After a long flight from Los Angeles, we landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, just outside of Paris. We managed, without too much trouble, to take a bus from the airport to central Paris — to the Arc de Triomphe, to be precise. Our next task is to try and make contact with someone at the company that manages the apartment we’ve rented. This should be interesting — a Paris apartment!
We had a phone and we had a phone number. We had acquired the phone from our phone company at home. It’s especially made to work in Europe, even though it’s on our existing cell phone account. We’ll even have our regular phone number over here. Sounds great, but you never know how things will go with all these different phone services and foreign dialing systems.
We gave it a try and the phone worked without a hitch. The next thing we knew, we were talking to a nice young lady with a British accent. She asked us to give her another call when we got close to the apartment, then she would come and meet us there. Sounded good to us.
The bus went straight to the Arc de Triomphe, where we got off, caught a taxi, made our call, and met the young lady on a very nice-looking street in central Paris. We were standing in front of the building our apartment was in. We’d made it!
Time to Check this Paris Apartment Out!
To get inside the building, we pushed some buttons to enter a code that unlocked a big, heavy iron and glass door. Then we walked through a small empty lobby, then through a small courtyard and into a second small lobby. From there, we took an elevator up to the third floor, where we unlocked the door to the apartment and went inside.
It looked great. There were four rooms: a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. They weren’t large by our standards, but pretty comfy for over here — certainly large enough for the two of us to wander around in. It was tastefully decorated and had comfortable-looking furniture.
The floors looked like they must have been original, with dark wood that was very well-worn. Really neat. These floors probably have squeaks in ‘em that are 100 years old. Other than the floors, the place had been thoroughly updated. There were large windows in the living room and bedroom that opened up onto mini-balconies.
The kitchen had a refrigerator and stove, a wooden table with four chairs, a toaster oven, a coffee maker, and drawers full of all kinds of silverware and interesting-looking utensils. There was a fresh bouquet of blue flowers and a complimentary bottle of wine on the kitchen table. (And another bouquet in the bedroom).
The whole set-up looked great. There was no comparing this apartment to a tiny Parisian hotel room, and the apartment would cost nowhere near what we would have spent on one. Yes, this would do fine… just fine!
The young lady handed us the keys, officially ending the “getting there” portion of the trip. We had left Los Angeles at 3:30 PM yesterday, and now it was about 2:00 in the afternoon today. It was time for a nap.
We conked out, but we set the alarm for just one hour so we wouldn’t sleep too long. We wanted to try to avoid being up when it’s daytime at home, but night-time here. Well, that alarm went off WAY too soon. We set it to go off in another hour. When it went off the second time, we felt good enough to give it a go. OK — let’s go check out our new neighborhood.
To be continued…
For more detailed information about renting a Paris apartment, see the Travel Notes, Paris page.
