Well the first adventure is trying to figure out where we are going to stay in Paris. The budget and the exchange rate will not afford us to stay long-term in one of those beautiful vacation rentals but I can look anyway! There are so romantic and beautiful.
Right away J. found a place called La Cite Internationale Universitaire de Paris. This foundation offers many services and offering dormitories to visiting academics and students is one of them. The interesting thing is that many of the former residents were famous like John-Paul Sartre. Maybe we will add our names to the list just for fun! We applied and waited until about mid-May when we decided we better seek alternative housing lest we be homeless in Paris.
We also tried using the Science Accueil services. They were very good. They said they would write to us in May with options and they did exactly that. It was fun to get an email with a long list of options. Though they were all in our budget and one bedrooms they were a far walk to the train and would add at least 20 minutes to J’s commute. J. is going to have to commute to the suburbs much like he did in Chicago for work. Having been there and done that with the long commutes back and forth we were hoping to minimize this as much as possible.
So we decided to turn to Craig's list. Why good ‘ol Craig’s list did not occur to us earlier is a mystery. We got the idea from the Sofie, J's cousin who is from Paris. Funny how the obvious just doesn't occur to you at times. Here we found so many options both in English and French. Mostly it seems that the Parisians leave Paris for the summer and offer their homes for sublets. Should this tell us something? There was a bit of a learning curve in getting familiar enough with the various Paris neighborhoods so we could make an educated guess on which listings would work best for us. After a few days we found a place for July and August on the rive gauche (left bank) near the RER stop Denfert Rochereau. It's located in the quartier du guerre, a popular Paris neighborhood. The owner of this nice apartment says this about it his home -
"I'm sure you will not regret it (no one did before). The place is really nice, and the terrace is really something exceptional in Paris. Maybe the only shadow is the 6th floor. but you get use to it"
– “Maybe the only shadow is the 6th floor.” Don’t you just love that?
Is it not fun to read this and hear your language from a non-native speaker? They get you to look at your language in so many new ways and make so many new discoveries or re-discoveries. After savoring the poetry of this description, the reality that reaching the front door would require climbing six flights of stairs shed some light on the situation. Well in Chicago I would climb 27 stories to my front door for the pure heck of it and didn’t I do the Hustle up the Hancock one year? That’s 98 flights in 40 minutes. 6 flights – piece of cake.
So where should we go for June? A friend of ours at work who is from Paris gave us yet another link to find short-term housing. It was wonderful because you could select the location, dates and price and presto listings returned. However, J. then informed me that he his paperwork for the research exchange may not be ready for June. With that in mind we decided to keep June free in case we decided to travel to CERN for a short-while. I think I was quite calm about not knowing where we might land and it only being two weeks to departure time. Only J. can really attest to this as it would be very uncharacteristic of me to not try and run around like a gerbil in wheel with this uncertainty at this late of time. Guess what? The housing hunt had a happy ending. One week before departure the Cite U. wrote to say they had an opening which we accepted. One day before departure the paper work came through for Js research exchange. I can’t wait to join him in a few days!
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