Right from the time, I received my paperwork formality details in India from the French Embassy, the scariest thing was OFII (de l’Office Français d’Immigration et de l’Intégration).
Why?– It’s the OFII sticker on your passport that validates your long stay visa in France and is equivalent to carte de sejour (residence permit).
I remember how I freaked out on my arrival in Nice, when I noticed that the authorities at the Munich Airport didn’t stamp my Visa. The departure stamp and the arrival stamp are the two most important formalities for OFII (along with a few others that I am going to mention here).
So, the first thing that you’d be required to do is to fill up an OFII form given by your home country. You fill that up while applying for the VISA. I received the OFII form the French Embassy in India along with the VISA forms. You simply fill-up some easy details including your name, address, passport number and parent’s name, and that’s it. (At this stage it’s not required to fill in a lot of details about your housing and place of stay in France— that you’d do upon arrival.
Important Documents:
To be complete, you OFII file must have the following documents:
– La photocopie de la première page du passeport avec mention de l’état civil et photo
– La photocopie de la page du visa
– La photocopie de la page du passeport avec le timbre d’entrée en France
– Une photo d’identité
– Un justificatif de domicile/ une attestation de logement avec la pièce d’identité de votre propriétaire
– La demande d’attestation de l’OFII dûment complétée et tamponnée par le Consulat-
(This is the document that we receive from our home country)
Some academies ask you to send all these documents by post during your first week in France. My academy was super cool so our gestionnaire collected the documents from us during our orientation day. It was good that way because I had heard a lot of ‘file-got-lost’ stories from a lot of people. It took us a month to hear regarding our viste medicale.
About the visit
I always manage to create a special connect with doctors. They ask me about my age and then check my weight, and then look at me again to confirm my age. And then comes the usual question- ‘Don’t you eat?” So this wasn’t the first time when my 41Kg left the doctors wondering.
Anyway, as I entered the OFII office, I was asked to show the ‘convocation’- the letter that I received about my medical visit along with my passport. We were asked to carry a passport-size photo but no one really asked for it there.
As I entered there was already a long queue, so I was asked to take a seat and wait for my turn. The timing that was mentioned on my convocation was 08:30 am and I reached the place ten minutes late. So the only trouble with coming late is that you‘d have to wait a little longer for your turn. So it’s really normal to be late by 5-10 minutes.
The tests included:
Eye-sight test
Chest X-ray
A few general questions about health and vaccinations
And in my case- a few questions about what I should eat to put on some good weight!
And that’s it, immediately after that, I was called for the much awaited- OFII STAMP.
I found a really detailed blog post by another assistant who is currently in Bordeaux while looking for an Image for my blog post. And Here it goes. – CLICK HERE
