Breaching the walls of the fortress

We arrived in Paris late last night, and in typical old-European-city style, it intimidated me into a small and whimpering ball. Our rented apartment is in one of those insanely narrow, old streets that looks like a setting for every euro-murder movie ever shown.  All the shops were closed, and they all close by bringing down steel garage doors...so the whole street looked forbidding and unfriendly.

On the sides of the fortress-like walls that make up the street, there are little electronic security panels, which open the enormous old doors, all of which have a perfectly useless doorknob placed in the direct center of the door, presumably for decoration or for confusing people.

Once you get inside the fortress walls, there is a tiny mailbox area where you must enter more codes to open the iron gates. Remember the iron gates where the nuns hid the Von Trapps from the Nazis? It's just like that, only Mother Superior's keys have been replaced by security codes. Something about the combination of medieval and high-tech was exhausting at midnight.  First you get intimidated because you feel like you're in a medieval slum, and then you can't figure out the high-tech method of crossing the moat.

But our apartment is lovely, spotlessly clean ("The owner is Korean," said the keymaster, shrugging, as if that explained the perfectly anal-retentive organization of all things.). And we are a couple of doors down from Cafe les Chats (a cafe with rescued cats), so we are headed there for some feline pre-Louvre love.

Oh -- unrelated -- Cassie got noticed on the plane for her intricate drawing on her brother's  iPad. The flight attendant guy was chattering and exclaiming in French, until I had her remove her earbuds and repeat the immortal phrase, "Je ne parlez-pas francais." The attendant changed over to gushing in English, and Cassie later confessed that she planned to keep her earbuds attached forever, so she could hide.