A place in the city — Paris

The apartment we rented for our week-long stay in the Marais district (le 4ème arrondissement) in October 2000 wasn't especially big, but it was pretty well equipped. As with most affordable rentals, the furniture was serviceable. I'd say the whole apartment was about 400, maybe 500, square feet. People in Paris live mostly in very small spaces. The important thing for us was not so much size or luxury, but location and price. This apartment was much bigger than most hotel rooms in the same price range ($100 per night), and it had a pretty good kitchen.

When three people with luggage holding three weeks' worth of clothes, plus carry-on bags, and camera bags, there's never enough storage space in these small apartments. You just have to put things where you can. The apartment is a place to sleep, eat breakfast, and maybe eat a light dinner in the evening. The rest of the time you're out on the streets of the city, seeing the sights.

We must have been having warm weather, because I notice that the window in the photos above is wide open.

As I said, the furniture was serviceable and fairly comfortable. The living/dining room had a table for four as well as at least one armchair like the one above and a small sofa as you saw in yesterday's post. There was a TV, which Walt and I enjoy having so that we can see news and weather reports morning and evening. Nowadays, with tablets and smart phones, maybe that's less of a selling point than it was 20 years ago.

The one bedroom, which you can see in one of the photos above, was tiny, in fact. There was just enough room in there for the double bed. The other bed in the apartmen was on a platform that was basically in the living room. It didn't provide much privacy for our friend Sue, but we're old friends and we'd been on many camping trips together in California, so we managed.

I'm not sure why the platform for that bed was built the way it was, but we had a similar built-in platform bed in one of the bedrooms in our San Francisco house. I believe Sue found this one pretty comfortable. There she is sitting on it on the day of our departure — all our bags were packed and ready to go.

P.S. I was supposed to see a dentist about my broken filling yesterday. I had a 7:40 p.m. appointment in a town that's a 35-minute drive from Saint-Aignan. However, at about 3 o'clock the phone rang and the doctor said he needed to cancel my appointment. He gave me a new one for next Wednesday at 7:20 p.m. The dentist said something about President Macron's scheduled appearance on TV at 8 o'clock last night. It wasn't clear to me why my appointment needed to be postponed. Wish me luck. President Macron announced a four-week curfew (from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. has been ordered for the next four weeks, or maybe six. It applies to people in the Paris region and in 8 other cities and large metropolitan areas around the country — about a third of the French population.