18. Antonin – 16th X

The X marks the fact that this in fact became the apartment we finally moved into. The broker was a friend of a friend, very sweet and he found us what for all intents and purposes was a very decent apartment. I still wanted the one on rue Passy, but the owner had refused to stop the visits until our money cleared so we couldn’t take a chance and give up on this one since it had almost all the criteria we were looking for. An apartment or house, in my opinion, has a soul and you either connect with it on some spiritual level or you don’t. Despite the fact that we signed the lease, I never connected and things went from bad to worse after we moved in. Apartments here are surprisingly “sonore” or noisy. I think a lot of it has to do with the old parquet floors that creak and groan whether or not you have carpets or rugs on top of them. Couple that with living below a family with two small children who constantly run back and forth and you have what I can only describe as your own personal hell. We moved in at the beginning of February. We had already given notice before the end of the month.