Things are Starting to Fall Into Place

I downloaded a countdown app which tells me how long until I leave. As of right now, there are just over 44 days until I leave on the biggest adventure of my life. Being a planner, I’ve been trying to get as many things settled as I can before it’s time to go so that there are as few details left up in the air as possible. This pre-planning has also shown me, though, that I may not be able to get everything finalized before I go and that I need to be ok with just letting some of those details work out as I get places.

My intention is to live and work in France. I’m a nurse in the United States, but I plan to start my expat adventure by teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL). I will be taking my TEFL certification course at TEFL Toulouse, a partner of the International TEFL Academy (ITA) in Chicago, the organization through which I’ve chosen to get my certification. My amazing admissions advisor at ITA, Amanda Saccaro, was so good about answering all of my (many, MANY) questions and helping me while I was trying to decide if TEFL was something I wanted to do, and then which organization I wanted to go through to obtain my certification. If you’ve ever thought about getting a TEFL certification, I highly recommend talking with Amanda at ITA and she’ll help answer any questions you have. Once I had decided to go through ITA, I had a choice between taking the certification online over 11 weeks, which is how the majority of people obtain it, or by doing it in person through ITA or one of their partner organizations around the world. After doing TONS of research on the pros and cons of each type of training, I decided to take the plunge and do the four-week intensive in-person certification class in Toulouse, France.

I’ve always dreamed of living in France, ever since I spent the summer there when I was 15, and getting my TEFL certification in France is one step towards that lifelong dream. Since I am over age 35, the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF) and its visa is unfortunately not an option for me, so I’ve had to figure out another option to get a visa that will allow me to stay in France long-term. I can travel to France on a 90-day tourist visa, but I am not eligible to work on that visa and the 90 days applies to the entire Schengen area within Europe, so if I want to travel around Europe at all, I’d have to do it within those 90 days. My next visa option is to obtain a student visa, but in order to do that, I’d have to enroll in and pay for university classes for at least one semester (and then, of course, attend and work hard at those classes). Not only is that a more expensive option due to having to pay for school, but I’d be limited to working 20 hours or fewer per week, so not a great way to make a living. The option that I’ve chosen to try for is the long-stay visa, but there is a great deal of uncertainty with that visa, at least at the outset. I originally submitted my online application for my long-stay visa at the beginning of April. Because the French Consulates in the US changed to a new system to book visa interview appointments, it took me several phone calls and another few days just to get an interview appointment booked, and then the appointment wasn’t until the end of May! Since the visa has to be issued prior to my departure from the United States, I am so glad that I started looking into the visa as soon as I made the decision to go overseas and didn’t wait until it was closer to time to leave. Had I waited, there would have been no chance of my getting an interview appointment prior to leaving the US and I would have had to either choose another country to live and work in or to come back to the US to apply for a long-stay or student visa. Once my visa interview takes place, it can still take up to two weeks until I find out whether my visa has been approved, but I’m choosing to remain positive and hope that I’ll get the visa.

I still have some time until my interview appointment and determination, but there’s plenty to do in the meantime. Here are some of the things I need to remember to do before I leave:

– Get a power of attorney drawn up so that one of my family members can take care of important business for me while I’m overseas.
– Get an international driving permit (from my local AAA office)
– Make sure my current US driver’s license will still be valid for at least a year
– Make sure my passport is valid for at least a few years
– Cancel the subscriptions to things I won’t need (my local public broadcasting station, SiriusXM and OnStar in my car, Amazon Prime and Netflix {though, truth be told, I’m still up in the air on these since I might be able to use them overseas}).
– Get a dental cleaning, eye exam, physical exam, etc. and make sure my immunizations are up-to-date
– Arrange a VPN service to use once I’m overseas
– Start unsubscribing to all the marketing emails I receive (this has actually been pretty cathartic and has helped clean up my inbox)
– Set up this blog, an Instagram account, and an email address to document my travels

If you’ve read through this far, thank you so much for sticking with me! This is my first real blog and I promise it will get more interesting as I start my travels. I started this blog in the hopes that it will be able to help someone else who is thinking about going overseas and is looking for some information. I have read through and bookmarked countless other blogs lately and they have been such an incredible help to me, so I’m hoping to pay it forward. If you have any questions or input, please feel free to contact me through this site or at expatmaineiac@gmail.com

The Expat Maineiac