The Chateau Chronicles - Moving In – Part 2
Continuing from Part 1…
After the walkthrough, the scramble for acquiring basic necessities continued, but once I received the results of the meter readings I had what I thought I needed to sign up for both water service and electricity. I was able to sign up online for water service without incident.
Electricity was another story. As I had been learning, French websites are an exercise in frustration, everything from impossible CAPTCHAs to the necessity for obscure information. Almost all websites want your birthday and the city of your birth. your “nom” which is your last name, but now I needed to come up with an IBAN number… a number most Americans never see unless trying to send an International wire. In France, it’s the equivalent of our “Routing and Account numbers. The IBAN is your passport to everything because the French rarely use credit cards, so everything is connected to your bank account.
My appointment with the bank finally came, just 2 days before my closing which meant I couldn’t sign up for electricity and ensure it would be connected in time for the closing. Given that I had planned for my friend Wendy and I to move out of the Airbnb and into the Chateau the day after I signed, I scrambled to find us another accommodation. I thought I was being smart in finding a little hotel a quick drive from the Chateau. Plus it had a pool, a welcome amenity. Did I mention everything we were doing was in 103 degree heat? But I‘ll save that weirdness for another post.
The Friend
Isabelle is a woman I met on my first trip to France when I stayed at the B&B where she works. We became fast friends and have stayed in touch during the past year via What’s App and Facebook. Two days before the closing, she organzied an excursion with some of her students, mostly young Afgan men who are refugees in France and to whom she teaches French. She takes good care of them as mother hen might and thus she organized a quick field trip with a few of them to meet up with me, and with another previous student now living in Agen. An unusual group we made – three fifty-something women accompanied by four twenty-something Afgan men picnicing along the river in Agen, speaking a mix of French and English, the men speaking mostly Afgan. Chloe kept the men entertained and she was a great talking point, especially when they discovered how much she enjoyed the salami they kept feeding her.
Picnic with Isabelle
I was reminded what a lovely woman Isabelle is, and how much she loves doing the work she does with the refugees. And it felt wonderful to have a friend nearby who I could call if I needed help.
The Bank Account
The big day finally arrived for me to open my bank account. With my “counsellor,” with my lame French, I muddled through getting me identified, finding the proper “attestations” to prove I had bought the property and getting the account opened. The whole process took about 2 hours. But in the end I had a paper with my elusive IBAN number and I wanted to run out and frame it in gold.
I immediately walked out of the bank and crossed the street to sign up for wifi (pronounced “wee-fee” in French! So cute!) and cell phone service. Cell phone was another insane mess. I had gone from a literal “burner phone” and old-school Nokia that I bought for $50 and somehow managed to set up and text with, pressing each number several times to get letters. Remember those? Then I discovered an app that would provide me with a French phone number that I could use on my existing phone, But each time I came up with a new number, I’d have to change it with the bank and the electric company.
The burner
But now I had a “proper” French cell phone and number, though I made the unpleasant discovery that to use the 2-sim card system on my iPhone, I would have to unlock it, which meant paying off my cell phone with ATT, something I bit the bullet and did, since it saved my having to buy another French phone. The bills were adding up.
The Closing
Finally, the day of the signing arrived! I couldn’t have been more excited. Wendy and I decided to walk over and once again, I got a text wondering where we were. Again, I had the time wrong, apparently. But we all made it, and I was very grateful to Chris, the translator that Paul my realtor had hired on my behalf. It was great to have him beside me, helping me ask the complicated questions. Over the course of about an hour and a half, with the attorney for the seller’s ex-wife on Zoom, we got through the entire 250 page document. In the end, I signed once on an electronic pad, and I was handed an old fanny pack of weird old keys.
The final signature
The keys
After the closing, Wendy and I walked back to the Airbnb, stopping on the way to buy a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The man in the wine store was very convivial and we got to “chatting” if you can call it that in my French, and for some reason I wound up telling him that my husband was “mort” and he explained that the “Veuve” in our champagne meant widow. How had I missed that weird fact? I have noticed that the French are very curious about the fact that I am “seul” though that I need to watch my pronounciation because “seul” misproncounced means drunk. Maybe the French now know me as the “drunk widow!”
The first unlocking!
Toasting!
Wendy and I picked up Chloe and with the fanny pack of keys, drove to the house and unloaded our first carload and popped some “drunk widow” on the front steps and toasted to a momentous occasion. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of that moment that seemed to take both a long time to arrive, but also felt strangely impulsive. I sense there is a part of me who watches my life unfold, as if watching the movie of someone else’s life. How on earth did that woman I inhabit wind up owning a chateau in France? And why, I wonder? Are you sure this is your life and not someone else’s? The answer is that I am not at all sure, but somehow here I am: the proud (and terrified) owner of a French Chateau!
Bon chance to me!