The idea of a long-term stay in France had been on our minds for quite a while, and when we finally made the decision to do it, our planned departure was still more than eight months away. The fact that our departure was a long way off, the abundance of web sites offering apartments, and our previous experience renting an apartment in Paris, all these things initially encouraged me to think that finding something we liked would be relatively easy. So why then did we end up finalizing our rental only weeks before leaving for Paris? Perhaps I should say that it was just another one of those little lessons in cultural differences.
No lap time
We hit the first bump in the road to the ideal Paris apartment when I began surfing the many web sites offering furnished apartments. The offerings seemed endless (even on a broadband connection), many were enticing, and, so far in advance of our arrival, most of the apartments that interested us appeared to be available. At one web site, however, many apartment listings included the phrase “No Lap Time.” Was this, I wondered, a Franglais reference to lap dancing? And if so, what did that have to do with renting an apartment?
Replies to my early inquiries soon remedied my confusion. If a proposed rental period does not begin immedaitely after the current rental ends, the gap between the end of the current rental and the beginning of your proposed rental is called the lap time. And it turns out that there are two basic Parisian rental schemes. The first allows lap time and will rent any time period not already taken. The second does not allow lap time, and only accepts rentals that begin immediately after the current one ends. And while laptime is rarely a problem for apartments rented on a weekly basis, many (most?) apartments rented on a long-term basis seem to operate under the second, no lap time, scheme. Hence the chorus of early email replies that scolded me with “sorry, no lap time.”
To make matters more complicated, it seems that many rental agencies write leases that give the lease-holder the ability to extend their rental at almost any time duing the rental period. This option, apparently, expires only within the last month or two of the rental period. As a result, for apartments with this type of lease, the rental agency doesn’t actually know that an apartment will be available until about a month before the lease expires. Which is why I received quite a few emails with the suggestion that I check back a month or so before our departure, since it was much too early to know which of their apartments would be available.
The French double bed
As if all this weren’t enough, there is the issue of the French double bed. Paris apartments, even by New York standards, are quite small. The previous time we rented an apartment in Paris, the bedroom (indeed, the whole apartment) was very much on the petite side, and the bed, which the bedroom could only barely contain, was a double. And our experience clearly demonstrated that a French double bed (which may or may not be as large as an American double bed, I’m not really sure) is very definitely not big enough for the two of us -- two average size, middle age, American males who sleep according to the toss and turn method. So, early on, one of our citeria for choosing an apartment was that there be two single beds or one bed larger than a double.
Of course, most beds in Paris are double beds. And most of the rest are not described clearly enough to know whether they are double beds or not. And what is left unclear in the description is often no clearer in a photo, for wide-angle shots can make the narrowest bed look wide enough for Marie Antionette and all her ladies-in-waiting. In one a period of moderate confusion, I also learned that some Parisians call anything larger than a single, including the ubiquitous double, a queen-size bed. After numerous false starts, I eventually figured out that the only reliable method for determining bed size is to ask for the bed’s width in centimeters. A French double is 140cm; a French queen is 160cm.
Twenty-word descriptions
Which brings us to yet one more obstacle in long-distance apartment rental: asking questions. Once, when I made a few inquiries about a specific apartment, an agent told me to ask one of our friends in Paris to visit the apartment and report back to us (and here I thought he was serving as our friend in Paris). Another agent politely but firmly reminded me that she was the rental agent, not the property manager. A much-recommended agency, and many others as well, expects web clients to commit to paying several thousand dollars a month for extended periods on the basis of fifteen- or twenty-word descriptions, often without a single photo (or perhaps two or three postage-stamp size images). There are a few large agencies that do provide lengthy descriptions and numerous large photos, but these, too, prefer that you not ask them any questions. Answering questions, apparently, is not part of their job description.
All in all, it took us many months to learn the ground rules for renting a long-term Paris apartment from 6000 miles away. And as the months passed, we felt more and more that the best solution, scary as it sounded, might be to search for an apartment after we got there. And that’s almost what happened. Except that we got lucky (or so we hope; we still had to make our decision based on a couple of postage-stamp-size photos). A no-lap-time apartment that we were especially interested in finally became available. And after a flurry of faxes and wire transfers (which is another story all its own), we have our one-bedroom apartment in Paris.