Well, it’s safe to say that moving day in Paris closely resembles that of moving day in the states…minus the whole furniture part.  Everyone is frustrated and moving around at a frantic pace, and something always doesn’t go right.  If our Parisian moving experience should be made into a reality show, it would be a hybrid of Amazing Race and Design on a Dime….with a language barrier.

We got to the apartment yesterday at around 11.  The three of us had so many bags, and the taxi driver absolutely hated us for no reason.  Talk about a grumpy individual.  After unloading our bags in front of the apartment we waited for the owner’s lawyer to let us in.  Five huge suitcases and tiny streets of Paris that are spacially impossible to navigate three deep was hysterical to watch.  Many of the locals passed by us and started to laugh.  Little did we know what we were in for.  The woman came and opened up the doors, the inside of our building has all of this cobblestone and it opens up to the sky in the middle.  We rolled all of our luggage, more or less, over and upon seeing the stairs just dropped it on the floor.  The staircase is oh so narrow and steep.  The pictures online made this place look huge for a studio….well it’s not.  It’s super tiny and there were decorating things everywhere (candles, random items of clutter, old magazines from 2006), and for a moment Roomie and I had a panic attack because we weren’t sure how we would live here for the next quatre mois.  After the lady left MoRo, Roomie, and I went into organization and idea overdrive to make the living situation the best it possibly can be, and we pretty much succeeded.  Let’s just say our clothes are the art on the walls and shelves now.  Oh yeah, the bathroom door is a sheer white curtain and I can’t really fit in the shower.  The shower has a hand held nozzle, and we tried to hook it up to the top of this shampoo holder in the shower.  I took a shower after my run, and lo and behold, the spary hits my neck at the highest point.  It’s actually really funny looking back on it.

Speaking of running, I took my first official run yesterday in Paris.  I’m planning on running today because I desperately need to.  With all of the second hand smoke I’ve inhaled, I might as well have picked up smoking.  The first 5 minutes within my run my lungs were gasping for air-something that’s never happened to me before in my life.  It was a really strange feeling.  I ran just over 5 Miles and it was really tough.  I had to stop every once and a while to catch my breath.  It’s also hard to run here because the pollution is ridiculous.  There’s no open air park that matches Central Park in size close to me, so all of the car fumes just attack…even by the Seine.  The cobblestones here are really rough on my stride, so I’m going to start looking into other places to run.  There’s a park in the 19th that’s supposed to be great for running, so I guess I’ll metro there, do my workout, and metro back for the time being.

Walking around last night, we noticed the leaves are falling off the trees.  Guess Autumn is really here.