07 novembre 2006
How to get an apartment in Paris - Dulcie style
I am writing this in a little cafe in the 13th arrondisement. The queen of England is sitting a few tables away from me, she is talking French to a man with a beard but this is just a trick. I know it's her, she can't fool me. My waitress is the actress who plays Dot Cotton in Eastenders, her French is impeccable, there's more depth to this woman than I originally gave her credit for.
The leek thing didn't last very long. I'm fully expecting a whole host of "I told you so" emails, but I don't care. I managed to do it for a whole day and that's something. I could have done it for longer if only there wasn't such an awful stink. Can I just say that if ever any of you invite me round to dinner and place a plate of boiled leeks infront of me, please don't be offended if I vomit on the table. I'm still eating like a French woman though, all salads and black coffee.
I've had a rather stressful week trying to find an apartment. Nobody warned me about the state of the Parisian rental market. Paris is tiny and there are more people than places to live. I was rather naively expecting to look at a couple of apartments, find one I like, and sort out the paperwork there and then, 2-3 days max, nuh uh, no such luck.
I have absolutely no idea how, but I actually managed to make appointments to see places, with MY French. Ok, so my grammar was abysmal and to a French person it probably just sounded like a random mish-mash of words. But I managed to get my point across, and what's more I understood what was being said to me.
I saw my first apartment on Friday morning. I put on my best “I look like a sensible tenant” clothes and went to find 68 rue des Filles du Calvaire. I found the street easily, yeah so my shoe got caught in one of those stupid grilles on the pavement and came off my foot, and yeah this really amused a load of old men sitting outside a café who started shouting things at me in French that I didn’t understand, but the main point is that I found the street. I retrieved my shoe and walked down the street, 34, 36, 38, then I had to cross the road, and all of a sudden I wasn’t on rue des Filles du Calvaire anymore. On the upside, the first word that came to mind was putain, which is French, I didn’t even think before saying it. My warped logic tells me that this means my French is coming on, but this little victory was overshadowed by the fact that I was well and truly lost.
I called the landlord. No reply. I wasn’t prepared for this. I can make appointments, but I don’t know how to go into the finer details of explaining that I’m lost. I left a voice message, I tried to say (in French) that I was going to try and find 68 BOULEVARD des Filles du Calvaire, because I must have had the wrong address. What I actually said was more like, “Er, je ne er trouve pas 68 rue des filles des filles des er du calvaire, maintenant je cherche pour 68 dans la Boulevard des des des filles du c calvaire. Er, merci pour m’appeller, huh. Er bonsoir, non, pas bonsoir, au revoir.”
This story is taking ever such a long time to tell. Anyway, as it turns out there wasn’t a 68 Boulevard DFDC. So I called the landlord again. He answered this time and he wasn’t amused. “Pas 68, 18!!!!! 18! 1! 8! 1! 8!”
I know my French numbers and I swear that he said 68 when we made the appointment. I’m English and I can’t really speak French. He is French so is rather good at it (no shit Sherlock I hear you say) …So I imagine that you’ll probably take his word over mine. But I’m right and I know it, that’s all that matters.
Well I found the place and it was tiny. I learnt a new word that day, “meublée”, this place wasn’t. There were ten or so other potential tenants squeezed into the apartment, and at least 6 of them wanted to rent it. I had a “what the F?” moment, I certainly wasn’t expecting competition. I gave the landlord my details, but he just looked at me blankly when I said I didn’t have a guarantee. Nice guy.
In Paris, to rent an apartment you need to have special kind of guarantee from somebody that you’ve already rented off. This landlord has to be Parisian, or your guarantee isn’t worth ****.
I’m kind of stuffed then.
I saw another place that evening. Far far away in the North-West. A couple of friendly Mexican girls were also looking at the flat, they told me that they’d been looking for a place to live for two months. TWO MONTHS! OMG I can’t afford to stay in a hotel for two months. The landlady picked us up at the metro. She was old and crooked, but bloody hell she shuffled down that street at a pace to rival an elite sprinter. Kind of like a penguin in fast forward mode. I’m 25 and healthy and I struggled to keep up with her.
“This place is really cosy” she said, “there is a nice view”. She didn’t say anything about the mould on the bed, the walls, the floor, the wardrobe. Nor did she point out the light fitting that was spitting like a sparkler. I kid you not. The Mexican girls spoke really good French, but the landlady didn’t want to talk to them, she wanted to talk to me. I didn’t want it, but, (there is a running theme here), my French isn’t good enough to politely tell somebody that their property is shit and that I’d rather lick a toilet seat then live in it. Sorry, that’s very strong language, but you’d understand if you’d seen this place. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to talk to the Mexican girls, they actually wanted to rent it.
I finally got the woman to let me out of the flat by telling her that I was looking at other places and that I’d give her a call back. She totally blanked the Mexicans and showed us to the door. I walked back to the metro with the girls, and they explained that this happens to them all the time, the French (in general) prefer Europeans. How horrid is that??? I travelled part of the way home with them and they gave me some useful property websites to have a look at.
My first appointment on Saturday was cancelled. “The flat was rented this morning”, the landlord told me over the phone. AHHHHHH the advert went up on www.pap.fr that very morning. Properties are so in demand here that they’re taken within hours. I panicked for a bit, went out for a coffee, and then tried to secure more appointments. I got one that afternoon. The landlord was English. Perfect. In the bag.
On route to the viewing I got a call from a Mexican guy who saw my advert on the internet. He wanted English lessons. Could I meet him tonight? Yes I could. We made an appointment. My first client. Woohoo.
The flat was really good value for money, nice and central, well furnished …lots of interested parties. Not a bloody chance for me. The landlord called me later, “er it was a difficult decision but we had to let the apartment to somebody else”. I was grumpy that evening, not even the French version of “Countdown” got me out of my fowl mood.
I wanted to have a bath and go to bed, but I had to go and meet my new student. Jorge is a nice guy, he just wants the opportunity to converse in English which means zero lesson preparation for me, easy money. He spent an hour telling me about how he hated France and the French, we arranged to meet the following day, he paid me and then left.
Then I reeeeeeally wanted to have a bath and go to bed but I needed to get more viewings. I stayed up until 4 in the morning, responding to adverts by email. I swear I wrote more than 40 personalised emails, IN FRENCH. Just before I turned my computer off I got a response from a guy called “Elvis”, so I sent an email asking when I could see his apartment and then went to sleep.
Sunday morning, 07:00, what the hell was I thinking travelling to an apartment OUTSIDE OF PARIS. This was desperation. The metro was empty, I didn’t really feel safe. But then I got off at my designated stop and was pleasantly surprised. It was a freezing cold day, there was an atmospheric fog, and I was in a very quiet and peaceful suburb, if you knocked down the ugly high-rise it could almost pass for a traditional French village. An old lady waved hello at me from her front garden. A cat stopped to miow at me on the street. I could get used to this.
I followed my map. It led me to the high-rise. You know the kind of kitchens that you used to get in the 70’s, where the tiles were orange and brown, where the walls floors and ceiling were covered in pine lacquered with 60 million coats of varnish, that kind of thing. Well cross that with the “mould” flat from Friday evening and you’ve got a perfect description of the place I found myself standing in.
I had another appointment later that morning, to share a flat with the landlord, I figured that a flatshare was probably more realistic than getting a whole place to myself. It was in the Marais district, for those of you who don’t know Paris very well, it’s the gay/Jewish quarter, full of life, very central, perfect. The flat was beautiful. My heart sank because I knew that there would be plenty of offers on the place, but I gave my details anyway. The landlord was really nice guy, he works as a web designer for a branch of cinemas, I forget which one. He seemed a little embarrassed whilst explaining the house rules, no smoking and no ham in the house (he’s a Muslim). Fair enough, if that’s all it takes to stay in a place like that then I’m more than happy to abide.
When I got back to my flat, I discovered that my laptop had crashed.
Normally this would annoy me. But, and you have to understand that the internet was the only way to find available apartments, it got me so angry that I spent a good half hour effing and blinding and stomping round my hotel room. “I only effing bought the effing thing this effing January ecetera e-effing-cetera.”
When I finally calmed down. I remembered an advert for an English speaking computer expert that I’d seen in a newspaper. I called him and read him the error message over the phone, and explained that the keyboard had completely frozen. He said that he knew exactly what the problem was and that he could fix it that evening.
I met Jorge (my student) at 4 and over a latte spent 90 minutes talking about Mexican boxing and Mexican writers and Mexican food. It’s quite fun this teaching malarkey.
The computer guy came at 8:45. He sat down, looked and the computer, he didn’t even touch it, and then he came up with this humdinger.
“I can’t fix this here, I have to take it back to my house, it will cost you €200 plus my €45 call out fee”.
I don’t get angry very often. But I really laid into this idiot. “I told you the error message on the screen over the phone! All you’ve done is look at the screen!!!!!! Why the &*&^ should I pay you when my computer isn’t fixed?!?!?!?!? You’re a %@$*ing rip-off merchant!!!!!!!!!” If I was a man, if I was 6 foot 6 with bulging muscles then maybe I could have got rid of him without paying him a penny. As it is I am a five foot nothing midget and so I had to pay him €20 to get the hell out of there.
I called ma in a right old state and she came to my rescue. She checked my emails and wrote one to Elvis (the apartment guy). “Hi, this is Dulcies mum from England. Her computers broken so she She says that she is computer-phobic but that’s a blatant lie.
can't access her e.mails. 2 o clock on monday is fine.can you please
text dulcie your address on xx.xx.xx.xx. thanks”
Then I called another computer “expert”. This guy was Scottish with a friendly voice. I explained what happened, and told him that if my computer wasn’t fixed on-site that I wasn’t going to pay a penny.
The Scot came first thing yesterday morning and my computer was fixed within five minutes. It cost €65, but it was worth it, there’s no way I could find an apartment without it. I’d grown very fond of my dinosaurs, but staying in a hotel was costing me a fortune.
2 o clock yesterday I went to visit Elvis and his flat, this was another flatshare. When he opened the door to the flat I saw immediately why he called himself Elvis. The flat was plastered with posters of The King, over 3000 of them!!! I was so taken with this shrine that I totally failed to clock the revolver on the sofa, the handcuffs hanging off a shelf in the corner of the room, the 20 or so police hats and the coat hanging on the back of a chair that said “Police” on the back (I wish I took a photo, such a funky flat).
“So what do you do?” I said. He just laughed and said “look again.”
He is a very funny guy, we spent a good 90 minutes gossiping over tea, well he had a tea and I had water, I hate French tea. It turns out that his grandfather was a famous French cyclist and was a friend of Jonny Halliday. I wish I knew something about cycling because he was so proud of his family heritage, but all I could do was say “wow that’s really cool”. I must remember to ask uncle Nick or Cyril if they’ve heard of Elvis’s grandfather Jean Marechal …I was impressed with the Jonny Halliday bit though, he’s a legend. Elvis pretty much offered me the room then and there, the only catch was that it isn’t available until December. Damn and blast!!!!!!!
In the middle of our discussion I had a phone call. A woman started talking at me really quickly in French, I kept on saying “Pardon, pardon” but she just got faster and faster. I thought that she wanted to arrange a time for me to go and see one of her properties, she said “c’est soir, 19 heure”. But I already had an appointment at that time so I kept on saying “Non, c’est pas possible, j’ai un autre visite, peut-etre demain matin?” Or something like that. Then she got really angry and hung-up on me.
Then I realised that she was the woman I had already arranged to meet that evening, she was just calling up to confirm our appointment.
Whoops.
I had another appointment yesterday evening, the landlord was a pharmacist who kept on talking about terrorists. I made my excuses and left.
I had a panic just before midnight, because I forgot to book my hotel for the following night. Just my luck, the hotel was full. I had to book myself in a hotel round the corner.
In a final moment of desperation, just before I went to sleep I decided to write an email to the guy with the flat in the Marais, offering his girlfriend free English lessons and promising not to eat pork in the flat.
It paid off. This morning I was woken by a phone call. It was Driss, the Marais guy, he told me that I could have the room and that it was my email that swung it. I’m moving in tomorrow night. Whoooooooooohooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
I HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE IN PARIS!!!!!!!!! All it took was a week of searching, 76 emails and 106 phone calls (I am not exaggerating I have the phone bill to prove it).
I packed up my things and went downstairs to say goodbye to the girls at reception and to tell them the good news. They were surprised that I’d managed to find a place so quickly.
I said goodbye to the dinosaurs and left for my new hotel.
This afternoon I had my first French lesson at the same school I went to this summer. My tutor is really lovely, I think I managed to convince her that I’m a serious student who wants to learn. Then my old teacher, Thierry, came into the classroom and said “this girl, this girl is trouble! She was one of the students in my favourite class this year, every day they partied, every day they came to my class with a hangovers.” Good old Thierry. Apparently I’m one of the only people in the class who hasn’t stayed in contact with him, oops.
I’ve had a pretty uneventful evening. I’ve just been registering new clients, Catherine, a friend of Cyril and some others from the internet. And of course I’ve been writing this. Oh and I've given my diet the night off to have a "pork fest", to get it out of my system before I move to the no-pork apartment tomorrow.
What did I say last time? “I won’t keep on writing such epic updates.” Sorry, I broke my promise. A lot has happened this week.
Thanks for all the emails of encouragement, keep them coming. I will get round to writing individual emails back, especially seeing as I’m not spending every waking hour apartment hunting anymore.
You’re all welcome to come and visit me. Blah blah. Stay in contact blah blah. Lots of love Dulcie xxxxxxx
02 novembre 2006
The First Day
08:30
I am here! It. Actually. Happened. OMG. Argggghhhhhhhhh. Last night
after discovering that my luggage didn't make the flight, I
successfully navigated my way to the station and got myself to Paris.
No mean feat, the signage at CDG is bizarre, I followed a sign that
said "la gare" and ended up at a fence.
My room is great. You're going to love this, when I opened my
curtains this morning I saw a zillion dinosaurs!!!!!
I'm not joking.
I'm staying opposite a museum, note to self, must find out the name of
this place. Now I'm sitting in a cafe with a
coffee, drafting this on the back of my boarding pass,
waiting for Monoprix, the French equivalent of Asda to open.
13:30 - Starbucks
I am now on the Bvd Poissonniere branch of Starbucks with a skinny
latte, quite why I felt it necessary to include the street address is
beyond me, but there you go, you know exactly where I was on 2
November at 13:30 eastern european time, (12:30GMT...but you know that
because you're all well seasoned travellers). Anyway I digress. I am
writing on the back of a napkin, my boarding card is black with
scribbles. Actually it's grey because I used a pencil.
Anyway, when Monoprix opened I went on in and got the following essentials:
1. Needles
2. Sewing thread
3. Shampoo (avocado)
4. Conditioner (avocado)
5. Face wipes
6. A scale (for food, don't ask)
7. Face wash
8. Eyeliner
9. INT 100P (No idea what this is, but it's on the receipt so I bought it)
10. Toothpaste
11. Mascara
12. Hairbrush
13. A toothbrush
14. 4 x tubs of 0% fat plain yoghurt
15. Deoderant
16.Lipstick
17. AIG ENFI VIT (huh?)
18. An onion.
19. A head of garlic
20. A sprig of parsley
21.1kg of leeks
This came to a grand total of euro97.68. The trip was pretty
uneventful, except for about 5 minutes in when I was unsure if the
parsley was actually for sale or just part of the vegetable display.
At about 09:45, I'm sorry I can't be more precise, I had a shower.
Afterwhich I prepared my breakfast, leeks. I figure that now I'm in
France I should eat like a Parisian. And the CEO of Verve Clicquot,
who unsurprisingly is French, advises that you should begin your
French diet with a three day boiled leek detox. What the hey, nothing
to loose. I figured I'd supplement the leeks with some low-fat plain
yoghurt to try and make it more exciting, and green tea. Sh1t, sorry,
merde I forgot the green tea. It tasted ok, I think I can do this.
With my Parisian diet sorted out, I thought I'd work on my Parisian
image. Quite difficult in jeans and trainers, I am relying heavily on
my beautiful wonderful darling D&G coat. I somehow managed to style my
hair without a hairdryer, and then applied my French makeup, exactly the
same as it's English counterpart except for a fine line under my eyes.
Soooooo French.
Then off out to complete my to-do list.
Item one was easy, buy a property rental magazine. The vendor
struggled to understand my awful French but we got there in the end.
Item two, to get a passport photo for my carte orange was equally
easy, even though the machine swallowed a euro.
On my way to item three, I stopped in at an estate agents. I've really
got to work on my French, despite my best efforts the guy simply said
"non" and showed me to the door.
Item three, to get myself educated, easy enough. I've got 4 hours of
1:1 tuition for Tuesday and Wednesday next week. Then regular classes
09:00-13:00 13 Nov - 1 Dec. Euro1,085. Ouch. Hopefully I'll have
enough French at the end of that to carry on learning without
lessons... We'll see.
And that's where I'm up to now. I'm enjoying my latte, watching the
world go by and flicking through the property mag.
17:30 - My room
This place reeks of leeks! I reek of leeks! After Starbucks I made
my way to the Champs Elysees for a new set of clothes, the trip was
successful. New jeans, new top, new knickers, new bra, new
nightshirt, new jumper. That was item four.
Items five, six and seven were to purchase green tea, more lemons and
a bottle of water. There was about 13 minutes between the time I
entered and left Monoprix for the second time today.
I couldn't find a copy of Fusac (Paris journal for English speakers),
so I'll save item eight for tomorrow.
Stil
23:15 - My room
The power on my laptop failed, the power cable is with my lost
luggage. What I was about to say was "still no
bag", classic timing.
After my computer conked out I had a late lunch of leeks and yoghurt
and then had a bath to try and get rid of the leek smell.
Then I composed a list of sentences to help me find an apartment and
got the lovely girl at reception to translate them into French for me.
I made a dozen or so phonecalls and somehow managed to make two
appointments to see studios, at least that's what I think I've done.
I watched the French version of Jerry Springer. Almost the same,
fighting, check, swearing and shouting, check check. Only difference
was that the guests looked chic.
Finally my bag showed up. The relief!!! So I was able to get back
onto the internet. I posted an advert, offering my services as an
English tutor. I also found a list of local schools and drafted
letters introducing myself. Then a light dinner of ...leeks. Then I
started typing this email. C'est tout.
I hope to hear from you all soon. Don't panic about the time required
to stay in contact with me, I doubt my subsequent emails will be this
long, or this dull.
Lots of love Dulcie
ps. Den, thanks for the pressie it's perfect.
