation, one of the organizers told us that Martinique is a Paradise, but that it also has seven Infernos. While I don't think that the metaphor completely jives with the classic literary work, I will say that the observation has been a recurring joke amongst the assistants. The Inferno I finished traversing only yesterday was entitled: Immigration, or, if you had a president who bought into the myth that immigrants are refusing to assimilate into your culture, OFII: Office of Immigration and Insertion.
In order to understand immigration here, one must first appreciate the rigamarole that is Immigration in the capital. When I lived in Paris for a year, I arrived with some important paperwork that had been stamped by the embassy in the States as well as an entry visa in my passsport. I sent off the stamped paperwork with a host of other documents - proof of residence, proof of enrollment, proof that my mother's first cousin wasn't an alien, etc - to OFII right after I arrived, in the first week of September. At the end of October I received a letter summoning me to the immigration office in Paris in late November. There, even an hour before my appointment, the waiting room was full of people and a crowd of folks without an appointment were trying to get their affairs sorted, waiting outside the door surrounded by National Guardsmen with automatic guns. The appointment functioned like an assembly line. First, I waited to have a rude lady take my paperwork and briskly ask me questions. Then, I was moved to another waiting room. Then, a couple of nurses very matter-of-factly took X-rays of my lungs (twice, because a smudge from my old T.B. infection appeared ... ) Then I was sent to another waiting room. Then, somebody quickly took my vitals and asked me about my health - and actually made small talk. Then I was moved to another waiting room, where a bunch of other immigrants were being yelled at. Finally, I was called into one last room where a lady confirmed my identity, slapped my residency sticker into my passport, then shooed me away. Having arrived before 8 a.m. by subway, I was completely immigrated and free to have a late lunch the same day.
Martinique went a little bit differently.
First, my paperwork wasn't sent off until the first week of October, and I was pleasantly surprised to receive a summons by email for the last week of October - given, I only had a week's warning, and it was during school vacation, so several assistants didn't make it to their appointments because of the late announcement. There's no subway and the bus system doesn't come close, so I walked over an hour to a regular medical center a little bit out of the suburb of the capital. It wasn't an immigration center at all, just a medical center, where immigrating persons were waiting with regular residents. I waited to get into a waiting room, which opened, of course, late. Then a very polite lady took my info and ensured that I knew what was going on. Then she called me to a different waiting room. Then a very soft-spoken nurse took my chest X-ray. Then I went back to the first waiting room. Then I was given a physical copy of my X-ray, which I've never had in my hands before, and sent very vaguely to another building. I went to a new building and waited, only to be told I had been in the wrong waiting room and have to go to a different doctor's office. There I waited in a waiting room until I was called into a random regular practitioner's office. He very politely took my vitals and asked me about my health in general, ensuring that I understood how the medical system worked in case I needed anything. Then, when he sent me out, I asked for my residency sticker for my passport. He laughed in my face. Oh, no, he explained, he had to fill out a form, which had to be snail-mailed to OFII, who would then write me a new summons to go to a different appointment. I went home no more legally a resident than I had been before.
Finally, last week I received by email a second summons to a different office, this one mercifully in the capital, and completely unguarded and accessible from the street. Yesterday, I arrived early only to find that the office wasn't open yet and the secretary was bewildered that someone would be there so soon. Only a handful of assistants were there. Finally, several minutes after the first appointment was to have started, a representative from the OFII in Guadeloupe, whom the state apparently paid to arrive by boat or plane, came in. She discussed at length with the secretary that if anybody without an appointment came in, it was in fact alright, but they'd have to wait until she was done with her appointments. She calmly walked us up the stairs and asked us to sit for a moment while she got ready. Then she called me into her office, made some small talk about Martinique, asked me how work was going, and ensured that I understood what steps I had to take if I wanted to renew my visa as she filled out her paperwork and put my residency sticker in my passport. Then she told me goodbye, and I had to remind her to give me my medical certificate, saying I'd gone to the medical appointment last month. She very kindly thanked me for reminding her and explained to me in what cases I might need it. I was out of there within five minutes, a completely immigrated resident.
As is said here, aux Caraïbes, on n'est jamais pressé. The process here took two individual visits out of my way on weekdays, as, as a New Yorker at heart who fetishizes my time, that annoys the crap out of me. Not to mention, there were a thousand loopholes for things to get lost - going to one appointment but not another, bureaucrats forgetting or misplacing paperwork, physical X-rays to get lost. Yet, officials were actually nice to me, which, after Paris, is pretty nice, too.

The Pace of Paperwork

Even if I take the bus, I have to
walk up and down this to get to
one of my schools.

When the bus does arrive, eventually, sometimes, on occasion, when the gods of this island, descended from Mont Pélée to direct our miniscule and insignificant lives, decide they're done smoking and drive out to get their passengers, I always try to stay focused on the road. Traffic here goes from 0 to 60, literally, unpredictably, so it's easy to miss your stop. That being said, I do still read the signs in the bus, just in case they're not from 2012 and actually do contain some pertinent info that I don't know.
I noticed almost immediately that, instead of buying a one-way ticket without transfers for 1,80 €, one-ways with transfers are available in stands for 1,25 €. Plus, those are sold are cards that can be charged with multiple trips, so I can save myself some trouble by buying several at a time. (For reference, the price of one trip on the Parisian transit system, when I was there was 1,10 € if you bought multiple tickets from the booth, which was in almost every station, and that system actually functioned properly.)
I also read that you could get a weekly pass for 10 €, which is pretty affordable. I spend almost that much on bus tickets each week, and I figured my trouble is worth some money, too. So, I be-bopped my happy ass down to the booth to buy one from the machine. No can do. So I go to the window and, after waiting in line, ask for one. The lady looks at me like I'm crazy. I point to the sign. "Oh, noooo, that's not possible!" exclaimed the lady, shaking her head. I insisted, pointing at the picture on the sign of the pass which very much should be available for purchase. She starting saying that just waaaasn't possible, listing off all the steps and procedures I'd have to complete to get one. Having played this game a few times with customer service representatives in other establishments on this island, and quite frankly being sick of it, I asked for a list of documents I needed, which she forked over. Copy of your I.D., copy of your electricity bill (which proves where you live - if you rent, like me, you need a letter from your landlord with their electricity bill and a copy of their I.D., which my landlord has previously refused to fork over), other nonsensical requirements. Now, mind you, I'm not trying to sign up for insurance (which took days), or a bank account (which took weeks), or sign a lease (which took weeks), or get my paperwork to start work (which took multiple trips to various school district offices). I just want a 10 € (= approx. $11.85) bus pass, which I'll have to glue my own damn photo to. You'd think I was asking to open a multinational.

On the plus side, when you walk
about town you see gems like this,
a contemporary, and somewhat
salty, mural about local claim to
fame Aimé Césaire, on the side of
the middle school named after him.

I took the list home and tried to figure out how I'd get another official passport photo made - that's harder to come by, here. Then I finally read the fine print on the back of the list. The weekly card doesn't refill itself. After all that, the form, the paperwork, the photo, the bus company doesn't even automatically refill your card. You still have to go, once a week, down to a booth, which are only in town, to refill the card manually. So, each Monday morning, you still have to buy a bus ticket or walk all the way into town.
I'm not getting a bus ticket right now. I can't deal with this crap.
Meanwhile, I still am not signed up for social security because the department of education did my application wrong, and the French government won't give me a rent subsidy, not because I make too much money, and not because my rent is too cheap, but because my apartment is too small. Too small. According to their estimator online, I'm otherwise eligible for 250 €  (= approx. $296.21) a month, but I can't have it because my apartment is too small.
Vive la France carribbéenne, y'all.

Exploding Bananas

Today's Fun Fact: Bananas can explode.
My new flatmate, in my apartment that I just moved into yesterday, warned me not to leave any food on the counter, because the ants would get it. Seeing no ants around, I thought it would be perfectly fine to leave my undamaged produce (a couple of tomatoes and a few bananas that were a little more ripe than I like them but, hey, not great selection here) out. She insisted and picked them up to place them in a microwave cover.
This morning I walked in to find banana and ants all over everything, the backsplash, the counter, the floor, and one banana missing some mass. Apparently, be it do to the heat or just their sheer number, ants can break into undamaged produce here, and somehow they explode.
Today's Useful Fact: Bananas, so long as they are already as ripe as you want them, can be stored in the refrigerator.

Don't you pity me right now?
(This is where I went to swim today,
just up the road.)

Now, I could go on and on in a sob story about my four-twenty-ten-nine problems with bureaucracy (just imagine it, French bureacracy*small town pace*island isolation) and all the hours I've wasted looking for housing, dealing with talkative landlords that didn't actually have to offer what they put online, and trying to get a phone that requires a banking account that requires an address for a lodging you can't rent until you can call the owner on the phone. Instead, suffice it to say that what actually got me in my actual apartment was not filling out my paperwork on time, nor going to my meetings early, nor diligently searching online using all my resources, but through good, old-fashioned, small-town gossip. My supervisor talked to her coworker who is also supervising an assistant and ... Ben, bref, I landed a decent, clean place to sublet, a little far from my work and town but within my price range and totally liveable.
I thought I'd left the world of small-town talk and everybody knowing my business back in Alabama.
Let's just hope that the bus system here works better than the one there (or else I'll never make it to work tomorrow ... )