I’m Really Not Going to Go Riding in Paris

I’m really not.

The Club Hippique website is quaintly translated into English, and the number of forms that need downloading before you can even set your foot in a stirrup is mind boggling.

Or not, if you know anything about French bureaucracy. A nice portmanteau word, that: bureau and crazy.

I think I’d investigated this last year, before I went over in January, and discovered that you need to have a license to ride a horse. This may have been down to more quaint translations, but I swear, I didn’t even bat an eye. Of course you would have to have a license to ride a horse in France. Bien sur, indeed.

A number of years ago, I had lived in Paris for a handful of months, hoping that my Irish Passport would be ‘done’ in time. It didn’t work out that way. As a back up, I’d gone through the many, many, many channels of many crazy bureaus and gotten my Carte de Sejour, a document that required no less than at least ten documents to produce it into existence, and had only the medical examination to swan through to get my year’s permission to stay… before I had to do the whole thing over again.

It was much simpler to go back to New York, only to secure my dual citizenship and head over here.

That experience has put me off filling out forms for the French, for life. Nope, not going riding in Paris this week. Even thought the notion of the trails in the Bois are deeply alluring.