Bricorama and Flea Market
I’ve come to the conclusion that the French design their bathtubs and showers specifically to irritate me. According to the check-in sheet I got for the dorms, the bathroom is suppose to come with a shower curtain. It didn’t, in my case, but it’s supposed to. This makes it all the more puzzling that the room doesn’t come with a shower per se. There’s a showerhead, but no means with which to attach it to the wall. This is inconvenient because the tub was evidently designed so that no one would be able to actually take a bath in it, with the possible exception of skilled contortionists under 3 feet tall.
Thus Saturday’s project was to go to Bricorama, a hardware store I’d noticed on the Boulevard Ney, between here and the station for the train to St-Denis:
(note that this picture was taken on Sunday, when they are closed, because I was too lazy to bring the camera Saturday. They were not all gated-up when I went in. I don’t believe they would have appreciated that)
I didn’t find any showerhead holders there that didn’t require holes to be made in the walls, so I got duct tape, double-stick, and a toilet paper holder:
The result is this lovely fixture:
In other news, I checked out the flea market just west of here:
I was looking for a watch, since my old one has stopped working. I didn’t find one that was the proper size (what is it with people wearing ridiculously large watches?) and had the date. But the flea market was… well, actually, it was nothing special. It’s like any street market. People sell stuff under tents. Whoohoo. Nothing against it, perfectly nice, just not terribly thrilling.
On the way I noticed an interesting variant on the three-card-monte/shell-game scam—instead of card or bottle caps, they use big brown discs, slightly smaller than CDs, with a white sticker on one. Kinda looks like some sort of mutant Oreo cookie thing:
(Okay, not a great picture, but I wasn’t sure how photogenic people feel while scamming tourists out of money, so I took it from across the street)
Also, here’s some pictures of this cat who’s been hanging around the dorms. Because everything’s better with cats.
And the award for best use of the skeletal garbage cans goes to… whoever didn’t want their guitar case anymore:
