My husband and I decided to go back to Paris again in October, 2012. We had had good luck with the weather in October last year, and we were hoping for more of the same. We were a little late in deciding (May), so I didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing an apartment. Although there must be thousands of apartments for short-term rent in Paris, many of the reasonably-priced apartments were reserved for part of the month--ten days, a week, 2 weeks--and not available for the entire month. I paid more this year (2875 Euros = $3600) for the month than last year, and the apartment was located in the 12th arrondissement, in the area of the Bastille. I loved the location last year on the Ile Saint Louis, but I also looked forward to learning about a different location in Paris. I thought that I knew the ropes when it came to renting an apartment online, but my education last year had only just begun.
In a perfect world, rental apartment ads would show the exact cost of the apartment up front, including fees, if any; the owner or manager would answer an inquiry within 24 hours; and the availability calendar for an apartment would be up-to-date. Apartments may be handled by the owner or by an agency acting for the owner, and sometimes the owner or agency follows good business practices. All too often, they don’t, and an apartment search becomes very stressful when you find out there are hidden costs, when you get no response at all to inquiries and when the apartment you liked and thought was available isn’t because the calendar hadn’t been updated. I checked out the following sites with apartments to rent in Paris:
Most of the agencies charge a fee of 25%, 30%, or 35% for short-term rentals, and their fee is usually included in the weekly rental amount; in monthly rentals, the fee is not included, and you have to search for the amount of the fee buried somewhere in the agency information. Craig’s List now has more false than legitimate advertisements, so I no longer use it as a source.
Last year, I dealt with someone who tried a bait-and-switch scam on me; this year, I was confident that I was dealing with the real owner of a real apartment; that is, until the agency notified me that someone may have hacked into the owner’s email, it was possible I had been corresponding with a scam artist, and I may have wired the deposit to the scammer’s account instead of to the owner’s account. We called both the agency and the owner right away, and the owner assured me that the deposit ($1800) had arrived safely in her bank account. Phew! In the apartment ads, there is always a phone contact with the owner‘s number. I’ll never again depend on email-only contact but will talk personally with the owner before I send money; this is yet another lesson learned in the online search for an apartment rented long distance without an on-site visit.
Surprisingly, air fare was cheaper this year, $1100 instead of $1300 per person. Our flight was with Delta to Atlanta, and Air France to Paris. We had our passports, our Bank of America debit card for cash withdrawals from ATMs in France, Capital One credit card, which charges no fee for purchases, and Bill Pay set up at my bank to pay any bills that came due during October. (Once in Paris, my husband mistakenly withdrew money from a non-BNP bank--BNP is a sister bank to BOA--and it cost an extra $5.)
We stayed with a similar timetable for traveling to Paris as we used last year. We left the Fort Myers airport at 1:30 PM on September 30, Sunday, and arrived in Paris at 8:20 AM on October 1, Monday. Friend Nancy again took us to the airport, which is a bonus for us.
Replica of sculptor Larry Young’s Tango
I still enjoy seeing this sculpture whenever I’m in the Fort Myers airport--officially,
the Southwest Florida International Airport
Tango artist Larry Young won an Olympic bronze medal in 1968 and one in 1972.
Metal Sculpture In Flight by artist Steven Swenor
On the way to Concourse C
The security checkpoint, none too busy, as you can see
Our Delta flight to Atlanta
On this trip, we passed through the airport in Atlanta, and there is a new international terminal with some very interesting artwork. The new terminal is flooded with natural light, and the art installations take advantage of the abundance of light. The two-story atrium has a suspended sculpture by Donald Lipski called Rebilace. It is a giant conical Swarovski crystal chandelier made of stainless steel mesh and thousands of Swarovski crystals. It has been likened to a butterfly net, or maybe an upside-down lampshade. Either way, it’s beautiful. In the words of the artist, Donald Lipski:
“Travel used to be really elegant, especially international travel, and it isn’t anymore…. It’s utilitarian and it’s slightly a hassle,” Lipski said. “I thought a chandelier might be just the thing to bring back some of that elegance.” In RebiLace — an anagram of Liberace — he sought to replicate the grandeur travelers might have experienced on the Queen Mary or in Europe’s landmark train stations. (I tried to find the meaning of Rebilace but couldn’t. For good reason.)
“The chandelier has, since medieval times, been a place of gathering, a sign of opulence and sophistication,” Lipski said. “I have situated our chandelier at the crossroads of the axis lines of the terminal, giving it high visibility from the moment one passes through security, comes up the escalator or arrives by plane.”
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
In 2003, The airport was renamed in honor of former Atlanta mayor, Maynard Jackson.
Rebilace, the Swarovski chandelier
A closer look at the chandelier
Titled "airFIELD," the suspended sculpture consists of 1,440 hue-changing acrylic discs. The discs make up two intersecting swooping shapes. From some angles they resemble a bird in flight. In the piece by California artist collective Uebersee, the discs are programmed to shimmer from clear to opaque in an abstraction of the airport's traffic patterns.
“This childlike fascination with flying just gets hampered by the normal air traffic experience,” Uebersee artist Nik Hafermaas said. “What we’ve set out to do is to recapture some of that fascination again,” and to visualize the thousands of takeoffs and landings happening every day at the world’s busiest airport.
The art installation airFIELD, made up of more than 1,440 acrylic disks
A rainy day for the flight from Atlanta to Paris. This was an omen of days to come.
The living room of the apartment on rue de Charenton, 12th arrondissement
This apartment belongs to a couple who lives here in the winter months and lives in their country home in the summer. You can see that the décor and artwork are much nicer than what you would typically find in a rental apartment.
Stained glass, free-standing panels and huge antique lamp base in the living room
These works of art and others were lovely to look at, but a little worrisome to live with, for fear we might accidentally damage or break one. They were near and dear to the owner, who kept both an inventory and photographs of her antiques.
The elevator went to the fourth floor of the building, and there was one flight of stairs inside the apartment. The plants are real.
The dining room of the apartment
The kitchen was small but adequate.
There is a washing machine, but no dryer, not an unusual arrangement in apartments in Paris. We took our laundry to a nearby laundromat, anyway. We didn’t feel comfortable using the dishwasher and washing machine because the controls were so unlike anything we are used to in the States. We also had a problem using our small electric appliances because the plug outlets were recessed, so the converters we brought with us couldn’t be plugged in. We were at a loss because we hadn’t had this problem last year. We got help from a kind and helpful neighbor who lent us a universal adaptor, which worked for the low wattage appliances.
The apartment has two bedrooms, so I was able to work on the computer in one of them. There was a problem connecting to the owner’s WI-FI, and we needed a tech to find out the problem. As it turned out, the password had been entered incorrectly by the owner--most probably a simple typo mistake.
This is the Place de la Bastille, and we often used the Bastille metro station because it offered a direct connection to Metro Line 1. Line 1 goes through the center of Paris and offers connections to many other metro lines.
Place de la Bastille
The revolution of July 1830, which lasted three days, created a constitutional monarchy. On August 2, Charles X and his son the Dauphin abdicated their rights to the throne and departed for Great Britain. The liberal politicians who composed the provisional government placed on the throne a distant cousin, Louis Philippe, who agreed to rule as a constitutional monarch. This period became known as the July Monarchy. The July Column, located on Place de la Bastille, commemorates the events of the Three Glorious Days. The Spirit of Liberty in all his gilded splendor tops off the column.
L'Opéra Bastille is a modern opera house and the home base of the National Opera of Paris. It was designed to replace the Palais Garnier, which is nowadays used mainly for ballet performances. Located at the Place de la Bastille in the 12th arrondissement, the house was designed with 2,723 seats, every one of which has an unrestricted view of the stage The building was inaugurated on July 13, 1989, the eve of the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, with a gala concert.
Place de la Bastille, as seen in the distance from the Gare de Lyon, a railroad and metro station within easy walking distance of our apartment
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