Two Things

Packing and shopping

Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.

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I’m not very good at packing for any kind of trip. I tend to imagine outfits I think will look good and then I get to my destination and they not only don’t look very good but they are also impractical for some reason – not comfortable for walking, shirt doesn’t actually go with pants, shoes look dumb, whatever.

Before we left for Paris in mid-April, I had a great brainwave, which was to try on the outfits I had in mind and take pictures of same. This is probably something a lot of much smarter people already know about, but I was quite pleased with myself.

Also this time around, I insisted on checking a bag. I know it’s a risk with connecting flights, but I wanted space to bring some things back and I also didn’t want to run out of clothes to wear. I don’t mind doing some sink laundry if there’s a heated towel rack for drying, and I travel with these Tide sink packets and this drain cover my friend Miriam recommended (hotel sink drains might not have stoppers or the stoppers might not work). But I would rather not do this a lot, and I am still traumatized by our last Paris trip when I underpacked for a heat wave and was washing everything constantly.

(Somewhat related, the most unhinged person on the internet once ranted at a forum full of women for not at least rinsing their bras out every night, calling into question their “standards of personal daintiness,” and I have never forgotten it, and now I do this. Never think you aren’t making a difference in someone’s life!)

Anyway, here is what I took, which seemed fairly reasonable (a lot of stuff is in the two packing cubes I’ve used for a long time now):

That includes shoes, tote bags, and scarves but not jackets. I ended up not needing my raincoat, which was a shame in a way because it is quite cute. I also took my J. Crew downtown field jacket and my denim jacket, which I wore to travel there and back.

Anyway! I took a lot of secondhand stuff with me: a Gap linen button down, two Kule tees (one long-sleeved and one short-sleeved), a Spanx dress (this one), my raincoat, two pairs of jeans, a striped Eileen Fisher cotton sweater, a knit Polo sweater vest from the 80s, and a few silk scarves.

I wore the scarves a lot, actually! Some of this was definitely French lady cosplay but some of it was to keep the chill away in the morning or evening, or just perk up an otherwise plain outfit:

LOL at the photo behind me.

I took the $5 Sonia Rykiel crossbody I mentioned a couple of weeks ago and did not even get the Uniqlo bag out of the suitcase. The Sonia Rykiel bag had the right amount of space and the right number of pockets, and I am particularly fond of the front pocket that is exactly the right size for a phone. Just like last time, I saw a lot of the Uniqlo bags on both men and women in the streets of Paris! But it doesn’t have a lot of structure and chucking, say, a phone and a wallet in it makes it seem heavier than it really is. (It is also $5 more than it was in 2023.)

Not secondhand, but I took my Eileen Fisher oval dress on the trip and wore it lots, including to travel home. It really is great for packing and it can be dressy or not. I did take these shoes in the picture with me, they are block heels and therefore decent when traversing cobblestones.

This is one of my pre-travel try-on pictures so please excuse my disgusting mirror and everything else

Anyway! I was very pleased with what I brought; it all worked. It didn’t hurt that the weather was perfect all week long – no rain, 70-degree highs and 50-degree lows.

I did not buy any clothes on this trip, though I saw so many stylish Parisian women in trench coats I was very tempted to buy one at Monoprix. I didn’t get to a Monoprix last time, but this time we went twice, once to get things for a picnic and once to get some hazelnut KitKats and another bag of tartiflette-flavored potato chips because OH MY GOD. I also bought a few of their Monoprix-branded reusable shopping bags, including one with an Eiffel Tower motif that was once the subject of a very nasty travel forum throw-down. (In short, they were hard to find for a while, a lady posted on the forum that she’d found a bunch and bought something like eight bags, she was immediately and vehemently canceled.)

Here is the one I chose to keep for myself, already in action!

On my previous trip to Paris I went into a pharmacy but quickly got overwhelmed and didn’t buy anything. This time I did a bit more homework and got a few things:

Respire refillable deodorant stick, Cicaplast balm, La Rosee toothpaste, La Rosee lip balm, Embryolisse SPF 50 stick.

That deodorant is “all natural” and therefore will not work, but I was intrigued by the scent and also the cuteness. If I had one suggestion here it would be to maybe not worry about hitting the Citypharma in Saint-Germain-des-Prés? A lot of people recommend it and a lot of people complain about how mobbed it is. Just go into literally any pharmacy, because they are everywhere and will have a decent selection of the most common stuff.

Not pictured, I went into the Aesop store to get some more of my hand cream and was suckered into buying this hand serum, which I began using right away and have been enjoying.

On the last day of the trip we went to this chocolate store and bought a number of things from one of the best-looking men I’ve ever seen in real life. The chocolate is also very nice.

I feel like these are reasonably useful/consumable purchases, and everything fit into our bags for the trip home, though our larger suitcase weighed in right at the limit. The only thing I sort of missed out on was poking around a vintage store. I walked past any number of interesting-looking places, but we were always on our way somewhere else or I didn’t want to be carrying something around for the rest of the day, so it didn’t work out this time. I did however get to E. Dehillerin for a madeleine pan, and I’m going to attempt to make some soon, probably this weekend when it gets chilly and rainy again.

We also did not get to poke around any flea markets – the one time we encountered a brocante in the wild was right before we went to the Moulin Rouge, so we couldn’t shop. Considering how creatively we had to swaddle a couple bottles of Champagne for the trip home, it’s probably for the best.