Opening a bank account and walks around Barentin

Yesterday I went downton to open my first ever French bank account.  That was somewhat of a fiasco, which I will talk about later, but first here are some pictures of Barentin that I haven’t shown you yet.

This is the running trail that starts quite close to the high school where I am living. I’m not entirely sure how far it goes, but I believe it goes all the way across Barentin, which is at least a few miles.  It’s very shady, level and nicely maintained, so I’m excited to start using it.  Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve been all messed up with my sleep schedule and my meal schedule, but now that I’m getting used to the new time-zone I’m excited to put running back into my routine.

You’ve probably had quite enough with the “city hall pictures," but I do feel obliged to post one of Barentin. It’s a nice focal point for “centre ville” since it’s on one side of a big square in the middle of the town.

In the middle of that square is this fountain and strange statue.  It’s a little awkward, and I’m not sure what it’s about, but I’m sure there’s some hidden meaning…I think it's the "ow I stubbed my toe statue." 

And then there’s this slightly awkward statue as well.  Honestly, I think most statues are pretty awkward and funny…and Barentin seems to have a ton of statues everywhere! So I’ve got a lot of statues to enjoy this year. It’s pretty cool here because there is literally a new statue everywhere you turn.

…and sometimes there are random old arches in the middle of nowhere. Pretty fancy entrance to your housing development, am I right?

It seems like everywhere you go in this town you cross the same little river over and over.  I kind of like it because they put flowers on all of the bridges and it makes it fun to see the same waterway all the time in different places.

Okay well those are all of my pictures, but there’s also the story of my bank account.  It was actually easy to open the account since all they needed was my passport and other information stating that I have housing and employment, but towards the end of the short process the account kept denying them the ability to fully open it.  The nice woman who was helping me seemed fully perplexed and she called two different people for help and finally had someone come in to look at what she was doing, just to make sure she hadn’t forgotten something.

Finally, they realized that there was a hold on the account because there is a law in the US that Americans can’t open foreign bank accounts without notifying the IRS!  Then a W-9 form (Something that verifies your address and social security number for banks in other countries) popped up on the screen and they were even more confused.  “But it’s in English! What do we do with this??” Anyway, it wasn’t too complex once we had figured out what the problem was, but I was surprised all the same. You’d think I was trying to immigrate from communist China or something…Oh no! It’s just the US, land of the free!