Champs-Elysees et Arc de Triomphe

Thursday, July 08, 2010 Day 8
We slept late, then washed the sheets and hung them out to dry. We then spent the rest of the morning struggling with our cell phone. We decided that we need to learn something about its operation every day. We are working on internet access today since that is the most important feature for us. After Roger struggled with the phone for over an hour (I gave up after 20 minutes), we trekked to the Orange again, where we encountered the same engaging young man who sold us the phone yesterday. He took the phone, invoked some magic, then presto! the phone opened up to us. I wonder how many trips to Orange it will take for us to operate the phone successfully! In our defense, he was puzzled at the screen which first came up, and had to do some sort of work-around to avoid the request to sign on to Free, which appears to be France’s equivalent of Juno in the U.S.

We returned to our castle and began to work on getting on the internet. We succeeded pretty easily now that Mr. Orange has worked his miracles. We still struggled with the whole thing – not only is learning a new phone burdensome, but it is particularly onerous when the phone is not in one’s native language, and one is not even fluent in the phone’s language. We were hoping to be able to change the language of the phone, but that doesn’t appear to be an option. Dommage!

It was almost 3:30 before we set out for Champs-Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe. We walked there, a journey of about an hour. It is certainly an impressive arch, but we chose not to go up in it. We are saving a grand ascent for the Eiffel Tower a little later. We took the bus back, and after a transfer, ended up at the foot of our street. It was a hot walk there, and a hot ride back, but the ride back took much less time, even with the transfer.

We did not go to the market today, as we have realized that we can get all we need at the local vendors. I will briefly explain “the market.” Every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, a large number of stalls are set up along a 3-block or so length of the street. Vendors there sell everything from fish to cheese to bread to shirts and pants to shoes to knick-knacks to socks to table linens to fruits and vegetables and lots of other stuff. There does not seem to be much difference in quality or price between the offerings at the market and those at the permanent shops along the street. I haven’t examined this in detail, but I can’t imagine a permanent shop owner allowing himself to be undersold by the market vendor, or vice versa. I am sure that in previous years, the market vendors had produce from their own farms, but I am not sure that this practice continues today, so I see very little difference between the market and the shops. For the most part we will probably frequent the shops on our own time rather than try to make the market, which is open from 8:00 until 13:00.

Because we did not go to the market today, we are out of almost everything – cheese, meat, fruit. We do have butter, some milk, cereal and some veggies. And one apple. We ate out for supper – pizza from a place at the bottom of the street which advertised air conditioning. We had just gotten off the bus and we were hot, so we opted in. The owner didn’t turn on the air conditioning until we had been in the restaurant for some ten minutes, but it did cool things off some. We were the only patrons the whole time. While sitting there, I managed to check our google mail via our telephone. Victory!

I am sorry if our cell phone travails are boring you. Right now they consume us, however, and they are all we can think about. We will get over this eventually. I hope.

It appears that we will be washing a load of clothes almost every day. The washer is quite small – I wasn’t sure I would get our queen-sized sheets and two pillow cases into one load, but I did, barely. But since we only have two towels, I plan to wash towels twice a week, as we go through enough wash cloths, hand towels and kitchen towels to complete a load a couple of times a week. That makes for three days, and our whites, dark colored stuff and delicate wash will make up 3-4 more loads. Our one drying rack will only hold a load at a time, max, and some of the items, such as our jeans and cargo shorts, take a good long while to dry. A load takes about an hour to wash, and if I will spend a few minutes every morning getting a load in and that should take care of the laundry. We can toss it on the drying rack before we set out for our day’s adventures. As it is, we have let it pile up a bit.