Toiletry shopping - Lost in Translation

As we were unable to bring most of our toiletries on the plane with us in our carry-on baggage, we decided we’d do a bit of shopping when we first got to paris. We ventured out into the local neighborhood in search of a “pharmacy”. Now, in Paris, the pharmacies are not at all what we are used to back home. No CVS style businesses with lots of selection of cheap goods exist. Here they are more like small boutiques and are indicated from the street by crazy green neon crosses. In most, if feels like you’ve entered a high-end spa or cosmetic store with lots of very neatly arranged little boxes. Pretty quickly we realized that interaction with the shop-keeps would be necessary, so we asked a friendly seeming young woman for some help with finding a razor. This didn’t go entirely smoothly as the French word for shaving cream is “razer” and it took a bit of gesticulating and mutual guesswork to figure out that what we really wanted in addition to razer was a “razior” which is razor. Probably a not the best word to start with, but once again, this was a fine example of the French being friendly and helpful despite our lack of French (and her English wasn’t great, all the more reason for her to have snubbed us). She helped us get a few of our essentials and we were off to explore encouraged by our successful toiletry acquisition and the good experience of attempting French language.

A short adventure in Montparnasse (Smart car store, Gallery Lafayette, ATM, Lunch)Emboldened by our success, we decided to explore our Montparnasse neighborhood before heading back to home base. We wandered down Boulevard Du Montparnasse and ended up at the Galleries Lafayette, which is a medium sized mall of sorts. In the mall was a store called “Habitat” that Melissa had wanted to see as inspiration for work. I’d say it was somewhere between Ikea (clean, simple, euro), CB2 (modern, primary colors) and West Elm (woods, muted colors, funky minimalism). We also happened across a department store with a range of more familiar seeming toiletries, so Melissa picked up some makeup as well.