A Nose Knows

  If I want to keep the blog name relevant then I need to add more whining!  It can't all be sunshine and the Eiffel Tower.  So, I think a lists of things that induce whining from me is in order.  In no particular order:

A) What's that smell?  Really, it is more than just smell, it lingers in the nose and becomes a taste.  Some days I swear I can feel it on my teeth.  There are basically three distinct smells that are reoccurring throughout the city:

1.  Dirt.  Paris might be beautiful and picturesque, but it is dirty.  It's hardcore thousand year old dirt too.  This is what I feel on my teeth.  The taste is there, but I can't really describe it well, tastes like dusty dirt.  Yum.  This whole city could use a good powerwashing.
2.  Piss, all kinds.  It really hits you in the Metro, again with the tasting.  It is a mixture of dog and human in various stages of freshness and strength.  I'm starting to think these smells are why scarfs are so popular in the city, nose protection.
3. B.O.  It isn't even hot here yet, but the level of body odor smells has definitely had directly proportional rise to the rise in temperature.  I can't wait for August.  Look, I already feel a little awkward jammed in to the metro.  I am a girl who is used to her personal space and that goes out the window when crowds of people are trying to pack into a metro car. Being that close though really familiarizes you with others personal hygiene habits.  I don't want to play into the whole French people stink, they really don't.  Most people smell just fine, but it only takes one rotten apple...

B) Why did you stop right there?!?  Multiple people a day will just come to a sudden and complete stop right in front of me.  There is no attempt to move to the side out of the way as to not have people run right smack into you.  It's the worst in the metro.  People will just point blank stop in the middle of everything.  An old woman stopped completely right at the top of the stairs, I nearly sent her flying! 

C) My medicine is FREE?!  Okay, so this isn't me whining at all.  This is my complete and utter relief.  The medicine I am on is quite expensive out of pocket.  Hell, it was nearly $200 a month with insurance in the states.  Every year the insurance companies would try to make it more difficult to get the medicine so I would switch to something cheaper, alternatives that I have tried and didn't work.  Here though, it is FREE.  FREE!   No shakedowns or jumping through hoops, no stress, and no getting letters in the mail saying my medicine isn't covered anymore.  Yes, it may be higher taxes here, but so far I have no complaints for the benefits received.   Also, I got into a doctor the day after calling for the appointment with a very kind doctor that speaks English. 

 So, when you visit Paris, make sure you are prepared for some strong smells, pack scarves so you look stylish as well!  You'll need to learn to keep an eye on the people in front of you, but also on the ground for rogue dog poop (seriously it's everywhere).  Despite these small annoyance, Paris is treating J and I well.

~L

Le Tour Eiffel

  The Eiffel Tower has become one of my key navigation pieces.  If I am lost I can usually look to the sky, find the tower, and know my bearings well enough.  I have never been very good at knowing N, E, S, W type directions.  They seem to fly out the window when you are here in Paris anyway.  The roads here are not parallel, not even close.  All the roads make triangles that end in a circle.  You may be walking two streets that were at one point parallel, but now they cross.  It is utterly boggling to my directionally inept brain.  Just when you think you know, boom...not even close.  So, best case, you look and spot a tip of the Eif and know you can at least orient to that.  Luckily, J and I are on one side of the river Seine (left bank) and we can see Le Tour when we are on the way to the metro.  Here's a picture of the Eiffel Tower from our closest metro:

  Only a few stops up is the Trocadero exit.  I was running errands to our bank, which is off this exit, and could not resist the sunny day and opportunities that this exit offered.  Truly, this is the best exit to take when wanting to view the Eiffel.  It lets you off onto a viewing area between to museums, which leads to the fountain park that leads to the Tower itself.  Here are some pictures:

  This is where everyone holds out two fingers to look like they are pinching the Tower.  So many tourists, so little time...

  Here, you can see the tall building just to the left of the tower, it is Tour Montparnasse.  J and I live in that district...kind of puts things in perspective.

  This is a picture from the fountains.  What a great day to run errands and run into this.  Struggling with the language and the lack of community have been compensated by living so close to beauty and old world loveliness around every corner.   I look forward to exploring more!
~L

Seeing Red

  If you didn't already know, the three cats and I made it alive to Paris!  The cats are slowly getting used to the new (much smaller) place.  They seem to like it though and have already found some favorite napping spots.  So having said that, lets talk about me!

  I was going to write about selling the house and then I got cut in line on several different occasions here in France, but then I started cleaning the apartment.  This place is Dirty (note the capital "D")!  I actually have several different theories about the guy that lived here last.  I'm speculating it is a guy by the amount of pee stains I scrubbed off the bathroom wall.  I'm not saying it couldn't be a woman, but she would have worked really hard.  My theories about the previous tenant stem from the amount of red streaks I've been scrubbing off everything.  Here there are in no particular order:

1) The guy had a super ambitious rouge toddler who was left alone with a red crayon.  Now, this was my favorite theory first until I kept running across red streaks that were near impossible for me to reach, even standing on a chair.  Granted, I may not be very tall, but I like to think that I am taller than most toddlers out there.  So, either this kid had amazing leaping capabilities, a ladder, or this just isn't' a plausible theory.

2)  I've just unwittingly became an accessory after the fact by cleaning up a crime scene, if not multiple ones.  I don't watch enough CSI to know what dried up blood stains that have been half cleaned look like, but I feel like what's on the walls could be close.  It seems like the guy started cleaning the red streaks, found it to hard, and stopped.  Then, he realized that he was horrible at cleaning, but quite skilled at making a mess.  In turn, he made a bigger mess of said crime scene in order to disguise the evidence.  Nicely played.

3)  This may sound like the silliest theory yet (wait, sillier than #2?), but it is currently my favorite.  The guy that lived here before...wait for it...wore a ring made out of red wax.  It has to be true!  I'm sure they make them.  I really don't know how else to explain the copious amounts of red streaks.

  Feel free to conjecture, unfortunately I am in a current state of disarray since our air shipment just arrived as well or I would post mysterious red streak pictures.  Stay clean!

~ L