Getting a phone and the Navigo

Firstly the phone – I tried Souhila's SIM in my cheap English brick and it worked, so gathered I would just get a sim, but the sim was €15 and to get a phone was only an extra €5 so I thought I might as well get the phone. The cheapest Nokia I could see with a PAYG sim was about €30-€40. I got a little Samsung E1170 and it cost €20 which included a sim and €5 credit. Also, you’ll need a form of identity to buy a phone in France – even if it’s only PAYG. If you top it up in the shop they'll probably do it for you or give you a hand. With SFR your top up lasts a certain period of time and the deals are nowhere near as good as in England, I topped up €35 and got €10 free which wasn't too bad.

Secondly, for the Navigo, the French website https://www.navigo.fr/pages/accueil.html is a tad useless, so we went to an information point to go and suss it all out. Essentially it’s free if you are a resident of Paris (need a contract or a bill or something like that), but they don’t want to give it for free to foreigners – even if you are living in Paris. Thankfully I had Souhila, and I also explained to the lady that I was working here and even paying French tax, so she gave me the card for free (you can pay €5 for something called a Navigo Découverte which is the same thing really). This is where passport photos come in use, I took mine along but the lady used a webcam to load a photo onto the card (which made me look very pale and very English). Bex on the otherhand with her Découverte had her passport photo stuck onto the card.

You then load your card at a machine. I got a Navigo Mois – month which was €62 for zones 1 and 2 and my work reimburses half of it every month. Make sure you get a receipt which also shows the zones on it, but when you give it to work make sure you get it back, because if you lose your pass the people at the station will get you a new one with your pass still on it! 

Hope that's of some use to someone out there!