WaterFalls

At the start of the month I received in the mail, two bills, one for the gas and one for the electric. Now of course all of these bills are in French, so to read them at all I have to translate the text with computer and dictionary. Still this is not too bad of a task. The other interesting thing is that most of the time when people pay bills here they do it via bank transfers. In other words you write down your bank account information and sign the statement authorizing them to take the money from your account. It is almost like they are giving you a check and you just have to put your information on it.

The bills had two parts two them. The first part was the regular bill for the month, not too hard to fill out and I did so. There was also a second part where you could authorize them to automatically take out both. This sounded like a good idea to me and so I filled this form out as well. Of course what I didn't realize is that the automatic bill starts this month not next. (laughing yet?). Since the gas and electric company are basically one and the same, I filled both sets of bills out the same way and mailed them off.

Two days later I get a notice from both the gas and electric company saying I need to pay my bills. Of course I had only received them a few days ago, but this was because I was starting up in the middle of the billing cycle, but the bills are in the mail, it should all be fine and dandy I think.

Fast forward two more weeks. I receive a letter from the gas company saying that I STILL haven't paid my bill and that if I don't do so soon bad things will happen. I know the mail can be slow here, but I'm starting to worry by this point. There is also a phone number you can call and talk to a real person. A real person who doesn't speak any English at all (I tried 4 times). Luckily for me I have a friend here who helped me call and we figured it all out. Here's what happened.

The gas company received BOTH my regular bill and the automatic one. However since I had authorized them to pay on both statements, there was obviously a mistake. What if I wanted it paid on the normal one and not the monthly one but they took the money out of the automatic one?!?! I might be devastated by the fact that the money is coming out of the wrong (same) bank account. So of course they do nothing, nothing except send me a letter saying that I haven't paid my bill yet. But now we have a nice helpful man on the phone and ask if he can make one of the payments count. No, they can't do that. I have to pay again, but since it is so late, I have to pay in person at the post office with cash. Oh boy! The electric company does the same thing the next day, but at least by this point I know what is going on and it isn't quite so confusing.

The moral of the story? If you are paying bills in France, be sure you pay them an odd number of times because otherwise the payments will cancel each other out.

On a more fun note, I went out hiking in the mountains yet again. This time with two people from church: a guy named Erkki who also works at CERN and a girl named Lauren from Australia. Erkki has a much nicer camera than I do and took a lot of the pictures posted here, thanks Erkki. The hike was in a place that is famous for its waterfalls in the spring as the snow up top all starts to melt. We saw a few of the waterfalls but most were dry unfortunately. That isn't to say that it was a beautiful day and a great hike. It was a long hike as well. We went up about 1200 meters in elevation and were on the trail for almost 9 hours. One of these days I'll actually go visit places other than mountains. Oh wait, it's almost ski season. Make that 'when ski season is over, I'll go visit places around Europe... until the weather is nice enough to go hiking in the mountains again.

Pictures with a * after the name are ones taken by Erkki and not me.

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