February 23rd Saturday

I got up around 10am. We had a meeting with our landlord at 11:00 so we wanted to be ready when he came. I had some chocolate cereal and got ready. I tried to quickly clean up the apartment before he arrived.

M. Choupin came over and we returned the original gas bill to him now that we’d successfully submitted our carte de séjour application. (It’s hard to not do a little dance every time I think that sentence.) Our landlord joked with us and said basically “So you guys are legit now? You’re not going to get deported?” We just laughed and said “Well, we hope we’re legit. We’ll see.”

Our landlord had also come over because we wanted to talk to him about a strange situation that had been occurring with our buzzer and the building. We have a door from the street that leads into the courtyard. You’ve got to have a code to get past this door. Then after the courtyard there’s another door that leads to the stairs of our building. You can buzz people to talk to them and ask them to buzz the door open or you can use a key.

We’d been having a guy that kept buzzing us and telling us strange stories just to get us to open the door. First he was asking for keys to the cave. Then he said that he had to check the chimney and gas. Adrienne has been the one to talk to him every time. She’s usually closer to the buzzer. Each time she tells him that she has no idea what he’s talking about and then hangs up. Well, the other day, the man got in and was at our apartment door. Once again, Adrienne was the one to talk to him. She told me it was the same guy who’s been buzzing us. He said some story about the chimney and gas. We don’t have either here. Adrienne told him he couldn’t come in and shut the door. We were concerned by the fact that he was at our door so we emailed our landlord. The situation usually occurs when he’s at work so I didn’t think he’d know anything about it. While he was here, he told us that sometimes homeless people try to get in the building to go squat in the upper story apartments. He said they’re harmless and won’t do anything to us. He wasn’t sure why the guy was at the door. He just said that he’ll call us if he’s coming over so we shouldn’t open the door if we’re not expecting anyone and we feel nervous about it. If things get out of control then we can install a peephole in the door. I discovered that in French they call it an oeil de boeuf (literally a cow’s eye). That had me laughing for a long time that night.

Adrienne and I felt comforted by M. Choupin’s reassurance and the fact that he seemed very concerned with our safety. We’ve really lucked out on having such a wonderful landlord. He even made sure we had the numbers for the police in France and in our neighborhood.

After M. Choupin left, we made some lunch. I showed Adrienne how to make popeyes so that we could use up the eggs. This is where you cut out a hole in a slice of bread, cook it in a pan with butter and crack an egg in the center. Yum.

Following lunch, I was on Skype and got to talk to my friend Amanda P. in Japan. We talked for at least two hours. I haven’t talked to her in a long time and it was fun to talk. I also did a little work around the apartment.

I got dressed up because Adrienne and I wanted to go out to eat and have some fun. We went to the Oberkampf metro stop and looked around for a cheaper place to eat. We ended up at an Italian restaurant. I ordered a pizza that came with onion, pepperoni, and peppers. It was good and I ate it all. I also had a tiny carafe of Sauvignon wine to drink. It had two and a half glasses in there. Adrienne ordered spaghetti with pine nuts and basil in it. I tasted it and it was amazing. Both dishes were very good. We had a nice waiter who was fun despite him speaking English to us. When waiters do that it reminds me that my accent has a long way to go.

After dinner, Adrienne and I walked toward the area where I’d gone out with friends previously. I showed her the two bars across the street from one another. One was named Café Charbon and the other was Chez Justine. We went into Chez Justine so that we could introduce Adrienne to the place. I ended up ordering a vin chaud because I’d really loved the one I had last time. It was just so nice to pick up a warm glass of red wine and taste the orange and other light flavors in it. The only problem was that it’s too hot to drink when you get it and it’s served in a normal glass instead of a mug. I guess you have to be really tough to drink vin chaud.

We left the bar and headed back home. After the wine with dinner and the hot wine, I was feeling mighty sleepy. We got on the metro and I felt like I was going to fall asleep on the way back. I managed to stay awake until we got home around 11:00pm.

I talked to my parents on Skype for a bit and went to bed around midnight. Nothing like a bit of wine to make me go to bed at a normal time.