day 2

slow start, went to visit our first apartment in the afternoon. it was 5 mins from j’s school on a great little shopping street, near 3 different metro lines. a perfect location. a bit small at 72 square meters (750 sq feet) but with 2 bedrooms and not one bathroom but two! it’s furnished (with reasonable taste), which would save us the money of buying furniture plus the hassle of carting it up the four floors without an elevator. downstairs, there is a cute little planted courtyard and a communications company office, (p and i are both fantasizing of working for it). the price is reasonable, plus there is no agency fee, which saves us a months rent. this apt is a definite possibility.

in the area we were looking , there were a limited number of apartments listed on the internet and p didn’t seem to be getting email responses. some things in france are so high tech and others are so old fashioned. there seemed to be listings in the windows of “immobilier” – real estate offices, so thinking that things were more localized we decided to walk around the area and speak directly to the agents. so we walked into 20 or so real estate offices but only got to see one other apartment. through our search, we learned that apartments are in such demand that as soon as a listing comes on, it is rented out. marie and her daughter, chloe told us that right now everyone is going on vacation, but starting in the middle of august all the students come back and there is a mad scramble to snap up apartments. we were concerned about being a weird case to the french. we have no official papers yet, we were foreigners and p’s job was out of the country. we didn’t know if we could compete with normal french people with all their papers. i now remember the scramble i went through trying to find an apartment the first time i moved here. back then, the only thing i could say in french was “i don’t have a job”. it’s amazing that i was able to find a place at all. luckily there are a few rare landlords/ladies who actually LIKE foreigners. they know that they are sometimes more dependable in paying the rent and that eventually they will leave. then they can raise the rent slightly and find another tenant. the french tenants know the power of the tenant laws and sometimes will move in, pay the rent for the first month and never pay rent again. it takes a long legal battle to get them out. anyway, we decided that tomorrow, we will continue the internet search but that p will use an old fashioned technology and PHONE them.

after visiting the apartment, we went looking for a crepe for j. unfortunately when we did find a place, it was 2:30 and it was closing. lunch hours are very precise here. i remember on my first trip to paris how i kept getting up late and missing lunch because i never got to restaurants in time.

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