Paris Is Always a Good Idea - Jenn McKinlay Page 0,62
own funk. Fabulous. I’d probably offended the entire restaurant.
Mercifully, the café offered coffee to go, a fairly recent development in Paris, so I finished my pastry and espresso and ordered a steaming hot coffee in a paper cup for my journey. The sun was out, but the morning air was brisk. I burrowed into my wool coat as I walked away from the Golden Triangle, knowing that the prices of clothing in this district were going to be well out of my range. Instead, I kept my eye out for three things: an Internet café, a pharmacy, and a reasonably priced clothing store.
The hustle and the bustle of the city soon had me moving faster than I was ready for, but that was all right. I loved walking along the Avenue George V. There was almost more eye candy than a person could take in. Men in suits, women in dresses, au pairs walking children to one of the city parks, tourists gawking at the tall cream-colored Lutetian-limestone Haussmann buildings that lined the streets in this part of Paris, and the endless boutiques, salons, antique stores, and restaurants that filled the bottom floors.
I stepped around a row of scooters, which were parked in clusters up on the wide sidewalks, keeping them out of the road, and saw the green plus sign that indicated a pharmacie up ahead. Excellent. It looked like the hygiene was happening first. Thankfully, the woman in the white lab coat working at the front counter understood my pantomime of putting on deodorant. There wasn’t much to choose from, not like the wall of lip glosses, but that was fine. It was a step closer to being civilized.
While the woman rang up my purchase, I asked if she knew where I could find an Internet café. The woman didn’t understand at first, but when I mimicked typing, she nodded. Instead of trying to explain, she wrote down the address on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I recognized it as a side street off the Rue de Rivoli. It was a bit of a walk, but that would give me a chance to shop for clothes, too.
I headed back out into the bright day, stuffing the small paper bag into my large handbag. It was a small errand, but the feeling of accomplishment gave me a surge of optimism. Once I was able to send my family a message and buy a new outfit, I’d be ready to tackle seeing Jean Claude again. I hoped.
I found two boutiques on my walk, where I managed to score some essentials—pants and shirts, nothing as comfy as my flannel cow pajamas, but I’d survive. Of course, I still wanted a dress to wear when I saw Jean Claude, but I’d worry about that later.
Right now, I needed to touch base with my team. With any luck, when I returned to my small apartment, my suitcase and phone would have arrived, but in the meantime, I wanted to make sure I let everyone know I’d arrived in Paris safely but was missing my phone.
Naturally, I got lost looking for the cybercafé. Shocker. I popped into a small bar that had a very “locals only” vibe. The only patrons were a cluster of old men sitting at a table in the back. I approached the counter and asked in my admittedly rusty French for help in finding the address the woman had given me at the pharmacie.
The short, bald, pasty man on the other side of the bar looked me up and down with a disdainful curl of his lip and then very clearly said, “No.”
I blinked. For real? He wasn’t even going to point me in the right direction? I opened my mouth to try again, but he walked away. I was dismissed.
Rude! I turned to leave, passing a tall man with dark-brown skin and soft brown eyes, wearing a corduroy coat and a hand-knit beanie. He gave me a friendly smile and asked, “You are lost? May I help?”
My shoulders dropped in relief. “Yes,” I said. I showed him the address, and he walked me outside and pointed in the direction I needed to go.
“At the one, two red light, turn right,” he said. His accent was thick, but I knew what he meant.
I put my hand on his arm and said, “Thank you. You’re very kind.”
He smiled. “Enjoy your time in France.”
“I will,” I said. I walked away, appreciating that it seemed important to him that