We didn’t even get dressed today until 11 AM. What the hell have we become?
To be fair, most of the morning was spent online cruising our usual Internet spots (and it was raining a bit), but also starting to fill out all the personal and financial information our relocation service needs to find us a permanent place to stay. We certainly don’t want to be the source of any delay in this with the holidays approaching.
Initially, they are presenting us with a unexpectedly aggressive timeline, with us being handed the keys to a place by November 25. We have mixed feelings about this. While it will be wonderful to be permanently settled and able to relax, we are paid up in an AirBnB until December 19th. If we have to bail early, we’re not getting any of that money back. Fortunately, that rental is not in Paris, but Saint-Germain-en-Laye, so a lot less money’s at stake. However, if we drag our feet a little, and embrace French bureaucracy, we might slow things down and improve the timing.
So with 11 AM rolling around and us feeling guilty, we forced ourselves out the door for a little adventuring to a huge parapharmacy. You all know what a pharmacy is, they sell drugs. Big US chains like Walgreens and CVS sell a lot of other crap too. Here in France, pure pharmacies just sell drugs, and they are somewhat hard ass about it. You have to ask for almost anything useful, even if a prescription is not required. Yeah, you can get ibuprofen, but you have to ask someone….in French. As an American, I find it an imposition to have to ask anyone for my drugs.
When we were here last October, we went to a huge, well known parapharmacy called “CityPharma”. By well known I mean Instagram and da TikTok. Influencers love the place. It’s swarmed with tourists with lines out the door waiting to get in. So last October we hit it very early, just after opening, and went right in.
Truly, it is an impressive place. They have the typical pharmacy counter, but then there’s everything else. Every imaginable cosmetic you can think of. Sun screens, beauty supplies, soaps and any other health goods. Women just go crazy in the place. Jeri had a list of high quality cosmetics recommended by Wirecutter that were cheaper in France than the US so we loaded up on those. But the buying experience, with the increasing number of people showing up, was less than desired.
However, since then we learned that the smart money goes to a different parapharmacy, the Pharmacie du Forum Des Halles. The Forum Des Halles is a huge underground mall located, oddly enough, in the Les Halls district. Les Halles is also the most transit lines converge and it’s a major transfer point. The station is so huge and convoluted, even the locals sometimes get turned around. But Metro line 4 passes through it, and there’s a line 4 station only a few blocks away, so an easy trip.
The damn mall was huge, and it took a while to find the pharmacy, but when we finally did, it was impressive. Certainly bigger than CityPharma and easier to move around in We had time to really browse and it was a weird place by US sensibilities.
The items accessible on the shelves were all cosmetics, hygiene supplies and supplements. Looking at the vitamins and supplements, they were way more expensive than the US. But again, any medicine that would actually DO anything wasn’t on the shelves. You had to ask. What was on the shelves was bullshit stuff like homeopathic drugs and botanicals. An amazing array of things that were useless. And product ingredient labels were few and far between, certainly not like the US standardized ingredient lists. In a great many ways the EU does public interest regulation much better than the US, but this certainly ain’t one of them.
We were starting to flag, so we headed back to the apartment. Along the way we cruised through some stores and bakeries looking for something to bring home for lunch. I suppose if we actually had things to do this daily shopping routine would be tiresome, but for now it keeps us engaged and exploring our surroundings looking for tasty stuff. Driven by food.
I’m going to try and add some more pics, as I think my walls of text are rather dry. I mean, to me, they are brilliant concoctions of artistry, but I doubt anyone else shares that view. But I’m not going to add pics just for pics sake. I need relevance! Well, crap. I just added another course to my text wall….
OK, an addendum. About 5 PM we decided to force ourselves out again and wander around. This time we headed over to the Montparnasse Cemetery, which was really close. We had been there once before, but it’s been a while. Yeah, Jeri and I are “Cemetery People” (If you people had any idea how weird we really are, your heads would explode). Wherever we go we always check out the cemeteries. They are very quiet, never touristed, and an illuminated peek into the local culture. Using Google Translate on the headstones helped with our learning French. I also wanted to check it out as a possible running course, because it’s time to get off my ass and get to it again. I looked good for that purpose, so I’m running out of excuses. Is that an unintended pun?
As expected, it was a great place, but we only touched a very small part of it. It’s so close we’ll be back. They even have bathrooms. Parisian cemeteries are gems. On the way back to our place, we spotted this. The car is parked in a friggin’ marked parking space, off the street, on the parkway. I did not know that French cars can move sideways, but that’s the only way I see this happening. And this wasn’t a one off. Cars were parked like this up and down the street. When you slow down and don’t blast through places like a tourist, you stumble on things like this.
