Our Giant American Television

To celebrate Dave's new job, we decided to finally take the big plunge: we bought a tv.

Saturday was cold and wet again, but we walked to the Hotel de Ville to check out the festivities for Poisson d'Avril. We took a few pictures, but after my shoes were soaked with rain I was cranky and ready to go.

We spent the rest of the afternoon chasing the tv. We found the model we wanted at the Carrefour only a few km from the apartment. But while we waited for the attention of the sales staff, we watched the last one get sold right out from under us. We asked if they would call another store and they said no. It wasn't an unfriendly "no", but more of a 'it's just not possible' "no". So French.

So we asked the Tom Tom to take us to the next closest Carrefour. The Tom Tom got confused, we got lost, and eventually we stumbled upon it. But they didn't have it, either.

Normal people would have given up by then, but we were really excited about finally getting a tv bigger than the computer monitor and, again, the weather was lousy and we had nothing better to do. So we drove to a third Carrefour (they really are everywhere) and finally found it.

The purchase was surprisingly easier than my stupid alarm clock. We pushed our shopping cart filled with the giant box up to the parking structure and started thinking we'd made a very bad mistake. It wasn't going to fit! But we pushed the front seats forward, the rear seats down, moved some headrests around, and the box barely made it in. Although Dave was stressing out a little bit because the box was supposed to be transported vertically and we stuffed it in horizontally.

The next challenge was driving. Since we'd jammed both front seats forward, there was no way Dave was driving. So I crammed myself into the driver's seat with my knees touching the dashboard, and Dave folded himself into the passenger seat. If we had gotten into an accident, we would have been in serious trouble.

We made it home without incident, and managed to carefully carry the box all the way up to our apartment. We wanted to rush it inside as soon as possible, lest our neighbors see it and think of us as "those Americans with their giant tv".

After setting it up, we watched "The Illusionist", which might have been a pretty mediocre movie on a regular tv, but was an awesome movie on ours.