So Here We Are In Paris...

First, the most important thing: we made it. We arrived in one piece and got keys to our apartment. And we are sooooo happy to be here - after our first day re-discovering the city, and after three months in the relatively small city of Barcelona, Rob and I both sort of looked at each other in wonderment of how awesome, beautiful, big, diverse, cosmopolitan, and (most importantly), spectacularly declicious this place is. But I'm getting ahead of myself - first some amusing points about our commute to the City of Light:

Our departure from Barcelona, sadly, did not go quite as planned. I am proud to report that there were no packing civil wars this time, and we even arrived at the Barcelona airport 2.5 hours ahead of the flight. That's the good news. The bad news is that immediately after watching our taxis drive away, we realized we did not have our mission critical gray backpack containing items such as planners, passports, checkbooks, and birth certificates. Don't worry, you might think, surely Matt and Rob made color photocopies of all those items in preparation for just such an eventuality. And in fact we did make such copies...we just put them in the backpack. The discovery of the missing parcel was followed by several frantic phone calls to the taxi company (Matt was told by a snippy dispatcher to call the corporate office in order to contact our taxi drivers, only to find no answer whatsoever at the corporate offices, at which point he called snippy dispatcher and begged - BEGGED - her to call the taxis herself, which she actually did) and an equally frantic trip back to the apartment to try to find the bag.

As it turns out, Rob recovered the backpack at the apartment building - turns out we had conveniently left it propping open the front door of the building, where it remained fully one hour later, just waiting for Rob to retrieve it. Eryn and I attribute this incredible good fortune to her recital of a silent prayer to St. Anthony (for those of you not in the know, some sort of Catholic god of travelers or lost items, or both, I think) while we were waiting, and she and I and the kids could be seen screaming and jumping for joy at the airport when Rob called us to relay the good news.

At any rate, we got the gosh darned (I am newly devout) backpack and then had to contend with the fact that we were now effectively arriving at the airport quite a bit later than planned. This might not be a big deal for a normal air carrier, but not having learned their lesson, Matt and Rob bought tickets for this trip on yet another discount European carrier (picture festival seating, charges for so much as breathing in the plane, passengers herded like cattle, and no pre-flight announcements whatsoever), so time was of the essence. Eryn and I ran with the 35 bags and two giggling toddlers to the EasyJet (a greater oxymoron has never been coined) ticket counter. Silly me, I was initially worried we might reach the front of the line prior to Rob's victorious return to the airport. But no, the line was as long as China's Wall, and took the better part of an hour to navigate. That left us with 10 minutes prior to boarding, which if you are dealing with festival seating, have 15 carry-ons, and two toddlers is something equivalent to d-day or zero hour or something very serious sounding.

We not surprisingly ran from the ticket counter to security (yes, we are "those people" whom many of you have learned to watch with equal parts amusement and pity trying to yell at their kids, tie three shoe laces, and keep 5 over the shoulder bags on all at the same time as they have to disrobe before going through a metal detector) in the hopes of getting on the plane early enough for Addy not to be sitting in the middle seat between two overweight Germans or something. OK, I actually always think "make my day" to that scenario, but we still felt like we had to rush. Imagine then, our relief when we passed through security to find the departure screen was saying our flight was conveniently 15 minutes delayed. Pleasure turned to horror as we literally watched the screen changing before our very eyes at the departure gate, informing us the flight was now 30 minutes...no, 45 minutes...no 1 hour...no 2 hours delayed.

The rest of our time trying to depart was something out of a sitcom. First, as the much delayed departure time approached, a large crowd of people would accumulate, herd-style, in front of the assigned gate, only to make a mad dash, now mob-like, to a suddenly, surprisingly newly assigned gate. The pre-boarding call for people like us with "special assistance" hurriedly scrawled on their boarding passes by the ticket agent could generously be called feeble, and other passengers were in a Darwinian rush to get decent seats so were nonetheless totally uninterested in letting those of us with the previously described load of children and bags cut in line (more like "cut in throng"). We were then greeted in our sweaty, exhausted state by a bitter flight attendant at the top of the stairs - no convenient gangway tunnels for these discount guys - asking for our boarding stubs. He was lucky Rob didn't hit him, but Rob did manage to produce a snippy and decidedly Ostrower-like "You mean it wasn't enough that you guys have already checked our tickets four times before getting on the plane? Don't you have something better to do?" in response. Needless to say, we boarded without searching for the stubs again, and we basically got our seats together too. Rob and I were happy, Eryn looked a little disappointed not be stuck 20 rows behind us.

But we got to Paris fine so the flight nonesense doesn't matter, and neither does the fact that we are back in shipping hell all over again. Those of you who have been reading these postings since our May arrival in Barcelona will recall that we waited nearly three weeks for our shipped boxes to clear Spanish customs. We naively thought that the lack of customs crossings between Spain and France (God bless the E of U, as it were) would make shipping boxes "easier." Surely UPS can easily handle getting us our stuff in the allotted ~1 week, we thought. No siree. The boxes actually arrived 24 hours earlier than we did and, with nary an email or phone call notice, were promptly sent right back to Barcelona because our names had not yet been scotch (le scotch?) taped next to the bell for our apartment. Or, rather, 3 boxes were shipped back, 1 was in limbo in some kind of limbo distribution center, and the other four were ready to be re-delivered. As it turns out, there's no approximate delivery time here, so we were told to wait in our apartment all day waiting for the four survivors, and when they did not arrive, were told that the bureaucratic problem with the box in limbo created a problem and so we had to wait in the apartment another day. I can happily report we have received half our shipment, and fully expect the other half to arrive sometime in the next 2 months. This, by the way, is why I have not posted photos - the download cord is in UPS's hands. Whenever I despair of our travel luck, I remind myself that this sort of nonsense is why we are among the only people we know who have tried this long term travel to a foreign country with two toddlers, and I just try to be proud of my new found battle stripes.

The important thing is that we are here, happy, and we have a pretty great living situation. Paris is awesome, something everyone already knows, so there's a limit to how unhappy one can be about anything. Our apartment, while a far cry in terms of luxury from our Barcelona pad - it hasn't been renovated in oh, 10-15 years and we have seen some mice - is within 500 feet of a huge subway stop, has a garden/patio/courtyard for the kids to play in, is about three blocks to a cool park/playground (very, very, very rare in Paris) and is about four blocks from the very chic part of the Marais. The less fancy part of our abode is good - we don't worry much about the kids messing with the decor or finishes, and it just feels much more comfortable.

Our neighborhood reminds me of what Central Square in Cambridge or Davis Square in Sommerville both used to be like. Maybe the best description is "poised to become up and coming." No, definitely not up and coming, but you can just tell it will be in a little while. For now, it's very mixed - lots of un-fancy little bistros next to McDonalds or KFC, a decent grocery store (even lousy grocery stores in France are better than the best in the US, in my humble opion) right next to a dollar store and a discount luggage center. Africans wearing traditional batique next to Chasidic Jews next to Trendy Bohemian types. In short, it's sort of Matt and Rob's kind of place (hello South Orange, not Short Hills), and it seems right for our family. People are not nearly as nice as in Barcelona, but we've only encountered a few of the infamous sour Parisians. People still grin and touch Addy's hair all the time, so all is right in the world.

Rob and I have only just begun to explore the city. In a typical move, we went first to the Institute of the Arab World, but only had a meal there (mediocre food, but fantastic view of Paris, I might add), and we've done a lot of walking around the area nearest our apartment, but there is SO much more to do and see, it's sort of overwhelming. I took Addy on my own to the Louvre yesterday and tried to play a special "I Spy" game I had constructed especially for the occasion - she hated the game and museum, but loved the big ice cream sundae I bought her on the walk (yes, we're a 20 minute stroll away) home. But that's another story for another blog entry.

We are very lucky to be here, we have a lot to do in the next three months, and we miss all of you back home!