The good news is that we are getting new pontoons in the port, and they are wonderful, but the bad news is that since our telephone lines run through the pontoons, we, the residents on the side of Boulevard Bourdon (the Boulevard de la Bastille side of the port went through this last fall), have lost our phones and Internet connections and won't have them back until............
It has already been 3 weeks and it seems like an eternity. No longer can we pick up the phone and call family and friends in other parts of the world without thinking about the cost. We still have our call back service, but it is not cheap on a cell phone, and we have been spoiled by the convenience of making long distance calls without charge. When you are paying for the call and you have to wait 20 minutes at long distance rates for a company in San Francisco to finally pull you out of the wait queue, it feels like torture.
When our pontoons went away, we had to leave too. For one week we lived in front of the captain's office on the other side of the port way down by the lock. It was like moving to a new neighborhood. Suddenly, we were no longer in the 4th arrondissement; we were in the 12th. The Bastille métro station and the shops that we frequent were much further away, and we had to add an extra 15 minutes to our estimate of how long a métro trip or a quick run to the bakery would take. Without our land telephone line, we had to go to the captain's office with our computers to check our email or do projects. While we whined about this at first, the captain and his team could not have been nicer, offering people who were there to use the Internet coffee or juice, and letting us use one of their desks when we had a big project to complete. People came and went, with and without their computers, and we saw neighbors from the other side of the port that we normally don't run into in the course of a day. So we realized that it was a fun place to hang out, and now that we are back in our Bourdon side mooring waiting for our phone line, we pack up the computers to make the trip all the way down to la capitainerie, just for the fun of it.
