When you arrive in France and go through customs, your passport stamp gives you three months in which you can stay in the country. Should you, like us, wish to stay longer, you either need to exit the country and re-enter (and hope you don't get caught), just stay as an illegal alien (and really hope you don't get caught), or get a French visa allowing a longer (typically one year) stay.
After some debate about the requirements and options and whether I should instead establish my Dutch citizenship, we decided to apply for one-year French visitor's visas.
The first step in the process was to gather all of the information required to apply -- fill out an application (of course, in French) for all four of us, have passport photos taken of each of us, write letters promising not to work in France, get letters from our US employers, show proof of income and medical insurance, gather marriage certificates and birth certificates, show proof of accommodation and details associated with your flight into France, etc.
We then did an overnight trip to San Francisco in mid-June to visit the French embassy. All four of us went and we brought the pile of paperwork -- with originals and copies of every document --to the appointment. For some reason I pictured we'd be sitting in a room discussing our plans with a French bureaucrat sitting behind a desk. What we found instead was like a visit to the DMV or post office. There was a counter with three officials that would call out your name and you would very publicly go up and present your documents.
The mood in the room was tense and got much worse when the young woman ahead of us started arguing with an official. She wanted to stay in France for six months until her marriage there in December and that was a problem for some reason. In response to the official's "no, it cannot be done", she kept repeating that she "read it on the Internet". That didn't get very far with him. Finally, after raised voices and much debate, he asked whether she spoke French. She responded with a hopeful but unconvincing "Oui". That raised my blood pressure about 30 points as I awaited our turn.
When our name was called I brought up our pile of paper and the official asked me for "the application". I started to hand over the entire stack -- assuming it comprised the full application he was referring to -- and he responded very sternly that he wanted "only the application form". My blood pressure went up further.
After that, however, we got into a good rhythm. He would ask for a specific piece of paperwork and I would silently hand it over. After about 20 minutes of that and some photos and fingerprints, we were done for the day. Surprisingly, our passports showed up in the mail in a few days with the French visas. We had what we needed to get into France for an extended stay. But, we weren't done yet. More in Part 2.
After some debate about the requirements and options and whether I should instead establish my Dutch citizenship, we decided to apply for one-year French visitor's visas.
The first step in the process was to gather all of the information required to apply -- fill out an application (of course, in French) for all four of us, have passport photos taken of each of us, write letters promising not to work in France, get letters from our US employers, show proof of income and medical insurance, gather marriage certificates and birth certificates, show proof of accommodation and details associated with your flight into France, etc.
We then did an overnight trip to San Francisco in mid-June to visit the French embassy. All four of us went and we brought the pile of paperwork -- with originals and copies of every document --to the appointment. For some reason I pictured we'd be sitting in a room discussing our plans with a French bureaucrat sitting behind a desk. What we found instead was like a visit to the DMV or post office. There was a counter with three officials that would call out your name and you would very publicly go up and present your documents.
The mood in the room was tense and got much worse when the young woman ahead of us started arguing with an official. She wanted to stay in France for six months until her marriage there in December and that was a problem for some reason. In response to the official's "no, it cannot be done", she kept repeating that she "read it on the Internet". That didn't get very far with him. Finally, after raised voices and much debate, he asked whether she spoke French. She responded with a hopeful but unconvincing "Oui". That raised my blood pressure about 30 points as I awaited our turn.
When our name was called I brought up our pile of paper and the official asked me for "the application". I started to hand over the entire stack -- assuming it comprised the full application he was referring to -- and he responded very sternly that he wanted "only the application form". My blood pressure went up further.
After that, however, we got into a good rhythm. He would ask for a specific piece of paperwork and I would silently hand it over. After about 20 minutes of that and some photos and fingerprints, we were done for the day. Surprisingly, our passports showed up in the mail in a few days with the French visas. We had what we needed to get into France for an extended stay. But, we weren't done yet. More in Part 2.
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