Our Parisian Pad

We moved into our apartment on Saturday! As soon as we saw our apartment, we knew this was the one we wanted. It's a spacious (for Paris) 700 sqft with 1 bedroom, 1 bath (with a separate toilet), kitchen, large living room, entry way and nice balcony. The apartment is situated in the 7th near the famous Rue Cler market and between the Eiffel Tower and Invalides (Military museum where Napoleon is buried).

On the move in day, we met the French owners at the apartment for a tour. Our agent didn't mention whether or not they could speak English so we assumed that they did. He knew that we didn't speak much French and should have mentioned something like that to us. Although he could have translated, he is not allowed by French law to be there for this tour.

After meeting the owners at the apartment and exchanging greetings, they launched into a 45 minute tour of the place...en francais. Matt did his best to keep up and would periodically stop the owners to translate something to me. When neither of us knew what was going on, we just nodded our heads and said "Oui" or "je comprends" assuming that we could just figure it out later.

Luckily for us, the owners were very understanding of our lack of French skills and patient in explaining things. It was obvious that they recently renovated the place and took good care of everything inside. In fact, Matt found his French equivalent as the husband took great pride in showing off his surround sound, stereo, HDTV and programmable remote. He also had all the manuals organized in case we needed to look anything up. That's great, but they are all in French. The owners also left us detergents, cleaning products, hand soap, and many everyday things to use.

After our tour, the owners left and the apartment was ours. Kind of a strange feeling to actually have our own place in a foreign country. The place was ready to go as we found it, but we still needed to get 350 lbs of luggage from our hotel 3 blocks away into the apartment. As we dragged the bags down the street on 3 separate trips we tried to keep in mind that it would another year before we would have to deal with these bags again.

That night we really felt like we arrived in Paris. We had been without a home since December 15th when we moved out of our house in Dallas. Since then, we were living out a suitcase and constantly pulling out and repacking items. To celebrate the occasions, we made dinner at home that night and had a cheap, but good bottle of Bordeaux.