Elsien's Traveblogue

Montpellier, Saturday 15th October 2011
French bureaucracy is second to none and I don't think you can even bribe the officials any more to cut through the red tape …
It is unimaginable what we have had to find / provide in order for the little belgian car to become French – it is not allowed to live in France and remain Belgian, you see.
The normal car papers, of course, but also a Certificat de Conformité, to say it has been built according to specifications … (Don't ask me why or what the meaning of it is...) It has one from Belgian Renault, but needs one from French Renault. It had a valid recent technical check (M.O.T.) from an official Belgian garage, but needed a new French one. It needed some tax certificate, but in order to get this, we had to prove where we live now. We need a utility bill for this, but the utility people can only be contacted by land line telephone after Internet registration and we can only get Internet and a land line phone if we can prove where we live by showing a utility bill … Fortunately Orange.fr was convinced by the provisional sales contract for the flat that we had bought the place and actually live there … However, they quoted a maximum of fifteen days for the line to be connected. Today is day 15, but I suppose they mean 15 working days, so that'll be next Friday then. Nothing will happen this weekend, that's for sure. We do have gas and electricity and I expect they will get a bill out to us somehow or other, sooner or later. The French banks also want utility bills in order to open a French bank account: Sales contract (we now have the real one, by bodily going to the solicitor, showing our passport and signing for it) and Internet / telephone contract together aren't sufficient: we also need to show an individual house insurance policy. This is not possible as the whole building is jointly insured by the housing co-op. Failing that, they will send a recorded letter. However, they don't send it when they say they do, so next week it will go back to the Post Office, undeliverable, as we will be in Brussels then. To pick it up from the Post Office, we will have to show proof of address … Maybe by then a gas or electricity bill will have arrived ...