PARIS Day 2

Sooooo.... we both hoped today would be better but unfortunately it wasn't :(

No call from British Airways about luggage and even when we called them tonight, Alia was on hold for 12 minutes before she got a message saying that they were off work for the day. Neither of us have working phones to call international numbers in France, so she had to buy Skype credit and call them that way.

The apartment that we're staying in is nice, very quaint, but lacks AC and is in an almost-shady area. The lacking AC isn't a HUGE problem because it still gets pretty chilly at night so we open all the windows at night & close them during the day so it doesn't get too hot. I don't get hot that easily but since Alia doesn't have her luggage, she only has a pair of long jeans & a shirt and feels the heat way more than I do.

The apartment being in a semi-shady area is more of a problem because it's supposed to be in a "trendy" area and I mean it is, if you consider hipster, art-loving, dirty, and tons of raucous drunk people at all these pubs trendy. I could see why it's called trendy, but it's not an area I would ever want to visit or really explore. The one good thing is that it's right between Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est, which are two big train stations & makes it pretty easy to take the metro. Both of the gare's are absolute NIGHTMARES though so we've been trying to stay away from them and we've been taking the metro from smaller stations down the street.

What's also nice about the area is that it's convenient in terms of small stores, boulangeries & patisseries so it's pretty easy to buy food. There's also a lot of little restaurants on the street below, but they are all sooo expensive. We both thought London was expensive but eating there doesn't hold a torch to eating out in Paris. So today we went grocery shopping at a store right below the apartment & plan on eating breakfast and dinners at home:)

Anyways, today! Starting from yesterday because of carrying my carry-on bag, I've been getting severe pains in my right forearm/hand & have these weird red marks that come up & feel really hot to the touch and makes it so hard to move my hand. Feel's kind of like a prolonged charlie's horse. So last night I manned up and went to bed but then woke up around 5 AM with the most excruciating pain in my arm. I took an ibuprofen & went back to sleep but didn't sleep very well since it hurt so badly... so I didn't sleep well & it took Alia forever to wake me up in the morning.

Once we were ready, our first stop was the LongChamp store since she wanted to buy a couple cheap longchamps :) The metro ride there was sooo terrible and it was super overcrowded. I know it's a Saturday and tubes also get crowded in London, but Parisians are just so..... rude! People are trying to get on without letting people get off first, no one ever fills into the car so there's people pushing you while you're trying to push other people while also simultaneously clutching your bag (Alia's mom told us some horror stories of getting purses stolen on the tube so we are now extra cautious..).

We ended up at a department store on Rue de Rivoli, which is apparently Paris's main shopping street and Alia bought all 3 of her longchamps. By now, it's around 1 PM and we decide to go get lunch at a tapas place. We didn't really want to shell out a ton of $$ again for food so we found a deal at this restaurant and it was by far the worst meal ever. The tapas were all really disgusting, the calamari looked like poop, the "bread" was literally cut up toast & the sangria was just okay. Around this time, my arm started to really hurt again so I took another ibuprofen (whoops, ibuprofen+alcohol do not mix) and then I started to feel incredibly nauseous. The restaurant, like almost every single one here, doesn't have AC, so we were both burning up the entire time. The service was also quite slow so there I was, ready to throw everything up, and we're there waiting 30 minutes for dessert. I was seriously ready to pay for a taxi back to our apartment at that point. Eventually, we get the heck out of that place & take the metro back to our apartment. We stopped to buy food & carted it all back together.

Once we got back, Alia wanted to check the status of her bags but we had absolutely no way of calling the company. My phone only can receive international calls & can't make international calls so she was unable to call from my phone. The pay phones here (or at least the ones we found), only take credit card & neither of us were about to stick our card into some grimy, random telephone booth. Eventually, we decide to make the most of our day and head to Marche aux Puces, which is some famous flea market in Paris.

The market closed at 6 PM though so we were like well screw the suitcase for now & headed out around 4:30 PM. We get to the metro station and well, just our luck, the train is having technical difficulties (what is up with this trip & technical difficulties?!) and wasn't moving. We stayed down there for 10 minutes waiting, me picking up random phrases of French & piecing them together & asking someone who turned out to be British oops, and finally decided to leave since it was SO hot down at the metro. Oh yeah, all the trains and metro stations don't have AC either, which is just dandy.

We decide to walk along Canal de Saint-Martin, which our Airbnb host told us was a nice little street for shopping and eating. Alia still doesn't have her suitcase & has no clothes for tomorrow, so we decided to do some shopping so she could wear clean, un-sweat stained clothes. We were either not in the right place or that street was not a shopping street because we walked for quite a while and saw no reputable clothing stores. After a bit we were like screw it, let's go back to Rue de Rivoli. So we walked to the nearest metro station and took it back to Rivoli. Being a saturday, of course that street was crowded and of course a lot of the stores didn't have AC, so we were just walking in and out of stores for a couple hours. She didn't find anything that she wanted for reasonable prices, so she bought a couple necessary items to tide her over & we were literally kicked out of a store around 8 PM because everything was closing. Boo.

We headed to dinner. It was still happy hour, so we both ordered drinks (& again my arm started to hurt so badly it was beginning to give me a headache so I think alcohol is triggering something). After the lunch fiasco we decided to semi splurge and get a better dinner, so that was fairly nice. By the time we got back to our apartment, it was almost 11 PM and Alia's been on FaceTime with her mom figuring out her luggage business.

This post is super long but I really want to be able to remember this in years to come :) It sucks majorly for Alia now but it sounds like her mom will send her another small suitcase with her friend. She's meeting her friend in Barcelona next Thursday, so at least she won't be clothes-less forever!