No, I’m not talking about the wonderful summer weather we’ve been having in Paris. You see, Monday night our groceries from Telemarket.fr were delivered, and as I opened the last box this is what was inside. It was not the paper towels and 6-pack of milk that I expected to find but a cornucopia of junk food. Evidently this box was accidentally switched with our more wholesome package. The contents are worth well over 100€.

Same as if it was a box filled with kilo bags of cocaine, we knew we had to get it out of the house and into its rightful owner’s hands. Four bags of Pepperidge Farm Sausalito cookies and who knows what else would do us in faster than if it actually was yayo.

The next morning I called Telemarket’s help line and stumbled my way through explaining the mix-up, expecting them to send someone over to take the box and bring us our milk and paper towels. But after clumsily provided some personal information the woman on the line said blah blah blah boite…blah blah blah c’est un cadeau (that’s all I understood…I’m terrible on the phone). I confirmed by saying “cette boite…c’est un cadeau??” She said oui, I said goodbye, and that was the end of it. A box of delicious death was ours for the keeping.

Like people who hold the two keys that must be turned at the same time to launch a nuclear missile, we agreed that anything in the box must only be eaten together, and only with extreme moderation. Our first night, it was two Sausalitos each.

Perhaps this is one way the French keep “fat Americans” fat once they move to France: by “accidentally” delivering boxes of junk food and letting them keep it.

It’s funny what you find in your draft emails or your old journals, isn’t it? This last weekend, I found this partial post from June of 2006 in the drafts of Wordpress, sitting patiently, waiting for the end of its story to go somewhere…

I added a few photos to illustrate, but the rest is as is:

For us, Paris weekends have been completely different than our weekends in New York City.

I used to wake up on a Saturday and head down to the deli for an egg and cheese on an everything bagel with a large coffee, all for under $2. Chances are that by 2pm, we’d be out shopping or running errands. People would be out and about, but the city would be quiet in most neighborhoods… peaceful if you avoided the tourists. Then Sunday was pretty much the exact same. Everything open and available for our convenience.

But as the French like to tell you, it’s different here. continue…

For a while I’ve wanted to record my bike ride from the 6th arrondissement to where I work in Neuilly-sur-Seine, which just beyond the western edge of Paris. My video camera is the tiny, popular Flip Cam Ultra, which I rigged up to mount to the bike’s handlebars. I knew this was the least desirable option due to how much handlebars move while riding. Ideally it would be mounted to my helmet, as my head would serve as a “steadycam”. Effective as it may be, I’m not yet ready to launch myself into that level of the nerdosphere.

The result, in real time, was what I expected: a bumpy, nauseating mess that was especially bad on cobblestone streets, or pavé as they say in French. To salvage the footage, I sped it up and added some music. It was such a gorgeous morning that I couldn’t let it go to waste.

On Saturday we needed to visit the Aubert store in Villebon-sur-Yvette, a suburb far, far away from Paris. Well actually, only about 20km, but it seemed like a different world.

We had reserved an elusive part for Dante’s stroller, the capote/habillage combo, a.k.a. the hood and rain protector. Like most everywhere else near Paris, the town was easy to get to, just 25 minutes south on the RER B. To get to the stripmall where Aubert was located, we took a 10 minute bus ride from the RER station in town, followed by a pleasant 15 minute walk where we passed by a wheat field and an equestrian facility.

The stripmall was like a taste of New Jersey. Or Orange County CA, or pick-a-place, USA. Discount shoe stores, Toys R Us, FNAC (see Best Buy + B&N combined), Darty (see Circuit City), McDonald’s (which we ate at and enjoyed), and hundreds of parking spots.

The overwhelming familiarity of it all made me realize just how much Paris is no more France than NYC is the U.S., and that suburbs, with their big box stores and better prices, are basically the same all over the world. The main differences between French and American suburbs are that the towns here are much, much older and hence have lots of quaint old houses and smaller windy roads instead of 8-lane boulevards.

Living inside the museum that is Paris proper, one is completely isolated from how the other half lives beyond La Périphérique. And like many lifelong urbanites who often mock the bland car-centric lifestyle of the suburbs, behind that pretentiousness I have a genuine curiosity about it, with its space and fresh air. It all seems very pleasant and nice, especially if you have children. I bet people even have backyard barbecues and athletic activities that don’t involve smoking cigarettes.

So what I’m really trying to say is that you should invite us over your house in the suburbs for a BBQ, but remember, we can’t stay long because we totally need to get back to the city because we don’t want to miss anything important!

If you’ve been chez nous anytime in the past, say, year and a half you may have noticed that our bathroom, or salle de bain, has been incrementally dilapidating. And finally now, all the very delicate French pieces have fallen into place. The repairs have begun!

Here’s the back story:

Shortly after moving into our lovely apartment in August of 2006 we noticed that the paint on the walls of the bathroom was starting to peel in spots. At the same time, our entryway door, which is adjacent to the bathroom, started to become stuck and hard to close. I though that since many things expand and contract with the changing seasons and temperature, and since this is an old building, it could be normal. But both problems kept getting worse.

By the end of the year it got to the point where I had to sand down the door frame just so we could close the door. And at the same time, the paint in the bathroom kept peeling. Thinking this couldn’t be a coincidence we decided to commence with the inevitably long and painful process of getting the landlord involved. We know now that both our landlord and our immoblier (the realtor who actually collects our rent and handles problems) are very nice people but we didn’t know what to expect. We’d heard nightmare repair stories.

The immoblier soon — meaning a couple of months in France — sent an architect to investigate. continue…

As everyone who lives in France knows, calling a customer service phone number can be a costly endeavor. It usually works something like this:

Let’s say your internet service goes down and you have no choice but to call customer support. Knowing that you’re about to get shaken down for 0.34€ a minute you suck it up and pick up the phone. Inevitably, you’re on hold for 10 minutes, speak to a person who can’t help you, hold another 5 minutes, speak to another person who can’t help you, all while you watch the clock and sweat. Suddenly you’re out 10€ and you have nothing to show for it. Why you should have to pay them to fix their problem is beyond my comprehension.

I really, really miss American customer service, even the outsourced kind, and whenever I am fortunate enough to have to call an ubiquitous “800″ number (hell, even the IRS has the friendliest folks) I speak to the support person like I’m an old friend, asking their name, telling them about Paris, and so on. It’s just so nice to talk to someone who at least pretends they want to talk to you! And it’s all on their dime.

Well it looks like France is taking a step closer to civilized customer service by eliminating per minute charges while you’re on hold.

Here’s an excerpt of an email I received from Free: continue…

While we’re not blogging about all of the things we keep saying we should blog about (our French bathroom plumbing woes, our sunless vacation on the French Riviera, the new Daily Monop around the corner from our apartment, our beef with Noos, Orange, or PhoneHouse, getting Dante’s first passport and American citizenship, and watching a guy dust for fingerprints on the windows behind our cafe table), we are still capturing our happy life here in Paris:

Hopefully, we’ll get to some of those other theoretical blog posts sooner than later. (If you have a preference about which one you’d like to hear about first, let us know.)

If there’s a better day to break my three-month hiatus from posting here, I can’t think of one. It’s been such a perfect weekend in Paris that there really isn’t anything to complain about. The weather is warm, the skies are blue, and Dante is quickly growing to become this amazing little boy who surprises us every day. Add to this a wonderful new mom.

Now that all the pleasantries have been taken care of, I wanted to talk about the status of mikeandrion.com. It’s obvious that, seeing we’re nearly halfway through the year and have just a few blog entries to show for it, we (OK, mostly me) are just not cutting the mustard as master bloggers. Part of it, of course, is that Dante (not to mention his Flickr stream and Tumblr blog) takes up a lot of our free time. When he’s awake, blogging just isn’t happening. When he’s sleeping I’m too tired to write many words (kind of like right now) .

The other main reason why entries are sparse is because of the sheer normalcy surrounding our lives in Paris. After singing the praises of Picard, comparing this in Paris to that in New York, and complaining about exploding electronic appliances, two-plus years on and life here is amazing yet mundane: I get up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep, rinse and repeat.

We’re trying to decide right now whether we want to make an effort to breathe some life into this blog, or to retire it (yet keep the archives live) as a memento of our first two years in Paris. We’re leaning towards moving on to other projects; Rion, as always, will continue to highlight her fantastic photography on Rion.nu. As for me, I’m going to move on to a new solo blog (topic and domain TBA) and also try to get some more updates on the IHT Developer Blog (RSS).

If you haven’t already, I suggest subscribing to our RSS feed so when we post new info it will be delivered directly to your reader.

Thanks for following our story, and we’ll keep you posted.