Imprisoned !
The first to leave was Wiggles. Poor thing. He was also the last to arrive.
As a condition of our move, explained here, I negotiated special handling for our scrappy and beloved feline friend. He might have been a big shot as he wandered the network of backyards that linked our Brooklyn block, hissing at other cats and torturing the local rodent underground. But put him in a car or cat caddy and he would be reduced to a howling, scaredy-cat, poised to escape at the slightest opportunity and quite willing to rip your face off to do so. Indeed, he worked on his claws for several meticulous hours each day, honing them to razor-like sharpness on the trees and fencerows of his proprietary Brooklyn playground for just an event. You always knew when Wigs had made a trip to the vet from the rows of angry scratch marks that striped my cheeks and shoulders.
If Jim’s company wanted him in Paris that badly, they would have to hire a profession pet courier for Wigs. C’est tout. Let him scratch someone else bloody.
So the company agreed, despite the unnatural expense. And thus began our first blush with French bureaucracy.
Mon dieu!
Because, as it happens, the French will approve nothing without a complete dossier, often in triplicate, and the overpriced idiot pet transporter, who was paid to get Wiggles from Park Slope to Paris in under 12 hours, lost the papers en route. He’d taped to the pet carrier one full copy of the dossier, which detailed all the tests and jabs and chips that Wiggles had received in keeping with French national requirements, and they’d come detached and gone very much missing. And they were the originals!
Mon dieu! The French men in suits informed us. Duplicates just will not do!
So Wigs was not allowed out of Charles de Gaule airport. He was imprisoned…for a full week!
Because that’s how long it took the French authorities to review the newly-minted and 24-hr FedExed documents, signed and sent aux urgence by the pet transport company upon Wigs’ arrival. That’s how long it took them to deem Wigs fit to commune with his French confrères.
Imagine having had the run of Brooklyn parks and gardens and then tout à coup having to live cooped up in a cat caddy for a whole miserable week. In an airport, no less, unable to understand anything being said by the people who hold your freedom in their hands.
Poor Wigs!
Next, it would be my turn.
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Image by Chachacha369, coutesy of Wikimedia Commons.