I've been spoiled by great weather on this trip. The coldest I've experienced was around -4/feels like -14 in Tromsø but that was when I had the flu, so it could have been 20C and I still would have been shivering. Actually, I turned the thermostat up in my room to something like 26 or 28 and I was still shivering during the night and day, so there you go.
But with all the great weather I've had, it came to a dreary, cold and wet halt today. It was raining yesterday and continued to today, but the mercury dropped to just above 0. Brutal, I know, and it almost called for gloves. I was especially chilly because I was down to my last clean-ish set of clothes and I had to do laundry. The concierge last night asked if I wanted information on the hotel's laundry service or how to get to a laundromat. Based on the hotel's price of more than €7 for a coffee, I didn't even want to squeakily ask how much the laundry service would cost and opted for the laundromat instead (€5 for a wash, €1 for every eight minutes of drying with one cycle at high heat doing the job, even on denim).
Armed with a little hotel bottle of body wash, I trundled off to the laundromat...and couldn't find it. I didn't manage to get a SIM card last night so I was stuck with my preprogrammed Google Maps directions that weren't updating my location. I kept walking around La Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré, not caring how lost or touristy I looked. I hadn't eaten, I didn't have any more clean clothes, it was cold and my phone was as useful as a paperweight. I eventually gave in and asked a bistro worker and he pointed me in the right direction, but it was still a bit more walking around before I found le laverie.
Oh, and that wasn't even the fun part. I've been to plenty of laundromats, enough to consider myself a pro at public laundry. And a laundromat isn't something complicated, like trying to use public transportation in a non-English city to get yourself clear across town (good times, Katowice). You stick your money in, dump your clothes in, press a button and wait.
Ha.
Turns out this laverie is a little different. You pick out a washing machine, go to the back where the money machine is, put your bill or coins in, press the number of the machine you selected, press the valider button, go out and have breakfast at a patisserie where a large coffee is most definitely not the size you were expecting, come back and have to use Google Translate to figure out that the digital flashing message on the washing machine doesn't say there's something wrong with your machine, but just that it's done and time for you to take your clothes out. Luckily, the dryer was a lot easier to use, but I still felt ridiculously proud of myself.
I saw a bunch of other stuff, like the big ferris wheel, the two-hour line at the Louvre (I'll be going back first thing tomorrow morning), the then-closed Musée d'Orsay (I'll also have to return tomorrow morning) and went to a hipster cafe where you pay by the hour and eat and drink as much as you want. But still, the highlight of my day was conquering the laverie.
Tonight it's Saturday and I'm off to experience a bit of the Parisian nightlife. But nothing too crazy because I've got an early date with les musées.
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