We got our passports back from the French Consulate today! That means we are legal to live in France starting August 1. This is a big relief because the timeline to get a visa is unpredictable.
First, we had to get passports for the kids...given that visas take 6-8 weeks we expedited the passports (over $300 per kid...through a travel office). We got those back sometime in May or June, I then had to file for a permit, which included providing an attorney's office with copies of passports, marriage license, birth certificates, and my resume. The attorney's office filed for the permit and I received that in mid-June. I was instructed to try to find an appointment time on the French Consulate's website. Note that the location that manages Utah is in San Francisco...yep, I had to make an appointment to go to San Fran with my husband. The crazy thing is that I was instructed to look on the website for new available times on Monday mornings from 9:45am-10:00am. Every time I looked there was no availability. I thought there was no way I was going to get a spot! Then, amazingly, I was contacted by the consulate directly. She said we needed to set up an emergency meeting since I was relocating for work. In an email exchange on a Monday morning, the best time to go there was Thursday the same week! I quickly made flight arrangements for my husband and me and he made arrangements for a sitter. We flew out Thursday with our entire family's passports, extra photos, and a bunch of documents translated in French: everyone's birth certificates, our marriage certificate, my resume, and my MBA degree. Fortunately, the attorney's office my company provided had all these documents translated well in advance for us.
We arrived in San Fran around 9:30am. We remembered that we had to also provide a self-addressed pre-payed envelope for them to ship our passports back to us...or else we would have had to fly back to San Francisco to get them in person...so we stopped at a post office first. It was my first time in San Francisco - and it was really awful driving downtown. It took probably 30 minutes to drive 5 blocks and then we had to find parking somewhere in the vicinity of the consulate (we found one about 2 blocks away). I won't say anything else about San Francisco traffic for fear I will go off on a tangent...
We made it to the consulate around 11:45 (good thing, too, because they close at 12:30). The consulate's office was very friendly! The security guard and the women we met were very helpful. I was not expecting this...I really expected the customer service to be unpleasant. We gave the woman at the first window all of our documents and payment ($111 per person), then we went to another window and another person scanned our fingerprints. And we were done! All in about 30 minutes! We had time to go to the Golden Gate Bridge before heading back to the airport...once we got out of downtown, we saw some very beautiful areas...then back to the airport to catch the 6:00pm flight.
Ten days later we got our passports back with the visas intact. Whew! One obstacle out of the way!!
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