Arrival in France

Arrived without incident at airport – well, I say without incident… The pilot was enjoying the descent into Beauvais, which seemed to be achieved by periodically slamming on the brakes, before roaring into life again. Even I was beginning to feel a bit queasy by the time the runway approached. The landing is usually the best bit for me – once back on solid ground I’m just itching to get off the plane – but this was the exception. We whacked off the runway, then repeated until the pilot felt like he was ready to make the commitment to earth.

The “Burt” sign was waiting for us – but our driver was not. He did turn up, but none of us realised he was there until he sort of squeezed in between us all and asked, “C’est vous?” We rolled our cases along to wait for him to appear with the van. He seemed disturbed by our three addresses (I got a confirmation on the three address reservation two days after we arrived, oddly), and proceeded to look them up on the map while driving along the motorway – arrrgh! It wasn’t the most relaxing drive, but it went smoothly and I was dropped off first. Naturally, it was while trying to find the way into my one-way street while on the phone still trying to get directions to the other place that he lapsed into Spanish, and I realised that we could just have had Meg speak to him. But you live, you learn, you die of some horrible and avertable crisis in the process.

Because I wasn’t sure how to get inside, I asked him in French if he would wait for a moment until I got inside. “Ouai, ouai,” he intoned. I turned back to the door of the building and heard at once the slamming of the van door. Le vroom. Wheeling round, I saw the van disappear down the street. Oh well.

There was no intercom or doorbell, so I phoned my landlady's mobile. She seemed awfully pleased to hear from me, and was very positive about me coming to Paris, only she didn’t seem to realise I was outside.

“I’m here!”
“Where are you?”
“I’m outside.”
“You’re in Paris?”
“Yes… I’m in your street. I’m standing outside number eight.”
“But you’re not coming until tomorrow!”

To cut a long story short, and to avoid the back and forth of “Aren’t you arriving on the first?” – “No, in the emails I always said the 30^th", I will merely say that she was in the middle of cleaning for us to arrive and was worried about the state of the flat. But realising her mistake, thankfully she was very nice and there was no problem about us moving in unexpectedly!

She decided that the easiest thing for us all would be to finish the essential cleaning and leave us with enough space, then she and her boyfriend would come back the next day while we were at class to clean properly, as per their plan. We could then sort out all the money and everything then. This worked out well, though her poor friend had arrived for a ten minute drink on the way home from work and was put to work! They wouldn’t let me do anything, which was nice but while it wasn’t my mistake I felt bad watching them run back and forth between the bedrooms!

Kenny arrived later that night amid a flurry of text messages involving Google maps and the metro. I had to go down to meet him as he was having trouble getting in (it turned out we had the code written down as 28 instead of 20A… oops – my ears were popping on the flight. That’s my excuse.) The housekeeper of the building had spotted him trying to get in and was concerned, so he was trying to explain he was staying with someone in the building, but couldn’t remember her name; however, as soon as I turned up and told her who's place we were staying in she lit up and let this suspicious youth enter.

The flat is lovely – it has a good size kitchen and dining area with an actual oven (a rarity for Paris) and two sizeable bedrooms. The couple are very artistic, and they have wonderful (or at least interesting) art everywhere. In sum, while things didn’t quite start smoothly, it’s good to be here and we seem to be lucky in our landlords!