I HAVE A HOME!

DATELINE: 01.02.09 PARIS, FRANCE

I cannot tell you how excited I am to not be apartment hunting any more.  Later this evening I will be moving into an apartment with a young mother and her two young daughters (who are, by the way, completely adorable), age 7 & 9.  Granted in a perfect world I would have found a studio apartment that I could afford, but I did not want to live in a crummy apartment with a toilet that frightened me.  So a room in a nice apartment with a nice young family is good by me!  

As of yesterday afternoon, I didn't think this option was going to come through, and had been frantically hunting for alternatives.  I had seen two apartments yesterday that I thought i could manage to live in, and was feeling much encouraged after the horrific apartments I had seen before then.  Neither of these two options had the Scary Toilet Monster, and both were in great locations.  the first was a studio apartment - a HUGE studio apartment very close to the National Opera house and the area called the Palais Royale.  It was lovely but way out of my pricerange.  The woman showing it thought she could talk the owner down (seeing as it was her son-in-law), but their requirement was that the tenant be flexible.  We talked about my living there for maybe one month, after which point the landlord hoped to come and do some work on the apt.  I thought this was a great option, but it was not certain that the landlord would go for it, at nearly €400 less than he was asking.  And Sylvie made a good point: did I really want to start this whole apt hunting process all over again in just 4 short weeks?  

The other apartment was in a pretty amazing location, but the woman I would be living with was a royal pain in the ass.  She wanted 22 guarantees of my existence and everything handled in cash.  At the point when I didn't see any alternative, I was willing to put up with that.  

I am much relieved to be moving in to this apartment near the metro station "Picpus", in the 12th arrondissement.  

In other news (boy am I glad I can stop talking about searching for apartments), last night I went salsa dancing with Naomi and Juan Carlos.  I had a blast.  Salsa dancing is apparently really popular here, and it is something that the cool kids do (yes, the cool kids of *all* backgrounds).  I found that really interesting because my adventures in salsa dancing in Boston had shown me that the women of my age group enjoy it but that the men who attend are 40+ and rather slimy (both literally and figuratively).  Those who don't fit that description are barely 21 and the stereotype of undergraduates from the math department at MIT (read: not typically described as "the cool kids").  Most of the people at the salsa club we went to last night were, I would say, in their 20s to late 30s.  And the vast majority were *really* good.  They teach a slightly different basic step than what we learned in Boston, and the lesson at the beginning of the night runs for 2hrs!  At some point I ducked out of the lesson and watched from the side because I was utterly confused: learning the dance is extra hard when you can't hear what is being said and you don't understand what you can hear.  Nor can you understand what your partner is saying to you.  Luckily, later on there were a number of very kind and very patient partners willing to put up with me tripping over my own two feel, staring at the ground, not understanding where they wanted me to go (wait, what? oh, whoops... you wanted me to turn and then step over there... where are we going now?), and running into just about every other dancer on the dance floor.  There were many many really good dancers there and it was also really a lot of fun to watch.  When we left at 2am, it was still going fairly strong.  Maybe next time we'll stay later.  But next time I won't fall for the most expensive bottle of water trick ever again (cost me more than a cocktail).  Next time I'll find the water fountain.

And now, it's time to re-pack my bags and prepare to move!!

a tout le monde de Paris, France: a plus!