Exciting news ....I have bought a bicylcle (un vélo). When I was telling everyone I was moving to Paris, I imagined getting a lovley classic bike like the one on the photo with a basket where I would have baguettes and lavender and wine and I would be wearing a stripey boatneck shirt, with a scarf and ofcourse a béret! Alas, like most of the preconceived ideas we have about foreign countries, these types of bicycles are extremely expensive (about 100Euro second-hand) and unpractical because they generally have no gears. Three of us and a really helpful french guy went to a flea market in the west of Paris to search for bikes, considering that there are heaps of bikes in Paris, there weren't many for sale but we ended up finding 3 decent mountainbikes, for between 28Euro and 40Euro (trust mine to be 40Euro!). I have often wondered where all the second-hand stuff goes because there are no Lifeline or St Vinnies anywhere, but I found it ALL, there was soo much stuff there, heaps of clothes, used pots and pans, furniture, new electornic stuff, old mobile phones, anything you could wish for! Because you can't take bikes on the metro (only the RER), we decided we may as well ride them all the way back to Chatenay since it was such a nice day. It was kind of scary going through all the traffic but still really nice, although I think it was 20km in all... not a bad test ride! I have one loose pedal but that is easily fixed! Here is a picture of all our bikes, mine is the dark purple one!
In other exciting news, I have a fridge now (40Euro -delivered to my room!) - yay, I can have cheese & ice cream! And I have a kettle (it's actually a coffee maker but it was cheaper to buy that than a kettle!)
The first week of the month is going to be awful, already this week I have had to pay rent + 'le caution' (deposit) which was 400Euro, then I needed to renew my Navigo pass - another 78Euro. All fairly boring and not much to show for it :(
No comments:
Post a Comment