So after trying to navigate a French map of the store (yes they have little pamphlets with a store map on them! :O) we went up around 10 different escalators to try and find something remotely my size. Once inside we walked around and barely touched anything. There was so much clothing and so many designers! I barely recognized all of the designer names. One thing you should know about me is that I am a born and bred Walmart shopper. Put me in Walmart with a certain amount of money and I'll come out with what we need plus more, with cash leftover. So basically these stores should have been heaven for me right? Wrong. I get SO overwhelmed when it comes to huge fashion stores. It's not like Walmart of Kohls where they have one shirt with 3 different colors and multiple sizes of each. In here there was one shirt, one size, one color; so the idea of trying to find something I would like left me feeling queazy. After around 3 levels of store I decided I couldn't take it anymore and we needed to leave.
The next place we went was Galerie Lafayette which again was HUGE. This store was even bigger than the last. It covers around 10 street blocks and has at least 7 floors so it might look like this.
- ... - Bridge - ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE
- ... - vvv - ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE
- ... ---------- - ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE
- ... ---------- - ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE
- ... - ^^^ - ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE ALL OF THIS IS STOOOORE
- ... - Bridge - I was just to lazy to fill in all the dash marks
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ---- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Yea just imagine copying and pasting that over and over and over..ten times.
Overall plain MADNESS!
I couldn't handle it so we just found a toilette and then attempted to find the exit…which was actually a lot harder than normal. Took like 20 minutes. Okay more like 10.
After walking the Champs-Élysées again looking for a outdoor patio for lunch and finding none open because of the gloomy weather we headed to Mcdonalds for lunch (no judging). Then we looked in our travel books and decided we needed to stick to smaller shops if we were going to buy anything. So we found these two smaller shops that were on the outskirts of town and decided to try and hunt them down.
Basically while doing that we got pretty lost. We had a few options for maps, some that were a little older than what was actually in reality. Overall there was a street named ___ Vielle and that's where the store was. We found just Vielle street and decided that it was the street we were looking for. After standing on a corner glaring into our maps for about 10 minutes a local man who spoke English decided to ask if we needed help. He then told us that the street we were on and the street we were looking for were two different things. He described it as "the difference from your father to me". Similar in gender but different in age. So we were close but still far. So even with the man's help we still found ourselves quite lost and wound up in a nice little park. We sat there for another 10 minutes before actually finding the rode we needed on a newer map and decided to throw out the old one we had been following..since it didn't even have ____ Vielle street on it. Oh well…the park was a nice place.
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| Lost park in the background with our handy dandy map |
After following our map very closely we came upon this wonderful street that we dubbed "Purseville". Basically on that street the only stores they had were dedicated to bags and purses. Short strapped, long strapped, shoulder bags, extra shoulder straps, wallets, backpacks. SO MANY BAGS! We didn't see one single other type of store. It was all purses. We would look down the street and see one store was overflowing onto the sidewalk with purses wrapped in plastic, only to walk by and look inside and see that it looked like they had stuck all the purses they had into individual plastic bags and then used on of those vacuum sealers on them just to make room for MORE purses. Towards the end, after we called it Purseville, we actually saw a store called just that, Purseville! If I had to predict it, if they stopped ordering new purses today and only sold the ones they had now, they had enough to make it until 2030. It was just so much!
Finally we found our stores we were looking for and after not liking them either, just gave up on French fashion altogether. It wasn't worth all the stress to find the exact shirt you wanted. So we decided to try and find the nearest metro (since we had basically walked into the bowels of Paris) and head to dinner. We went back to the place we had our first French meal, A little Greek stand where we got Kabobs. A tortilla of sorts filled with beef, lettuce, french fries, onions and a special dill sauce, topped with salt. Really good stuff.
After that we wandered around the streets near it looking for a cheap crème brûlée for my mom. We searched and searched and found a few but we felt bad for going to a dine in place and ordering just one crème brûlée for the 3 of us. So we just went home.
On our way home we walked on this bridge in which the side railing was covered in locks. All type of locks: bike locks, luggage locks, but mostly the locks with the gold colored base. The symbolism of this is that couples from all over come to this bridge and take a lock and normally write their names on them and the date, lock it to the bridge, and then throw the key into the river below. It's SOO romantic and just another one of those things that Paris does to get it's name as one of the most romantic places on Earth. The locals like to get something out of it too; the vender across the street sells the locks and keys and tells people to go "lock" their love together on this bridge.
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| The even have lights at night for them |
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| Romance at it's finest |
So today wasn't so much an eventful day, but just a day to enjoy the ambiance of the Parisian city. But I am sad to say that I have given up talking to the locals. Every time I try I just feel like they laugh at me when I walk away. I can order food really well but everything else like in shopping stores and souvenir shops, I just can't do anymore. So we've decided to stick to being the stereotypical loud Americans that assume everyone speaks English. I'm just really tired of having only 10 people in a 100m vicinity of me that can hold a conversation for longer than 2 phrases. Having only your family to talk to can get old really fast and I am dreading going to Italy where we don't even have someone who is studying the language in the family.
Also, I've discovered that I now dream only in French. The other night I was on the set of Grey's Anatomy and all the actors were speaking French and I was going along with it like it was nothing big. Oh it's crazy! I need a language escape!
So for a little humor on this post I've attached the French version of the movie poster for Hangover 2
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| So much more English than the actual title |
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