The shuttle service was ready and waiting for us when we blinked our way into the Paris sunshine on the 2nd. For a mere 10€ (euros) extra, the driver was willing to take our bags as well ourselves into the city from the Charles de Gaulle airport.
About 40 minutes later, we were unloading our baggage onto the sidewalk in front of our new home address in the diverse 9th arrondissement.
A bit of background: For administrative reasons, Napoleon divided Paris into districts, or arrondissements. There are 20 of them in all, starting with the 1st on the Ile de la Cité (the original city of Paris, where Notre-Dame is situated), and spiraling out from there. The closest American parallel I can make is a borough. [For New Yorkers and other city dwellers accustomed to an urban grid configuration, Paris is downright vexing. This snail-shell distribution of the arrondissements is only the beginning. There’s no grid at all, no uptown, no East Side. The Left Bank/Right Bank (rive gauche/rive droite) isn’t all that helpful, to me at least. Paris is a web, vaguely circular yet irregular and possessing a certain elegance in its layout. Without a detailed street map, however, most Parisians are lost in neighborhoods new to them; most Parisians carry such maps with them at all times, clever and practical folk that they are.] Our arrondissement is known for its significant landmark, the Opera House, which of course no longer has any opera performed in it (the new Opera House is in the Bastille and opened in the late 1980s; it’s an ugly, uncomfortable behemoth of a building, but I digress. The Opera House in the 9th is where Phantom of the Opera takes place, and there is a lake underneath and a huge chandelier up above just for literary accuracy’s sake. This section (or quartier) makes the 9th seem snooty and upscale, but north of the Grands Boulevards (a series of major roads that run east-west north of the Seine), where we live, is on the way to Montmartre, a more risqué and less affluent area. It looks like we are nicely situated in between these two well-known quartiers. Thank you for your attention. Now, back to our story.
So, here we are with our stuff, hunting around for some euros to pay the driver with, when I notice that – of course – there’s a numeric keypad just outside the building entrance that requires a code. This digicode system is in practice all over the city. Normally, there’s a button below the pad that allows you to open the door without a code during the day, so that deliveries and workers can easily enter the building. Our building has no such button, and I realized that we didn’t know the code. What to do? Well, knowing that our apartment was on the ground floor (that’s the rez-de-chaussée in French), we went ahead and knocked on the window to the left of the entryway. Fortunately, this worked.
A woman of a certain age, Madame Chevaillier, greeted us warmly. It was soon evident that she spoke not a word of English, meaning that I would need to take the lead on communicating with her. She thoughtfully offered us a beverage and a snack (cookies, marshmallows, and fruit), before letting us know that she had waited all day the previous day for us, since our lease began on the 1st. Just a little guilt-inducing statement, but oh well. So we begin to tour the apartment, and it becomes clear that it’s a duplex. Nothing against them, generally, but we had specified that we did not want to take a place that required our walking through one bedroom to access the other. Well, here we are on Day 1 of our Paris Adventure, and not only do we need to walk through Meredith’s room to get to ours, which is up a creaky, windy, narrow staircase, but we have to do this to get to a bathroom, as well! Nothing of the kind was mentioned in the on-line description and depiction of the apartment, but nothing could be done about it at the time and it certainly wasn’t our landlady’s fault that we didn’t know this in advance.
Apart from the layout challenges, the apartment is quite lovely and suits our needs well. The dining room is separated from the living room (salon-séjour) by an archway and the small but well-equipped kitchen is off the living room. The bathroom (salle d’eau) adjacent to Meredith’s cosy little room has (drumroll) an actual shower! Upstairs, we have a French bathroom (bathtub and sink) and a separate toilet (or WC, or water closet), and a comfortably appointed bedroom. The décor generally evokes the 18th century, with lots of drapery and curtains and hidden closets and doors. There’s an amazing amount of storage tucked behind folding doors along the staircase, for instance, and our washer and dryer (!!!!) can be found there as well.
In addition, the kitchen and dining room are well stocked with dishes, cutlery, pots and pans, etc, and there’s ample linen for the bedrooms and baths. That said, we found certain gaps in the inventory that we’ll be filling over time: wine glasses, a clock, bathmats, water pitcher, candle holders, large glasses (tough to find in France, the land of portion control), wooden spoons, and more will be on our shopping lists. Given our particular needs, we also will be stocking up on power adaptors and splitters.
Okay, back to our initial tour. Mme Chevaillier took me on a two-hour (two-hour!) detailed review of every fork, lamp, and napkin in the joint. She’s left us equipped with knick-knacks and books, records (LPs!) and doilies, a piano and lots of cleaning apparati, and we’ve signed off on every last item. [In the interest of toddler-proofing, certain objets d’art will be relegated to high shelves or closets to avoid having to pay for their possible replacement.] Once that was done, we sat down to sign the lease and fork over a few more euros (the balance between the three months’ rent due up front – two months of security plus the September rent – and what we had wired to her in advance), learn how to operate the two locks on the front door and the those on the shutters, and then she called a taxi and was gone to catch the TGV (the train de grande vitesse, or bullet train) back home to Nice. I have subsequently spoken to her a number of times, but those tales will wait for another ‘blog.
Did I mention the phone is dead?
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