Am I Shallow or Is it Just Le Confinement?

Thanks for reading me.  My latest on Medium is , I Refuse to Allow a Multimillion-Dollar Corporation to Steal $156.46 from Me!  And below is a more personal lament.  Do leave comments here and there!

I Can’t Order from UNIQLO and it bothers me everyday…

Before I arrived in Paris, I quarantined in Miami, DC, and New York. I wore shorts, leggings, sweats and, when I dressed up, jeans. I lived in Uniqlo.  

I worried: How would I fare in France? And in Paris, no less, where one dresses for the butcher. Turns out, some Parisians have relaxed their standards.

“Now with le confinement [con-feen-mah],” says my new acquaintance as we walk home from the Champ de Mars with our dogs and I apologize for my attire. “We all wear sweats.” His English is not polished, but it’s far better than my French. 

He repeats his name for me, slowly and slightly louder, the way one talks to foreigners. “It’s an unusual name,” he adds, “hard for Americans.”

“Pas de problem!” exclaims the woman who recently forgot her own phone number. But if I can associate the name with one I already know… 

“It’s the same name as a famous chef in New York, Daniel Boulud,” I say. He likes the idea of having a celebrity namesake, immediately Googles him, but can’t find anything. I am surprised, so I ask how he’s spelling it: M-O-L-O-U-D. ( Clearly, I don’t learn best through my ears!)

Moloud’s reassurance helps. At least I’m wearing white sneakers. Still, I look longingly at the popular French combat boots I’m too short (and maybe too old) to wear. Bundled in down, I lust after the leather jackets some of the other dog owners wear and marvel that the cold doesn’t seem to bother them. I try to remember how they’ve tied their scarfs.

But when it comes down to it, all I really need for standing around the dog park is good long underwear.  Somehow, despite schlepping  four suitcases, I forgot to pack it.

Hence, my Uniqlo yearning. Oh, for some Heat Tech!

Friends back home don’t understand. “Just order it on line,” they say. 

Duh. How come I didn’t think of that? 

I log on to the American Uniqlo site, fill up my “basket,” and discover that they don’t ship to Paris. Already a patron at amazon.fr, I figure there must be a French Uniqlo. Alas! my American log-in name or password are not accepted at uniqlo.com/fr. 

Begrudgingly, I open an account on the French site, filling in my information, entering a new password, pausing in between pages to copy-and-paste into Google Translate any navigation prompts I don’t understand.

It’s tedious and time-consuming. I soothe my annoyance by telling myself, this is improving your French vocabulary. 

I finally sign up, find the Heat Tech items I want— now priced in Euros of course — place them in mon panier, and proceed to checkout. I fill in the address of my Paris apartment and then I’m asked for adresse de facturation — the billing address. 

No problem — the French amazon site takes my Amex card with its New York billing address. But, here, when I am asked to enter “country,” France is the only choice.

I have an address in France but no bank account. Not only does this prevent me from ordering from Uniqlo, Carrefour (supermarket) and other online retailers in Paris, I can’t get a cell phone, a carte vitale, or subscribe to a food-delivery service. (Because I am forced to walk around with a dumb phone that doesn’t connect to the internet, I can’t use my Uber account either.)

Each company asks for my “RIB” —relevé d’identité bancaire, statement of banking identity. Again, my friends: “Why don’t you just open one?”

In the U. S., all you need is cash, or even a check, and an ID. Fifteen minutes later, you have a bank account. Here they want your first born. You need a lease, a job, a passport, an envelope showing that you have an account with a utility. Oh, and by the way, signing up with a utility company requires…you guessed it, a bank account. 

Luxury problems to be sure. But this week, it snowed, and the temperature dipped into the 20’s (-6 Celsius). Based on my previous 11-year back-and-forth to a city I purposely avoided during the deep winter months, it might not warm up until June. Hopefully, I’ll have a bank account by then, just in time to order some basic tee shirts from Uniqlo.