Welcome back to Amelie’s world …

One week in Paris already … looking for an appartment and rediscovering so many things I had forgotten about life in Paris :

- Everything is longer, people take their time which is good on one hand, and terribly frustrating on the other hand when you go to the bakery and wait for long minutes to get your standard sandwich w/ french baguette…

- The subway … even if our subway system is way cleaner and newer than in NY, the main subway lines in Paris are overcrowded during peak hours. Weirdly enough, this is not the case in NY and you are not ’squashed up like sardines’ in the wagon. Parisians are so used to it that they no longer realize that commuting in Paris is real assault course.

- CDI ou CDD … ? Ah !! What would France without his CDD vs CDI !? The CDI stand sfor “contrat à durée déterminée” vs CDI which means “contrat durée indeterminée”. In other words, if you really not want to be looser in France, you’d better have your ‘CDI’ because people will consider you as ‘unstable’ with a limited term contract (CDD). “Bienvenue en France les amis !”. Our labour market was designed to prevent companies from laying off their employess too easily and quickly (because as people would tell you : “we care about our people “…). Because our politics then realized that we needed some kind of flexibility in our labour market, they invented a ‘magic’ limited term contract (CDD) and called the perpetual one : “CDI”. As it now turns out, this measure is totally couterproductive since companies rarely lay-off people with a perpetual contract CDI (because too expensive to do so) and the other layer of population with a CDD is discriminated and struggles to find an appartment.

But a petit déjeuner in a French bistrot, walking in Montmartre a Sunday morning, enjoying the Parisian lanscape from le Sacré-Coeur, this is ‘priceless’ mon ami ….

Thomas