It was Monday - the first weekday in our new apartment and our first day of school. It felt like the beginning of something.But first, something smelled a little funny. Literally - we started to notice something rancid in the stairwell of our apartment building. We tried propping open the windows, but the odor wouldn't budge.Meanwhile, I constantly voiced my amazement that in the week since we had arrived I saw very little garbage on the street. Obviously people must have had trash but where was it? In New York, it seemed that there are always smelly black plastic bags lining the streets. Compounded with the dogs using the streets as their public toilet, Manhattan emitted quite a summertime aroma. Paris didn't seem to have this problem. Despite the French's reputation for being dog-obsessed, I had seen many more dogs smuggled into cafés in New York than Paris. And the trash, where were they hiding it...Our suspicion proved true when we discovered a closet on our ground floor filled with green plastic trash containers, which were obviously not air-tight. These were the containers put on the street for garbage collection. Although honestly I hardly ever saw them, so they must...
Recently in Homesickness Category
It was Monday - the first weekday in our new apartment and our first day of school. It felt like the beginning of something.But first, something smelled a little funny. Literally - we started to notice something rancid in the stairwell of our apartment building. We tried propping open the windows, but the odor wouldn't budge.Meanwhile, I constantly voiced my amazement that in the week since we had arrived I saw very little garbage on the street. Obviously people must have had trash but where was it? In New York, it seemed that there are always smelly black plastic bags lining the streets. Compounded with the dogs using the streets as their public toilet, Manhattan emitted quite a summertime aroma. Paris didn't seem to have this problem. Despite the French's reputation for being dog-obsessed, I had seen many more dogs smuggled into cafés in New York than Paris. And the trash, where were they hiding it...Our suspicion proved true when we discovered a closet on our ground floor filled with green plastic trash containers, which were obviously not air-tight. These were the containers put on the street for garbage collection. Although honestly I hardly ever saw them, so they must...
The night before, Geoff and I had decided to venture outside of the city for the day in hopes of clearing our heads a bit. We woke up a bit too late to take any faraway excursions, so we settled on Le Bois de Boulogne, an enormous, 2200-acre park on the periphery of Paris. I had seen pictures of the park before and it looked lovely. We were still feeling pretty strange about the day before, and really we just wanted some fresh air and a nice walk. When we got off the metro, it seemed we had arrived at the edge of the park. But really we were in a small circle of a park surrounded by highway and filled with several sleeping homeless people. Geoff was tired and wanted to join them, but I forced him to press on. I had seen the pictures of the park and was determined to see the beauty. We finally figured out how to cross over and under the highway and weave through the trails to head in the right direction. As usual, Geoff's navigational skills came in handy - and he didn't even have his GPS with him that day. It...
It seemed like a simple plan. We only needed to get a traveler's check at the American Express office for our security deposit. But somehow, two American Express offices and a half dozen ATMs later we were still short 1,000 Euros and out of time. So, Geoff and I had to split up - me to meet Sylvia for our noon meeting and Geoff to check out of the hotel.Sylvia readied the paperwork as she chewed on a cigarette. Meanwhile, we wrestled our enormous luggage up the stairs. Although the lease measured a single page, the entire packet included about 50 pages. There were photos of everything in the apartment - from the furniture to the inside of the closets (and contents) to the tops and bottoms of every pot in the apartment. She also created handmade manuals for every appliance and utility including the single unit washer/dryer and the stove/dishwasher (believe it or not, also one unit) and left detailed instructions on how to shut off the water and gas for the apartment if we were to leave for more than three days.After she double-kissed us good-bye, we were left alone in the apartment. And that's when it set...
