Glasses

I have had the same pair of glasses for 7 years. I like them, but I've had a hankering for a change for a while now. Well, I noticed that this place with good reviews was having a sale, buy one pair of glasses, get the next two for 1€ apiece. I thought to myself, Hot diggity, I think this might be the time to change. So I looked at the fine print, where it said that one of the extra pairs had to come from a pre-selected collection, and I thought, that's not too bad, I can live with that.

So I woke up Monday morning (feeling like P. Diddy), I grabbed my glasses, was out the door, and was gonna hit the city. I got to the optometrist and really wasn't sure what to do. There was no front desk, all the salespeople were occupied, and I hadn't been to an optometrist in France before, so I really had no clue about protocol. I sat down where a bunch of ladies were sitting, waiting. After about 10 minutes, I looked over at one of the desks and saw someone new standing there: the receptionist, who had apparently just arrived. I went to her, asked for an eye exam, and she was like, Do you have insurance? I had a moment of worry: Was the exam only free if you had insurance that covered it? In any event, I answered that I didn't, and they said, Well, you'll just have to pay the normal price for glasses. A big relief.

After about 10 minutes of waiting, the optometrist took me into an exam room. The technology floored me. I don't know if it's the fact that France has such good health care (which occasionally carries over into French Guiana) or if it's the fact that I haven't gotten an eye exam in five years, but I was impressed. The first thing they had me do was look one eye at a time into this little machine that showed a picture of a road leading to a multicolor hot air balloon. The picture was clear, then blurry, then clear. At the end of two minutes, there was a printout of the shape of my eyes, complete with the astigmatism. Un-frickin'-real.

Then we went through the part of the exam that I was more familiar with, where you look at the letters and read them off, then make judgments about which view is better. The only part I didn't recognize (and therefore messed up) was when there was a screen split between red and green colors with some large letters. I was asked which color stood out more, and it wasn't until we got to my second eye that I noticed that one side was supposed to be blurrier than the other. I was focusing so much on the colors that I ignored the letters. I'm not too concerned, though. At the end of the exam, he told me to compare my vision with my current glasses with the view that he was about to prescribe me. I needed new glasses badly, apparently.

So I went out, and an associate sat down with me and helped me figure out how much my lenses were going to cost. It turned out that it was buy one lens, get one free, so I could get much better frames than I had anticipated, staying right within my budget. The salesman helped me pick out some frames, offering his opinion on what looked good but also helping me realize that if I picked frames that didn't completely go around the lens (i.e. like the frames I've been sporting since July 2004), they'd have to give me slimmer, more expensive lenses. So he helped me a lot. Unfortunately, one thing the billboard didn't make clear was that the 1 euro pair of glasses had to BOTH be from the pre-established selection; if I wanted to get a frame that wasn't from that selection, I'd pay full price for it (but the lenses would still be free). So I ended up getting the pair that I liked best that was made in Europe, rather than another one that I liked that was from the US figuring I could get it in the US for cheaper if I really wanted it. I also got a back-up pair and a pair of sunglasses. The three together totaled 261€, 11€ above my target, due almost entirely to the fact that sunglass lenses were a 10€ fee (which I knew from the start). All three pairs will be ready in a week (which for me is insanely long, since here we usually get ours in an hour or so). Once I get them, I'll put pictures up.