Bag It

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With the exception of catching this morning's showing of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes' Le Silence de Lorna (which I all but hated), a good chunk of the day -- close to six hours -- was eaten up by another missing-suitcase search. Hours of waiting and walking back and forth to my apartment, pleading with the Air France ladies at the local office, making expensive cell-phone calls to four or five Air France lost-baggage reps, etc. But the bag and I finally met up about an hour ago at the Majestic Hotel.

The bag was delivered to the Majestic at 9:37 am two days ago, only no one at Air France thought to call or e-mail me about this. This information came from the Air France employees at the walk-in office. Relieved, I walked right over to the Majestic. The concierge, however, said no -- wasn't there, bad information, very sorry. Back to the Air France office to ask "what the hell?" One of the women eventually put me on the phone late this morning with an Air France baggage detective who told me it had absolutely been delivered to my apartment on rue 14 Juliette, in care of a Monsieur Gilles.

So I humped it back there (about a 20-minute walk) but found no "Gilles" on the tenant list. I spent a good two hours knocking on every door in the building, asking everyone who answered if M. Gilles lived there. No dice. I left a note written in moron-level French on the door of the building manager, who was off working. I also spent part of that time calling Air France reps, asking who signed for it. Nobody knew squat.

I finally went back to the Air France office around 2 pm and was told the information about the bag having been dropped at the apartment building was wrong (sorry) and that the bag was definitely and absolutely sitting at the Majestic -- and had been there, as they said earlier, since Saturday morning. Back to the Majestic and a chat with a different concierge guy who immediately said "ah, voila!" and pointed to it, sitting four or five feet away. Absent six days and there it finally was.

So the primary bad guys, of course, were the Air France delivery guys and their bosses for (a) taking four days to deliver the bag from Paris To Cannes and (b) declining to notify me of its arrival. The secondary villains were the Majestic concierge staffers who blew me off late this morning, not caring to look for or ask about the bag because I'm not a paying guest and, I'm guessing, therefore considered a nuisance. This despite the fact they'd been told to deliver it to Pete Hammond, who is staying there.

There will be blood when I get back to Paris and file my report about the stuff I had to buy (including a pair of white pants) to keep myself going without looking too scuzzy.