Post by Ella
Smooth flight with a 1/2 empty plane, touch down at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, 5 minutes in Border Control. It’s all automated: scan your passport, take a photo…does the photo match the passport? Yes? Done. We meet up with Ehtisham from “Welcome Pickups” to get a ride from the airport to our AirBnb in Paris. They are a little more pricey than an Uber and definitely more expensive than the metro, but this is one of our splurges. When emerging in a zombified state into the Arrivals hall, sure is nice to be led to a waiting car and then stare out the window for the better part of an hour while Ehtisham’s car (which looks more like a London taxi) threads through Paris traffic.
By now you know that we prefer apartment stays over hotels. This particular apartment is situated at 19 Rue Eugène Varlin. Smack dab in the middle of the African quarter. I don’t think it’s officially called that.
Our AirBnb host was not able to greet us in person but had sent elaborate instructions on getting in. The first part involved walking around the corner to an alternative entrance where we punched in a code on the key pad situated on a massive wooden double door. Walk across a small yard (a graveled area that served as parking) through a small gate, and down the stairs on the left. Another code (“to be entered carefully and without interruption “) got us into the main apartment building. Up to the 1st floor in the elevator, turn right, find the door marked EDF, enter the small room and find the lockbox on the back of a large locked cabinet. Another code to open the lock box and voila, the keys! Back to the hallway and continue to the end to find number 21. Hand the chunky cylindrical metal key with a circle of prongs on the end to Grubb and let him wrestle the door open.
After figuring out the WiFi (a small business-sized card with a QR code to scan automatically connects our devices), we are ready to go to the nearest metro station to buy our navigo passes,
and then explore the area on foot, ending at a Senegalese eatery where we each had a Thieb. More on all that in upcoming posts.
