Dateline France:

I has been about three weeks since we've arrived in France, and I
thought I'd put down my impressions and send them off to everyone.
So some of you may already know some of this.

First, many thanks to Dick and Nancy K. for warning us to bring certificates
of every major event (birth, marriage, first drink of wine) and lots of
little pictures of ourselves.  We've needed everything we've brought at
some point so far.  The French love forms, rubber stamps and little
photos.  When we applied for our identity cards, they first gave us
an appointment sheet that told us when to come back and what papers
to bring (and 5 photos).  They stamped it a bunch of times.  When we
went back for the appointment, they took all our papers, and gave us
each a receipt with three stamps on it and one of the pictures.  This
piece of paper must be presented eventually when we get the identity
cards, but who knows when that will be.   Kaye having a different last
name presented a few problems (good thing we sent for a copy of our
marriage license).  A wife having a different last name still seems to
be a rarity in France.  On the other hand, they will issue you a
Certificat de Concubinage that indicates you are officially living with
someone out of wedlock.  It allows your companion to be covered by
family health benefits and the like.  (I'm thinking about lying about
being married just to get a certificate.)

The town we live in, Le Vesinet, is 30 minutes directly west of Paris,
inside one of the "buckles" of the Seine.  The nearest town that shows
up on most maps is St. Germain-en-Laye, where Loius XIV was born.
Le Vesinet is a suburban development laid out in the 19th century.  They
did developments a little differently then.  There are 5 artificial
"lakes" (big ponds, actually), with streams connecting them, and ducks
and swans that live on the streams.  At least a tenth of the town is
parks, and most of the houses are mansions.  It is all very clean and
rather quiet (especially in August, when all of Germany comes to France
and all the French go to Spain).  We live on the second  (French) floor
of an apartment building near the edge of town.  There is a park for
little kids across the street, and Kaye has already met some neighbors
there, a fair number of whom speak English (because they like languages,
or they or a spouse is American or English).

It's about a 15 minute walk to town, where the train station, main shops,
and weekly market is.  There is also a butcher, baker and grocery a couple
blocks from us.  A short drive away is a hypermarche, which is like
a Fred Meyer with all the departments rolled into one.  Kaye made the
mistake of going to one on a Saturday afternoon, and thinks the French
handle shopping carts the way they drive.  Haven't been to many restaurants
yet, but I am doing research on an existence proof of a drinkable bottle
of wine for 6 francs.

The apartment gets a lot of light (the building is only as wide as the
apartment), has three small bedrooms, a study, a living room with a dining
area off it and a kitchen.  One and 2 half baths, none with a real shower.
There's a washing machine with an hour-and-a-half cycle.  It gets things
white (even if they were colored to start with).  There is no dryer and
no oven, other than a little counter-top ditty.   A little short on lamps
two, but it will do us fine for the year.  My favorite feature is a little
chute in a closet off the kitchen where you can just toss your garbage,
and it ends up in a big can down below.  For those of you who don't have
it, our address is 41 bis Avenue de Lorraine
                   78110 Le VESINET
                   France

Kaye was very brave and flew off on her own two days after we got here to
pick up a Volvo we ordered from Sweden.  (The Swedish government would give
us a registration good for a year, as opposed for 6 months for France or
Germany.)  She took an overnight ferry from Gothenburg to Kiel, then did
her first driving on the Autobahn, stayed one night in the city of
Valkenburg in Holland, and made it here by 4pm the next day.  I was waiting
with champagne and lobster.  A Volvo is a large car by French standards,
and most parking places around here seem more like hypotheses than theorems.
Many thanks to Francoise Bellgarde and daughter for informing us about
no right turns on red lights and the aggressive interpretation of
"right of way".

We have tried to take the kids a lot of places before school starts.  They
have been into Paris four times and can go for 10 or 11 hours at stretch.
We have been to the gardens at Versailles when they had the "Grand Waters"
show, in which they turn on all the fountains, and open up a couple
normally closed areas.  We are saving the Chateau for when all the
Japanese and German tourists are back to work.  This weekend we plan to
explore St. Germain, and next week there is a "Secondhand Goods and
Ham Fair" in the next town.   Kaye has to get busy putting some columns
together.  I have borrowed a Mac from work, but it is an AZERTY keyboard,
which means I work on object-oriented dqtqbqses.  There is a QWERTY
keyboard on order.

I've been playing musical desks here at GIP Altair, but I think I am
finally in the right office.  There are four people coming and four
people going, but there are constraints like getting people in the
same groups together, and segregating smokers and non-smokers.  I really
haven't gotten into my work here yet--there have been things to finish up
from OGC, and I had to fly back to San Francisco to talk at IFIP.  I
also have a stack of papers to read for the Extending Database Technology
Conference next March.  Dave DeWitt is here, and we are going to be
learning the O2 database system over the next month.

The excitement this week has been getting the kids into school.  We thought
at first that Sarah would not be able to attend the preschool near us,
but she got off the waiting list at the last minute.   She seems to like
it, but it breaks up Kaye's day a little to have to pick her up for
lunch and take her back in the afternoon.  No school on Wednesday, but
half a day on Saturday.  She seems to like it, even though she doesn't
know any French yet.  Luke is going to the Lycee Internationale in 
St. Germain.  He has a regular French teacher, plus two half days of
English.  However, his section is composed of kids who don't speak
French or who are not yet fluent.  But by his third day there, he
is writing cursively in French, and not too concerned by it.  His classroom
is in a castle, and he gets *served* a three-course lunch every day.
Figuring out the bus he takes has been educational.  We tried to find
out from the bus company exactly where the stop is.  They claimed there
was a yellow mark on the road.   No such luck.  Another mother actually
had someone from the company come out, who agreed there was no yellow
mark.  Their final advice was to ask the merchants where it stopped.
Luke missed the bus the first day; Kaye was waiting in the wrong place
that evening.  She thinks she has converged on the correct stop, and
Luke seems to keeps his wits about him and get himself off the bus at
the right time.

So much for now.

Dave Maier


PS to Ron Cole: I've seen a lot of people coming back from vacation with
windsurfboards strapped on their Renaults.  I presume there is somewhere
in France they windsurf, but maybe they just use the sails for a little
extra speed on the highway.