CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

More clothing, and a mixed blessings bank experience

Yes­ter­day, we all went shop­ping again — this time Kathy and Angie got their own per­sonal shop­pers, and Nate and I headed off to the men’s sec­tion for me (Nate couldn’t care less about clothes for him­self for the most part).

So, we had a great time shop­ping in our sep­a­rate camps — Kathy and Angie bought a lot of great stuff, as did I (I bought a lot MORE great stuff than they did — but that’s ok, beats a watch ). So, towards the end of the day, Olga and I are close friends, we’re chat­ting away the whole day in French, talk­ing about what we like and don’t like — meet­ing all the dif­fer­ent peo­ple in the store (she’s a real celebrity in the store, she’s been there for 30 years, every­body loves her, all the peo­ple work­ing there were grab­bing at her for atten­tion at dif­fer­ent times). It was really fun to walk around with her — because we sort of had “run of the place.” All the “you may stand here and wait for your turn to talk about this pair of pants” stuff that goes on nor­mally in a depart­ment store — that was gone … we’d walk up to a spe­cific depart­ment or brand area and the peo­ple would turn, see her, see me, SMILE broadly and imme­di­ately want to help. Mul­ti­ply that by the fact that every­one was French, and you can see how it was fun to have this “back door into the sys­tem” kind of access.

We spent a major­ity of our time at Zadig & Voltaire which is a new favorite brand for me … the clothes are pretty cool. That was our first stop, so Nate was still into it — while he played his DS, he’d look up every once in a while and say “no, Dad, I don’t like that col­lar — it’s too dull”, then go back to his DS. But that wore off soon, and he was ready to do some­thing else.

Well, Olga threw her weight around and we went to the cham­pagne bar run by Moet. Behind them, there was a pri­vate porch salon that was cur­rently closed, but had an enclosed fancy schmancy trans­par­ent tent with sofas and pil­lows inside. She strolled up and asked/told them that Nate was going to use that tent for the day, so he got to hang out in lux­u­ri­ous secu­rity while we rolled around the store buy­ing things.

Towards lunchtime, Olga ran off and got me a foie gras sand­wich — which was pretty awe­some. She came back with the sand­wich and said she had also given one to Nate (uh oh).

“Oh, that’s won­der­ful,”, said I, “let’s go visit him for a lit­tle while?”

“D’accord.”, she said. (happy agreement).

So, we roll up on the trans­par­ent tent, and there’s my brave boy, gamely gnaw­ing politely on this thing that’s been handed to him. She had enthu­si­as­ti­cally handed him a foie gras sand­wich, he has COMPLETELY politely taken it, said thank you, and bit­ten into the thing with­out com­plaint. By the time we’d arrived, she was enthu­si­as­ti­cally ask­ing him if he was enjoy­ing the sand­wich and he was say­ing yes … then she said she was going to head off for a few min­utes as well (per­haps to eat) and would be back in 15 min­utes. “D’accord.”, said I.

As soon as she was out of the tent…

“Daaad?…”, says Nate.
“Yeah, son.”, say I, sup­press­ing a grin.
“I really don’t like this sand­wich AT ALL.”
“Oh, I fig­ured that — I’m really proud of you, buddy, for how you han­dled your­self — really, really proud.”

So I threw myself on the grenade for him and ate his sand­wich too. So now, my finicky boy has not only eaten goat face in Africa, he’s eaten duck liver (this was foie gras du canard, I’m pretty sure) in France. I’m a proud papa

Bank­ing Gone Bad
Ok, fast for­ward to the end of the day — Olga and I are chat­ting away — we don’t got to Eng­lish much, but I’m start­ing to get a lit­tle tired. I called Kathy (using Olga’s spe­cial in-store mobile phone to call the other per­sonal shop­per, because we’re so cool), and Kathy says she’s wrap­ping up. Olga and I are look­ing for a new wal­let (which we didn’t get, even though the folks at Gucci, Ver­sace and Prada were think­ing we should ), when Kathy calls to start talk­ing about how to coor­di­nate her return to my build­ing. Acti­vate moment of exhaustion.

So, I’m stand­ing there, with the phone to my ear, in the Ver­sace depart­ment, Kathy’s talk­ing into my ear in Eng­lish about how she’ll get all her stuff over to our build­ing — and Olga is talk­ing in my other ear in French about how she can han­dle the whole thing for us — and Kathy is talk­ing about how we might want to leave it all here while we go to Notre Dame, and would that be pos­si­ble — and Olga is say­ing that she will com­bien tout l’ensemble ici and Kathy is say­ing that if we could, it would be nice to pick it up tomor­row and Olga is say­ing nous sommes ferme demain and Kathy’s say­ing we really don’t want to take all this stuff with us to Notre Dame and I’m start­ing to spin and *poof*

… hello, this is your brain’s inter­nal French trans­la­tion depart­ment — we have shut down for the evening, you can now only say “chat” and “chien” (cat and dog) — have a good day.

Ok. Un moment. Je ne pense pas qu’il est pos­si­ble for me to make sense out of this sit­u­a­tion quand je parle avec both of you at once.

So — I strug­gle to the sur­face for air — and ask Olga if we can leave every­thing until Mon­day. I’m strug­gling to under­stand her but she says basi­cally that she can gar­ble blark mark Mon­day floop mongo Hotel. I take that to mean that she’ll have the entire group of stuff dropped off on Mon­day at the hotel. Superb!

The sit­u­a­tion is resolved — but please note, I’ve gone from flu­ent French to back of the class­room from that tense experience.

Then Kathy calls back a few min­utes later — “Honey, my card was declined.”

I’m not going to go into too much detail — but these are cards that don’t get declined.

Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, when a snafu like this hap­pens — I’d just call my banker/broker at Schwab, Matt Pick­ett — and he’d flip a switch and all would be well. But Matt’s self­ishly decided to leave because his wife is hav­ing a baby. The nerve — doesn’t he know I’m buy­ing CLOTHES in PARIS?!!!

Well, as a backup, we’d usu­ally call his asso­ciate, Bran­don Siler, who han­dles our “fast and dirty” spe­cial needs (wire trans­fers, etc.). Bran­don is also COMPLETELY self-centered and has left on his hon­ey­moon. I mean, who do these peo­ple think they ARE? I’m buy­ing pants AND shirts. I’ve eaten foie gras!

Well, it’s time to break glass in case of emer­gency. I took the iPhone out of air­plane mode. It shud­dered with antic­i­pa­tion as some­where an AT&T billing com­puter turned its sleepy eye our way, licked its lips and started my inter­na­tional meter.

I called Schwab’s inter­na­tional phone sup­port line. You’d think that the inter­na­tional sup­port line would come in through some voice­mail tree that is faster, since well — it’s inter­na­tional, right? Nope. “Howdy, wel­come to Schwab — press one if you’d like to take a really long time — oth­er­wise please wait just a nor­mal long time for the next avail­able associate.”

While wait­ing, I lis­tened to the play­ful sound of my pock­ets emp­ty­ing into AT&T’s bank accounts.

“Hi, this is Schwab, how can I help you?”
“I’m call­ing from Paris, this is $1/min, my card has been declined.”
“Oh! Let me ver­ify you and then I’ll trans­fer you to the appro­pri­ate depart­ment!” … arg.
…verify…verify…
back to the hold music of my money dis­ap­pear­ing
“Hi, this is Schwab bank sup­port, I under­stand you are call­ing from Paris — do you have a num­ber we can call back?”

Olga, Olga! Chat! Chien! Com­ment t’alez vous?!!! … oh damn … how do you say “I need the phone num­ber for your spe­cial phone so I can get an inter­na­tional inbound call returned from my bank to deblock my wife’s credit card?”

“Je desit un numer pour tele­phone pour ma banque me rap­peller?” (I need a num­ber for phone for my bank me to callback).

insert grap­pling with phone num­bers — coun­try codes (the iPhone bill is still run­ning, mind you) — and then hang up.

Now we wait.

Poor, poor Shelly the Schwab oper­a­tor. It took her about 10 min­utes — but she fought her way back through the snooty depart­ment store switch­board using her high­school French and found us again. I con­grat­u­lated her profusely.

She told me she’d make a note of the costs for the call and see to it that we were reim­bursed for our iPhone charges, and worked to remove the block on Kathy’s card. She said that the block was because Kathy’s card doesn’t usu­ally have this sort of behav­ior — my card would work fine — but hers needed to be cleared (after all, I had no prob­lems yesterday).

Shelly advised wait­ing 15 min­utes, then Kathy could try it again. All very nice — so we do that. Mean­while, Notre Dame is slip­ping through our fin­gers (which ended up work­ing out for the best).

Mean­while — since Olga is just stand­ing around — all the young man­agers from the var­i­ous depart­ments are reach­ing out to her and beg­ging her to help them with things — what, I don’t know … but she’s really peeved by it, keeps telling them she’s with a client … and that’s adding to the tension.

Kathy tries her card again — no love. AAAAaaaarrrghhh…

Ok — we’ll head over there and use my card.

We grab Nate, head out of the build­ing, cross the street to the other build­ing, find Kathy, Angie and Olivia (their shop­per) and every­one is stand­ing in line for a major pur­chase at the teller. It’s a huge line because the guy in front of us (who also has a “lesser” shop­per, it would seem) is try­ing to pay on mul­ti­ple cards. Stand around, stand around.

I sug­gest that Kathy take the kids some­where to eat — which she does. So now I have the room to get my Mal­colm on. I ask if there’s any way we can get around this ridicu­lous line — so one of Kathy’s shop­pers (Olivia had an assis­tant, it would seem) asks if we can cut in for 2 min­utes to run my card. Every­one agrees. We shoul­der our way in — and presto! Card declined.

Rokey dokey smokey — I’ll just be tak­ing off my charm hat now. Here, Olga, hold my smile — I’m call­ing Schwab.

The gang of per­sonal shop­pers scurry me off to the ladies pri­vate shop­per salon — they can tell I’m less than enthused — and I think from my body lan­guage, it’s pretty clear that some poor banker is about to die, and that this isn’t about lim­its or anything.

They sit me down in a chic-chic room for ladies, throw some orange juice at me and run away. Well, most do — Olga blithely sits with me, fully aware that beneath this ter­ri­fy­ing exte­rior beats the heart of a very nice person.

Acti­vate iPhone…

tra la la — Schwab voice­mail prompts –

“Hello, wel­come to –“
“Call­ing from Paris, every­one must die, fix now.”
“Ter­ri­bly sorry, work­ing quickly, please ver­ify.”
“Ver­ify.”
“Trans­fer­ring now.”
“Amber here, ter­ri­fied, wel­come to bank, please let me live.”
“Sorry you are unhappy, fix prob­lem.”
“Fix­ing prob­lem now sir, please do not eat me. Will involve man­ager, please may I call back?”
“Cell­phone num­ber.”
“Ten minutes.”

Chat with Olga — who seems to sug­gest some­thing like “oh, it’s just a secu­rity thing (which it was), let us stay happy.” So we did.

iPhone rings
“Amber here — all is well — may I stay on the line while we con­firm?”
“Thanks, Amber, let’s see how that works out, you’re a really nice per­son.” — oh look, my human­ity — I found it again.

So we all head back out to the teller, I’m chat­ting with Amber, who’s telling me that she was really afraid of hav­ing to call in through the store, because her French is ter­ri­ble — ergo the iPhone call­back. We laugh, we cry, we’re hav­ing a great time.

The French peo­ple all start talk­ing really fast to each other. Olivia is reach­ing around for receipts, tick­ets, all sorts of stuff.
I turn to Olga, who explains that the “work­ing receipt” for all of Kathy’s pur­chases has expired, because they’re only valid for an hour after they are sub­mit­ted and fail. Zut Alors!

So, the hero(ine) of the day is the lady behind the glass at the reg­is­ter. She was fir­ing away at the key­pad, enter­ing the ENTIRE day’s orders by hand at a speed that made me think of Heather on the cal­cu­la­tor (shout out to Heather and her lick­ety split fin­gers!) … the woman types and types — they scan and check and con­firm that every­thing is right. They ALSO apply 10% dis­count on a major­ity of stuff because Kathy had some sort of super duper dis­count card (because she rocks). They ALSO set up the parts we need for VAT (I think?) — so we’ll get another 12% back from taxes. Woot, this is like Christmas!

Mean­while, Amber and I are still con­nected and run­ning up my iPhone bill.

The time had come. I hand over the card.

In a tech­no­log­i­cally inter­est­ing moment — Amber tells me that the pur­chase has been approved … and THEN the lit­tle ticker tape on the desk starts spit­ting out it’s con­fir­ma­tion. Cheers and clap­ping all around. Laugh­ter and relief. Ain’t life grand?

I thank Amber, get her name and con­tact info so I can tell other peo­ple how great she is, and hang up.

“Mon Dieu!”, I exclaim … Olga vir­tu­ally slaps me on the back and com­pli­ments me on my proper use of French. Seems it’s all come back to me now.

After­math
So, we ended up skip­ping Notre Dame, got our clothes back to the hotel our­selves — poor Olga stayed an hour later than her check­out time — she’s a won­der­ful, won­der­ful per­son. Ends up she’s a Chris­t­ian too (we find each other), we chat­ted about that a bit — then wished her well, and she us as well.

Nate and I went off to the local toy store and bought a Lego kit for him as a cel­e­bra­tion of his impec­ca­ble behav­ior the entire day (Olga kept com­pli­ment­ing him on how gen­tile he is (polite)). So, Legos in hand, he was all set for the night in the hotel. Angie, mean­while, had had a great time buy­ing clothes (as any young girl should in Paris, imho), but was tired — so she was all set for the night. So Kathy and I decided to dress up in fancy clothes and go to din­ner alone (the kids were full from their foray in the store while I fought with Schwab).

We headed off to one of the places we’d vis­ited last night. This was a pretty nice place, quite busy — called Les Grands Capucins … which means “The Big Capuchins” (look it up). Big place, lots of activ­ity — a wee bit too much atti­tude… but we were bound to give it another try.

The food ended up being ridicu­lous… there’s an entire story there about me tak­ing on a pompous French waiter and win­ning in his own court — but this post is too long … so suf­fice to say … we had din­ner in spite of the poor service.

We ordered some food, enjoyed each other’s com­pany — and lo and behold… my card was declined.

I decided that the com­pany needed me happy — so I used the com­pany card. I’ll reim­burse the com­pany for din­ner when I get home (shout out to Heather (dou­ble shout out, Heather, woot!)).

I got back to the hotel — called Schwab (again) — talked with Tony — insert dia­log here — he con­nected us directly to Visa Fraud pre­ven­tion … they in turn had a full stop on our account because of the weird pur­chase pat­tern. All is fixed — for now.

Kinda can’t wait to find out what hap­pens next with my card that can’t be beat.

Sacre Bleu!

A day of being American in Paris: running, buying clothes, and eating nasty food

So, yes­ter­day was a pretty awe­some day. I started out the day with a run in Paris … which sure beats the tread­mill in my bed­room (and for those more fit­ness ori­ented friends, yes I did stretch a lot before­hand, made all the dif­fer­ence in the world). My super Nike+ shoes with the magic tech­nol­ogy that talks to my iPhone didn’t work in Air­plane mode — which makes sense. But when I first got out of the hotel — I started up the magic Nike+ app on my phone and was heart­bro­ken to see that the shoe wasn’t respond­ing (yes, I couldn’t all my shoe effec­tively). I didn’t fig­ure out it was the air­plane mode and though maybe the shoe had got­ten busted in travel.

So, given that — I opted to just run any­way (arg — sim­ply run­ning, with­out magic tech­nol­ogy to tell me every­thing as I run? How prim­i­tive) … and headed out into the streets of Paris. It was cool being “that early morn­ing run­ning Amer­i­can guy” while all the pretty Parisians were stand­ing around in their cool clothes smok­ing cig­a­rettes and watch­ing me with casual con­tempt (or per­haps inter­est on a few corners).

I had my tunes going, lis­ten­ing to some old 80/90s pro­gres­sive stuff — so it was sud­denly a very Euro expe­ri­ence (I mean, c’mon, Depeche Mode while run­ning in Paris, your head just explodes with the atti­tude that engenders).

Since the streets of Paris was laid out by a bunch of cows, drunks and peo­ple wear­ing lead-based make-up, the streets criss-cross in the most psy­chotic ways pos­si­ble — so it’s more than easy to get com­pletely lost, and then pull out your handy dandy map and still be com­pletely lost. After try­ing that a few times, I decided to just run and “use the force” to find some­thing I could recognize.

Using that logic, I decided my best bet was to turn towards large gath­er­ings of trees and big avenues. That got me more lost — but even­tu­ally, after about an hour of run­ning and stop­ping and run­ning (mostly run­ning, with a lit­tle walk­ing), I found the river. Thank­fully, I was near a weird spot where the river splits, so I could find it on the map — iron­i­cally, I had been under the impres­sion that I was to the West of the hotel, but I’d got­ten com­pletely turned around and was on the East­ern side.

So, once I had my bear­ings, I fig­ured out that I was about 2 miles from the hotel, which was cool. I was all warmed up, my legs were feel­ing pretty good, and I was stand­ing next to the Seine with the Eif­fel tower off in the dis­tance as a ref­er­ence point, and Notre Dame across the river nearby. That was pretty cool.

Dur­ing my wan­der­ings, I tried my GPS app on the iPhone, which involves tak­ing the phone out of air­plane mode. Of course, in that process, I dis­cov­ered that my magic shoes could talk again — so I acti­vated that and had a fun run back to the hotel. I ran along the Seine, down to the Lou­vre, through their gar­dens, turned at the Lou­vre arch (not to be con­fused with L’Arc de Tri­om­phe”) — ran through that for good mea­sure, then cut back into the 2eme Quar­ter and headed for the Opera house. Our hotel is near the Opera house, so I found my way home, felt great and loved that it was all that and a bag of chips too.

Dur­ing the run, I took a few pho­tos, like this:

because life is a com­pe­ti­tion, right?

So — after a got back to the hotel, I set up the TRX sys­tem and worked out some more — which was fun, dif­fi­cult, and more fun.

Then we decided to split the day up into boys and girls — so Angie and Kathy went shop­ping for a purse for Angie, and Nate and I went to L’Ecole Mil­i­taire (the mil­i­tary school), which has a pretty cool because they have a museum filled with guns and junk.

Nate espe­cially enjoyed him­self with all the can­nons and stuff:

…as well as vis­it­ing the creepy tomb of Napoleon (which is huge, btw — that guy REALLY had a com­plex, even in death):

(the scale is odd in this pic­ture, but that brown box, that’s actu­ally about 20 feet long and 25 feet high — we’re over an atrium, see the tiny peo­ple at about 12 o’clock one flight down?) Napoleon hated being small.

Sooo… after that, we headed back to the mar­ket, bought a cool purse for Angie — and I had a chance to buy some cheese and pate in French… loads of fun.

Buy­ing Clothes
After a break — Kathy decided we should go buy some clothes — so we went to Grand Lafayette — which is a fancy depart­ment store in the heart of Paris. When we got there, I asked where the men’s sec­tion was and after a lit­tle point­ing — it was explained that it was in the other build­ing across the street, the men’s building.

So we headed over to the store ded­i­cated only for men and began look­ing at Prada, D&G, Burberry, and stuff like that and my head started to explode. So we asked for a per­sonal shop­per, and they sent over Olga, a very, very nice lady who’s been doing this for 30 years. She walked me around, spent my money — chat­ted with me in French and a lit­tle Eng­lish — and we bought some clothes. I’m just gonna leave it there — it’s kind of appalling, actually.

Suf­fice to say, my foray into fancy clothes has begun — we’re lov­ing that I have a physique to jus­tify these clothes — and I now am the embar­rassed owner of a pair of D&G jeans (shout out to Hillary and Heather). We’re going back tomor­row for some more shirts, pos­si­bly some shoes, and a jacket. One thing that makes it a lit­tle bit safer is that they don’t have a lot of the expen­sive stuff in my size — so we avoid a feed­ing frenzy. All the shirts are slim fit — which rocks.

Nasty Food
While I was going through the cloth­ing expe­di­tion with Olga, Kathy took the kids back to the hotel, because they were tired. Once she returned, we got to leave the depart­ment store after hours (you see, we had a per­sonal shop­per), and headed out car­ry­ing my D&G bag, but still wear­ing my nasty shirt (the store will be clean­ing and press­ing the shirts we’ve pur­chased thus far so I can pick them up tomor­row). You’d think the bag would get us a moment’s peace with the wait­ers at the Cafes, but nope — no love there.

They were rude, ignored us, all the stan­dard stuff. We tried a sushi joint for a sec­ond — but that was a non-starter — Paris has not com­pletely embraced the fine sushi expe­ri­ence — so it was about as appe­tiz­ing as super­mar­ket take-out … so we left.

Our third try was a nicer place that promised to have lob­ster and crab and all sorts of other cool stuff — but on fur­ther inspec­tion — we found that thye were out of the good stuff and would we like this other thing instead? Oh, by the way, at this point my dogs were tired — I’d been walk­ing around in my Chucks all day (and yes, that prob­a­bly added to the atti­tude — my bright green Chuck Tay­lor shoes in Paris) … so when the ser­vice was slow, and the options were lim­ited … we left there too.

Finally — we gave up, and in a moment of exhausted frus­tra­tion — we went to McDonald’s. Yes, that’s right. We bought fine Prada cloth­ing and fin­ished off the day eath­ing Mickey D’s. Ahhh… the life of a Cosmopolitan.

Well — we’re back in the hotel — have rested for a while — I woke up at 3am — am post­ing this stuff … and that’s about it for now.

More later.

I am a giant

In Europe, every­thing is smaller — it’s just the nature of the crea­ture because it’s so cramped. The cars are smaller, the hotel rooms are smaller (even Kathy com­mented on how small the bath­room is — it’s the size of a closet) … we have a “quad” in our hotel (which, for the record is very nice), but it’s made up of two rooms joined through the “adjoin­ing doors” — –and I kid you not, the com­bined space is smaller than our liv­ing room.

But the best part is that I tower (tower, I tell you) over just about every­body in France. I am a giant — I can reach out and crush small build­ings, I eat vil­lages, I am a giant Amer­i­can giant man.

I went into a store to see if they had clothes in my size, just for fun — and the guy asked me if I was XXL or XXXL. I was so huge he’d lost ref­er­ence sizes in his mind.

I can’t tell — but the food por­tions may be get­ting big­ger around here — that’s a lit­tle scary, because Euro­peans can’t afford to be fat — there’s no room. But maybe it’s just that, since every­thing is so tiny — we’re feel­ing more full on smaller por­tions, because well — they look big­ger (if a plate of peas fills the room, it looks big, no?

Well — in any event … I’m enjoy­ing tow­er­ing over this entire con­ti­nent (when we walked through the Ams­ter­dam air­port, I hap­pily reported to the kids (in a large open space filled with thou­sands of peo­ple) “I am the tallest per­son in this air­port” … they looked around and smiled.

So far, I haven’t smacked my head on any­thing — even though the doors ARE shorter (and likely often older than our country).

I will not climb over that moun­tain range over there and say too­dledo for now!

Eiffel Tower visit

We went to the Eif­fel tower — it was tall.

When we got there, they said that the top floor was closed. We decided to go to the sec­ond floor — but when we got there — there was an Easter Egg (it’s a video game ref­er­ence) and we found a place to buy tick­ets to go to the top! So … ummm… we bought the tick­ets from the machine, imme­di­ately got on the ele­va­tors (which were run­ning and manned with oper­a­tors?) … and went up to the top, which was closed.

There were all sorts of other peo­ple going there too, mind you … but it was weird — it was like some­one had the very French idea to put up a sign that said “go away” — and then when you ignored that sign, you got every­thing on the menu.

Well — suf­fice to say, we got good pic­tures, had a good time — and then went home. Strangely, the World Cup is so pop­u­lar that they lit­er­ally had a giant TV set up in front of the Eif­fel Tower so peo­ple could watch the games (we went by while Argentina was beat­ing South Korea). It’s REALLY big here, the World Cup — you’d almost think we were in Europe or something.

On a related note — I’ve been watch­ing the World Cup stuff a lit­tle more — and well … it looks like Greece beat Nige­ria (the TV is in French) … that’s all I know about that. I think (aside from the US, of course) that the Ger­mans are “the show” currently.

So … we’re back to the hotel, we’re try­ing to stay awake again until 8-9pm … and after that … we do some­thing else … no idea what.

Just wanted to tell you that we got to the tower — mis­sion com­plete on that front.