The Rest of Paris in a Nutshell

The main activity of our fifth day was a visit to the Musée D’Orsay.  The building was formerly a train station. They were having a special exhibit of works by John Singer Sargent. One of his most famous works is Portrait of Madame X, seen here.

What I like most about seeing actual paintings rather than photographs of them is the ability to appreciate the brush work and paint application up close. The Femme au fichu vert by Camille Pissarro was one of my favorites from this perspective. You could see the how the paint was applied in gobs.

We spent the rest of the day roaming around. Dennis wanted to see the Pont Alexandre III, an ornate bridge crossing the Seine, so we headed that way. It is recognizable by its gilt statues as seen in the photos. We then wandered down the Champs-Elysées, which was closed to car traffic for a Christmas tree lighting, as far as the Arc de Triomphe.  We saved our visit to the inside of the Arc for another day as the weather was not great.

The next day we visited the Louvre. The Goya painting below was one of my favorites. The Mona Lisa is a bit underwhelming, especially since you can’t get close to it. The barrier keeps the crowd back about 15 to 20 feet. I’m not sure why people feel the need to take a picture of it. I have noticed in recent years that many people at museums simply walk around the entire time with their phones out taking pictures of nearly every work of art. Walk up to a painting, take a picture, walk to the next one, take a picture … Are they making a book? Will they ever look at all those photos?

Of course, Dennis had to have Escargot at dinner that night.

The next day we visited the Palais Garnier, an opera house built in the late 1800s at the behest of Napolean III. The interior is described as being “characteristic of Baroque sumptuousness”; see the photo of Dennis walking through the grand foyer. The ceiling area around the chandelier in the auditorium was repainted in 1964 by Marc Chagall.

We headed back down the Champs-Elysées, this time with the intention to visit the Arc de Triomphe. The traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe has 12 streets feeding into it!  Fortunately, there is an underground tunnel to access the center of the circle where the Arc is. We climbed the many stairs to the top and were rewarded with great views on a much better day than when we were there previously.  In one of the photos you can see the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre on the hill which we had visited a few days earlier.

On our last full day, we headed to Notre Dame Cathedral and nearby Sainte Chapelle (known for its beautiful stained glass windows). No sightings of the hunchback while at Notre Dame.

View of the outside of Notre Dame

Inside the Cathedral

Inside Sainte Chapelle

One item of interest is the statue of St. Denis outside Notre Dame. It depicts the saint holding his head as he wanders to find an appropriate spot to be final resting place.

The next day we started our trip home, heading to Barcelona to spend the night. The train trip was beset by delays and we ended up getting into the station more than four hours late. We ate dinner and then flopped into the bed. The second leg to Alicante went off without a hitch and we were soon back in our apartment.

We think we may visit Paris again in the future, as there is so much to see and do, but that will have to wait until after several other trips that are being considered.

Salud.

Visa Renewal (Bureaucracy Redux)

We may have mentioned previously in this blog that our initial visas were issued for one year. At the end of that year you need to renew your visa or leave the country. The renewal is for two years and the process can be initiated up to 60 days before or 90 days after your visa expires. Our initial visa began on January 16, 2025, so we could begin the renewal in mid-November.  If we were not approved we would need to be out of the Spain (and any other Schengen country) by April 16^th.

We were visiting Valencia in mid-November, but upon returning we started collecting documents and contacted an immigration lawyer to help us with the application.

One of the documents that we needed was an updated marriage certificate from the State of New Hampshire.  We decided to have Maureen’s sister send the application, a copy of Maureen’s ID, and a check to the vital records department to expedite the process.  The document needed to be mailed to Gilford, NH (our US address on our driver’s licenses) and then Dennis’ brother Steve would send it to us via overseas mail. He was also going to be mailing us a dividend check we had received and the original title for our car (we are considering selling it).

The marriage certificate was received in a timely manner and everything seemed to be on track.  We felt we had plenty of time.

We checked the mail daily for the envelope to no avail. In the past it had taken from 2 to 4 weeks to receive a letter from the US, but before we knew it we were into February. We began to fear the envelope had been lost.  We checked at the post office to see if it was being held there for some reason, but they could not find it. We finally gave up and re-ordered the marriage certificate, but this time we planned to have Steve send it to us priority mail expedited with tracking.

The re-ordered marriage certificate was received in Gilford on March 12^th. Our window was closing rapidly. We had Steve scan a copy of the document and email it to us so we could forward it to our lawyer.

Then came another curve ball. The immigration office was tightening their requirements for proving that you have the financial means to support yourself while in Spain. For the original visa it was enough to show that we had investments in the US and Social Security income. Now they wanted “certification” from the bank of the money.

Getting that certification and translating it to Spanish proved unworkable (our US bank told us we would need to personally appear in the branch office to prove identity for them to issue such a document) so our only option was to transfer the required amount of money to our Spanish bank.

Cue the frantic call to our financial advisor to have her transfer the necessary funds to our US bank account (have we mentioned that she is a superstar?). Once the money was in the US bank we began transferring money to Spain.

To transfer money to Spain we use a service called WISE which is very reasonable and usually fast. They do have limits on how much money you can send at one time so we had to do two transactions and, of course, there was a few days between for the funds to clear (in today’s day and age of technology, that does not really make sense to us, but it is what it is).

We met with the lawyer on March 17 and went over our application with her. She related that we were down to the wire and needed to get the money confirmation by the end of that week.  Fortunately, the money was in our Spanish bank on the 19^th and we were able to send her the confirmation from the bank.

Now all we could do was wait and hope. We began mapping out scenarios of where we would go if we did not get the renewal.  One option was the “Schengen shuffle” where you go in and out of the Schengen (most of Europe) area so that you never violate the “90 days in any 180 days rule”. Great Brittain and Ireland were top contenders since they are not in the Schengen area. Certainly workable, but not preferable.

We were doing chores in downtown Alicante when we got a message from our lawyer saying that our visa renewals had been approved! A huge weight had been lifted and a visit to our favorite tapas bar was warranted for celebration.

The next step was to apply for the renewal of our national ID cards. This had been difficult the first time (because we initially relied on an immigration lawyer to make our appointments). We learned from our experience and after several days of Maureen obsessively checking for appointments to be made available, we were finally able to get them. Another victory!

So, by the end of May we should have our new cards in hand and not have to worry about dealing with the Spanish bureaucracy for another couple of years.

And now the kicker. Remember that first envelope that Steve sent to us? It finally arrived (3 months after being mailed)! Apparently, it had been “missent to Bermuda”. A fitting end to this tale we think.

Salud.