Our Apartment in Paris

The apartment we rented has been nice. It was a real crap shoot, considering you have to select one over the internet, and send off your hard-earned $$ by wire transfer, without any real guarantees, but it definitely turned out well.

This one is on Rue de Greneta, and we rented it through Home Rental Connections, via the internet. The apartment is nicely decorated, in a spare European style, so lots of room for our mess.

It was wonderful to be able to stretch out, and eat real-people food in between the extravagances of the bakery. And, it was incredibly quiet, considering all of the activity just down the street.

About a block away was Rue de Mortoguiel, an old shopping district with cafes, bakeries, fish & meat & produce shops, in addition to a couple of small groceries and a hardware store, which we had to make use of when one of us accidentally broke the showerhead.

Interesting to see that the trash is picked up daily in Paris.

Most people apparently don't have large washer & dryers like us, but hang clothes to dry (on the weekend, lots of windows had sheets and blankets hanging out of them).

We used the wireless internet with our laptop everyday, both for this blog, and trip planning, so it was a real asset. The cable TV was interesting to see how diverse the programming languages were (in Italian, German, French, English), but just as un-stimulating as US TV. Not so many commercials, however. In fact, I don't think I saw any, come to think of it.

The apartment was on the 3rd floor, (2nd floor, European style, where the bottom floor is the Ground floor). Interestingly, the apartment had a brick wine cellar with a barrel vaulted ceiling, which was four flights down a small tiled staircase. Very dark and musty down there, and mostly empty, but interesting to see. This building has 6 or 7 floors. Do all of the apartments have those cellars? It was another example of Paris underground (sewers, metro, catecombs, basements, there is a lot of this city underground).

Oh, and try to figure out appliance controls in another language (the photo on top, above, is of the French washing machine to the left of the stove in the kitchen). Also, cleaning supplies under the sink required translation, and so did packages at the store. We bought some sour cream at the which turned out to be tasty, but it had a strawberry on the container, so I thought it was whipped cream. Reminds me of a story I once read about some Chinese immigrants to America who bought a can of Crisco thinking it had fried chicken inside.

I also have to say, virtually everyone we have had any dealings with has been very friendly and accomodating with our terrible French. I've had much worse experiences as a tourist at home. Lots of people do speak better English than our French, but even if they don't, it works out.