Bizarre Bank Business, round two

Today I remembered why I so badly did not want to close my bank account last year when I left: because I’d have to re-open it were I ever to come back. Now I’m back… and the bank administrative nonsense has begun again.

The problem is that you need an address and a signed lease to open a bank account, so I was waiting until I found an apartment to start the bank process. However, the apartment hunt isn’t going all too well, and I need a bank account to, among other things, get paid (CNRS will only do direct deposit, and only into a French bank account), get a cell phone (they won’t give you a contract and a number without a canceled check), and, if I’m leasing from an actual landlord, then even to rent an apartment (note the circularity!) So what to do? I got my very wonderful friend François (with whom I’m staying, with Kim, in their snazzy house outside of Marseille) to write a letter swearing that I’m lodged at his house, rent free (which is actually true at the moment). This letter, along with a utilities bill and a copy of his passport, when presented to the bank (along with my own passport and assorted bits of information including my monthly income and the number of children I have – note the similarites with my travails the first time around), meant I was deemed an acceptable client to give them my money. I went to La Banque Postale, a bank run by and through the post office, because it was suggested that they might have the lowest fees. When I got there and met with the representative, he immediately decided that we were best friends and, in response to my rather insistent questions about fees, and internet account viewing, and non-French-ATM access, told me not to worry, he’d take care of me: “Ne vous inquiétez pas, mademoiselle. Je vous protège. Si vous avez des problèmes, n’hésitez pas à me demander. Même si à Marseille, moi, je vous protège. Pas de problèmes.” (Don’t worry, mademoiselle. I’ll protect you. If you have any problems, don’t hesitate to ask me. Even in Marseille in general, I’ll protect you. No problem at all.) Well, alright. Opening a bank account is indeed painful, but I need to do it, I’ve already done it once before, and this time, my French is actually good enough that I can understand what the bank person is saying, so it should at least go off smoothly.

Hah.

I’m not getting paid until the end of July, and I need to (a) buy stuff, ya know, like food, for the next month, and (b) pay rent for July if I ever manage to find an apartment. This means I need about 900€, just to be totally safe, for the next month. I have an American bank card that lets me withdraw from European ATMs, but it expires today, so my plan was to get this account open, withdraw 900€ from my American account, deposit it immediately into the newly-opened French one, et voilà! be well on my way to being settled.

My pal the bank man starts filling out my application, first on paper, then by transferring all the same information into a supremely 1990s-looking computer form, all the while stopping and chatting to me about where he was born (Martinique) and how close it is to the US (in the same time zone as the East Coast, and only a two-hour flight to Miami!), that he longs to visit the US so he can travel down Route 66 (ah oui, la route soixante-six!), and that the only English he knows is, “Nice to meet you!” but that all the travel books say you should never say that to any American (duly noted). All at once, watching the bank questionnaire proceedings, I notice a question that asks how much money I want to open the account with. He types 0. I protest that really, I do want to open the account with some money as I want to deposit it right away. No, no, no! he exclaims. Didn’t I tell you that I’d take care of you? It’s much easier to just open the account with nothing in it now, and then deposit money in later. No really, I say, I’d like to deposit some money right now. I’ve got it with me. But no– it’s soooo much easier to deposit it afterwards. Don’t worry, I’ve got it! You can count on me.

We move on, blow through pages more of questions and options that he doesn’t even ask me if I want — at one point, I notice us speeding past the internet vs. paper statements question, so I stop him and say that I want internet access to my account. He obliges, but upon attempting to put in my email address, it throws an error because he’s actually checked off the “receive updates via SMS” box, and, as I don’t have a cell phone (because I don’t have a bank account…), he’s just put in the bank phone number. Unfortunately, the bank phone number, being a land line, can’t receive text messages and thus the computer gives an error saying that the phone number must begin with 06 or 07, the initial digits of all mobiles here. He, however, ignores this message that keeps popping up and continually re-types in the bank’s phone number, regardless of my pleas to simply uncheck the “SMS update” box. After about 5 minutes of me saying exactly the same thing, the SMS box gets unchecked, but at this point it’s unclear if the internet banking is enabled. When I ask about it, he assures me that it’s probably set, but, don’t worry, we can check and take care of it after the account is fully opened.

At this point, another box shows up on the form, asking how much money I’d like to open the account with. As before, he puts in 0; I argue that indeed, I have money that needs to go in; he ignores such arguments and tells me that we can deposit it after I’ve opened the account and to trust him in this, he opened an account for another American just last week. In fact, this box shows up a few more times, and each time I plead with him to enter some amount – even 50 €, look, I honestly have it in my wallet right now! – but he persists.

Some indeterminate amount of time later, we’ve more (or less) successfully navigated all of the questions, I’ve signed several forms, he’s copied all of my paperwork, and the account seems to be open. He informs me that my checks and bank card will be coming in the mail and grudgingly gives me some “only provisional” RIBs (Relevé d’Identité Bancaire – what I need to give out to all these places that need my bank info). When I ask him to do a deposit, however, it seems there’s a teensy tiny problem – the account isn’t exactly open yet; it needs to be processed by the bank so I can’t actually deposit any money until that’s happened. But — well, it’s 4:30 now, and tomorrow’s Friday, but I’ll file it as soon as possible, so it should be ready next week some time, maybe Wednesday or Thursday.

So after all those assurances, I’ve managed to open a bank account, into which I really need to deposit money today, and that’s not even possible to do because the account isn’t open enough. No amounts of suggestions of going back into the account-opening system would cause him to budge, even when I explained the whole 900€ situation. (Note: I’m not actually carrying 900€ around with me; I ended up not withdrawing it from my American account at all because I had nowhere to put it.) He was quite nonchalant about the whole having-gobs-of-money-in-my-pocket-for-several-days situation. Some protector indeed.

I got back home and François expressed great distaste for the Banque Postale and roundly assured me that he would never have an account there because they really don’t have any idea what they’re doing, which quite indeed seemed to be the case. Given these issues, I’m actually going to try to go back tomorrow morning first thing and see if I can head the account off before it’s sent down the opening tubes, and maybe just cancel the whole caboodle and try again at a different bank.

Sigh. And I thought it’d be easier this time around, now that I know how France works.

Marseille, take deux

So I’m back in Marseille, one year later! (Le fromage, me manque.) I’m here just for the summer, working with my old advisors on some extensions of the projects we were doing last year. Flying in over the city really brought to head the amazing fact that I’m getting to live in the south of France again – back to the sunshine and the mountains and the sea, the cheese in the marketplaces and the fresh, delicious bread on every corner, the omnipresent produce in outdoor markets, the chance to speak in a language other than English on a regular basis and to be exotic and someone who stands out amid a sea of compatriots, being able to pay even amounts for meals and not having to calculate tax and tip and just leaving 2.40€ on the table and being done with it; back to a city that’s walkable to work and to fun and to water; and of course, back to playing pétanque.

I’ve been staying with my friend Kim for my first few days here so I could go apartment hunting in person. She lives in Gemenos, a small town outside of Aubagne, which is a slightly less small town outside of Marseille. I went into the lab on Friday to say hi to everyone again and meet with my advisor and get myself set up, and then took the train/bus combination back to Gemenos. As I’m getting off the bus and start meandering up to the apartment, I hear this mighty musical ruckus, and around the corner comes a troupe of fife-playing, drum-banging, and leg-kicking men, who veer, as a pack, into the nearest bar, violently playing a rather repetitive fife tune, and then all emerge, drinking pastis, to slap the onlookers on the back and loudly and enthusiastically talk about whatever it is they’re talking about. I ask the guy next to me what’s going on, and he says something about tradition and saints and how he lives upstairs of the bar they’ve currently invaded, but it’s impossible to hear him because there’s a 30-man fife and drum band playing fortissimo 10 meters in front of us. After everyone’s downed their pastis, they form up their ranks again and start marching up the street… right into the next bar, a good 100 meters away. I take the opportunity to ask an elderly couple what’s going on, and get a more complete but still insufficient explanation (again, awfully hard to hear anything), involving the summer solstice and this being only the beginning of a yearly festival that lasts through July.

I leave the band behind and continue walking up the path. In the town square there’s a big table set up, covered with bowls of nuts and bottles of alcohol (mostly pastis, of course). Here, slightly away from the tooting, I asked the guys manning the table what’s up. Seems it originated as a festival for St. John the Baptist (it was his Saint day), but it morphed into this town procession, in which the band goes around to each bar in the village (there are exactly six) (but they go two or three times each), playing this one traditional song over and over and over and drinking a pastis at each stop. Some of them (especially the dancers) were decidedly soused by the time I saw them.

 

I took a video because I was super excited about the fife-playing: here.

Brown Band, please note how the fifes click each other on the beat and how the drums click sticks. Also note the fife player on the right, who’s got a cigarette stuck between two fingers.  After you, you really wouldn’t want to let a little thing like fife playing be cause for discarding a cigarette…

A couple hours later, there was a concert by an actual band which was surprisingly good. The announcer came on stage to introduce them and said they were an all-female band, isn’t that amazing! Sure enough, a group of women start playing and singing, but about 30 seconds in, out struts the lead singer – a guy, of course, for maximal irony – wearing a ridiculously tight shirt and exceptionally pointy shoes as only these Continental folks can pull off. Another 30 seconds later, two backup dancers strut out and start dancing their little hearts out, Backstreet Boys-style. (Wearing, again, super-tight wifebeaters and athletic shorts, and doing air punches and head-over-heels flips and energetic gyrations.) It was absolutely hilarious, especially given how incredibly enthusiastic they all were, running around on stage. They started out by singing a medley of songs that included the word “crazy”, which all just somewhat arbitrarily morphed into each other. It got even stranger once they started to sing songs in English – the two female lead singers were fantastic, but it seemed that the guy, much like André the Giant in The Princess Bride, had learned all the words simply by remembering their sounds, and not doing a particularly good job at that. He sang (among other things), “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes, but instead of any of the words, was singing just consonant things and moving his mouth around, trying to make it look like he was actually singing in English. Seemed to fool most of the audience, except for one guy standing next to me with his mother, who spent (as I did) most of the concert cracking up and facepalming at the absurdity of the singing.

The coup de grace was when the two backup dancers came out for the grand finale wearing kilts and ties and were doing leaps and kicks and somersaults in time with the music. Ridiculous, but fantastic.

 

Now that I’m back in Marseille until mid-September, I’ll try to write somewhat frequent posts of any interesting doings that happen here. Cross your fingers for good stories!