Our day in Chambery

Janice and I spent the better part of yesterday in Chambery with several couples from the school. We travelled there to see a radiologist and a doctor as part of the process to get our long-stay visas. Apparently the French are concerned about TB so we all had to get chest x-rays. There was no foolin' around with these doctors. Go in to the room, take all of your clothes off from the waist up, stand in the correct spot, and hold your breath. Bam! picture's taken and you're done. The whole process took less than 2 minutes. They processed about 15 of us in about 60 minutes.

Then, we hand carried our x-rays across town to a doctor who asked us a bunch of questions. After filling out some paperwork he handed each person 2 sheets of paper and said something like, "You can now get your long-stay visas. One copy is for you. One is for the Mayor's office." He never even looked at the x-rays!

I have included a couple of photos of our trip. One thing we all noticed was how dirty Chambery appeared. We felt lucky to be living in Albertville after this trip.

I took this picture while we were driving home. It is along the freeway. You'll notice that the flagger is mechanical. "He" waives his arm up and down to draw the attention of the drivers. At high speed these dummies look pretty realistic.

We were having a hard time finding our way back to the freeway until we saw the sign for the Albertville McDonalds (hiding behind the traffic signal luminaire). Once we saw that we knew we were home-free. (Somebody in the car commented that they must've done that for dumb Americans. Ha!)

sf