14/03/2024 – BONUS POST Trouble comes in threes…Hitting the ground

This post’s title does have a literal component. First morning and I fall, getting out of the shower, taking the too-high step down from the full bath onto the polished concrete floor. I bounced off the door, raked my way down the vanity unit and landed in an ignominious pile next to the lavatory. I have big blue bruises on my left hip, hand and a red-purple three-inch graze down my ribs. I was shaken, but I am fine. Moreover, I trust that was the third and final of the initial trip “troubles”.

Yes, we had our teething problems, which only make the prospect of today’s partly-sunny forecast and self-promised coffee in the Louvre members’ room, all the more enticing.

Carey had the brainwave to become “Amis du Louvre” for this trip. It’s an excellent way to support a great teaching institution, and enables unlimited walk-in visits. Given we are in Paris for the two rainiest months of the year, we anticipate great use of our cards. We’re off to test the proof of that today.

We also experienced a hiccough with our hotel (yesterday) and several of the small indignities that seem inevitable when flying economy (on Tuesday).

We arrived at our aparthotel in Malakoff around 8:30 am yesterday. We were not expecting check-in, but they let us leave our bags. We lived close by for 6 weeks in 2020, part of our covid-odyssey (see earlier post). It’s an immigrant neighbourhood just outside the ring road, sprinkled with laundromats, grocery stores, the kind of restaurants you might regularly eat at if you had only a single hotplate at home. And, it’s an hour’s walk through the city to the Seine - perfect for the budget traveler.

When we returned, caffeinated and with provisions, we found ourselves in a stand-off with the receptionist, who asserted, despite our paperwork, that we had only booked (and, more crucially, paid for) a room for one person, not two. Conducted hilariously in my broken French and her broken English, polite and even smiley, the nub of it was that we were not getting our key… After about 20 minutes, the manager showed up and allowed us to check-in, saying (as I understood it), that we have 50 nights to figure it out... Nevertheless, straight off the red-eye, it was pretty stressful.

It is hard to say any specific Delta item was a “problem”, but, taken together, I think they can be “counted”. Most bizarre was my strangely cubic breakfast sandwich. It turned out to be 2 rectangles of tofu, expertly cooked to precisely the consistency and flavour of dish-sponge, garnishless and buried deep in a square roll redolent of varnished cotton wool. Clearly, Delta considers all vegetarians must be resoundingly punished, or, at the very least, soundly discouraged from their deviant predilections…

It took every drop of that highly-drinkable, three Euro Medoc we got from the Monoprix last evening to wash away the taste