My Paris Apartment Visitors

This morning at 8AM, I had the second visitor to my apartment…technically this could have been the third visitor if you count the first visitor as the homeless man that was sleeping outside my door 2 days ago. Yeah, it's true, maybe he had been reading my blog about Motel 6 and figured he would come in the building with the broken entry door, and check-in to the 5 th floor...uh, hall floor.

My second visitor was the concierge lady who is the building guardian. When she heard about the homeless guest, after I called my landlady, she came up right away. The homeless man was gone, but her and I had a nice visit. She speaks only French, not one single word of English, but we managed to have about a 45 minute conversation about the neighborhood, the stores, the markets, her daughter, how to shampoo the carpet and where I could go to buy a rug and comforter for my apartment. I did not realize until 10 or 15 minutes of talking to her, that she did not speak one word in English, but she spoke French very, very slowly for me. She told me that to improve my French I should only speak French and no English.

So this morning, at 8AM my door bell rings. Of course I was still sleep because according to my research on jet lag, it will take me one day to recover for each time-zone I traveled, which means since I left from Las Vegas which is a 9 hour time difference, it will take me approximately 9 days to fully adjust to the new time zone….I believe it.

I got out of bed with jetlag hanging around my neck like a child that doesn’t want to walk but is too big for me to carry, to see if maybe the homeless man had returned and wanted a cup of coffee or maybe it was the concierge or maybe it was a friend of jetlags. I peeped through the tiny peep hole (hmmmm, I wonder if the French eye is smaller than the American eye because the peep hole is as small as my pupil, it’s so tiny, why did they bother to cover it with a little brass cover that slides open?) anyway, standing outside, was a man dressed in a light blue uniform that looked like either the police or a postman. I guessed the postman since he also had a packaged envelope in his hand.

Hello, Who is it?

So I put the security chain on the door, thinking maybe I had a delivery? I said “Hello”. He said something in French, much faster than the concierge spoke to me, so I did not understand and it was too early for my brain to translate. So I asked him if he spoke English, please. He said, “I come inside your house for the cocker-rose.” I said, please say it again as I pointed to the carpet I thought he came to clean….(don’t ask me why). Then he showed me something that looked like a caulking gun and said, “Cockrolls, Cocker-rolls, I come inside your house for the cocker-rose.” Bugs!? I asked…Bugs?...He said, “Yes, the Cock-rose.” I asked if he could come back later and he walked away to ring the neighbors doorbell. They did not answer so he went away.

If my next visitors are the cocker-rose, I will cry and call my ex-best friend B.