New Friends and Banking Challenges

This week has been a series of fun and somewhat funny events.  I'll give a small summary of each...

On Monday evening as I was coming into the apartment from work, Jill met me at the door (which was nice).  Before we could close the door our neighbor from upstairs came up the stairs and greeted us in French.  Of course I stumbled into my jumbled French, asking her if she spoke English.  Much to our surprise, she did.  She asked if we were from England, of course we confessed to being Americans.  Her name is Sylvie.  She and her husband live above us and are home to take care of their sick grandchild.  Any way, she and her love to travel, just returned from 3 weeks in the West Indies.  When we told her we were from the U.S. she clamored about how much she loved the U.S., having recently visited Rhode Island.  She told us her husband spoke better English then her and invited us up for a drink in the near future.  We look forward to that.

Soooo, still on Monday we had to get additional passport pictures taken.  We went to the local photo shop and had the pictures done.  It took a whole 5-10 minutes.  When I went to pay with my French debit card, I had a brain freeze and punched in the wrong PIN, not once but twice.  At this point the guy informs me the next bad PIN will lock up my card.  As a result I used my U.S. debit with no problems.  We leave and go do a little grocery shopping.  Again I go to use my card and again... my brain punches in the wrong series of numbers -- bing, bing, bing my card is frozen.  Now that would be easy to just the call the bank the next day to have it undone.  But not me, I decide to go to the HSBC ATM and try it one more time - hey, you never know.  The machine confiscated my card and now I am without access for a week. Jill shakes her head and wonders how I survived for the past two months.  I just hope one day I will learn.

On Tuesday we got our mail from the past two weeks.  Not too much -- a couple of bills and a letter from the company we set up a heating unit maintenance contract.  The letter (all in French) had the contract and my check (it was voided).  Ok, I know I struggled writing checks at the beginning, but everyone had cashed them.  When I reviewed the contract there were two services listed.  Both had a price next to them so I paid the bill with the two amounts combined.  I was thinking I would receive a base program and then additional services.  I took the letter into work and asked my assistant to help me.  When I showed her the letter she started to laugh.  She quickly regained her composure and explained that I was to choose one of the two packages and only had to write a check for one of them.  Who knew???

Last night, Wednesday, we shared a bottle of champagne and had dinner here in the apartment, a nice salad, zuchini and a lean hamburger.  Afterwards we decided to go for a walk.  We ended up at Le Passy, my favorite watering hole, for a night cap.  While there Jill was using my iPad to do her Facebook.  Those who know us probably know that 2 months ago this was a joke not a reality. 

At Le Passy there were 5 or 6 guys who were doing a bachelor party.  We kept hearing them refer to Buffalo so I asked them if they were from the Buffalo, NY area.  Of course they weren't.  They were 5 French and 1 Australian.  The Australian was getting married and buffalo was an Australian drinking game.  The rules of the game -- if someone says "buffalo" and you have your drink in your dominant hand then you have to chug your drink.  We visited with them for ~30 minutes. They had another game which had 10 items on a list and the groom-to-be had to do them all in the night.  You can imagine they were wacky.  We offered to help him with #2 - have a women buy him a drink.  Jill did and then signed his list.  We finally went home around 11PM. 

Live, Love and Laugh...