Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

There have been many… um, mishaps let’s say, that have happened on our journey to Africa thus far. This is one of them from our last night in Paris.

After a day of walking to the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triumph, rue Champs Elysees, and everywhere else, the rechargeable batteries in my handheld GPS were kaput. So, I took out my little Energizer wall charger and checked the back of it for the operating voltage. Aw, it is only 110v and I’m in a 240v country.

Never fear, I brought my converter kit with me. It has one electricity converter (240v to 110v) and 5 electric plug adapters. I already had the French plug adapter in my hand when I read the back of the charger and whined to Dana about Energizer’s discrimination of our European friends. My whining must have distracted me from thinking through my next actions. I didn’t reach for the converter, nope just slapped the plug adapter right on the charger and into the wall. If you know anything about electricity, you know this was not a good thing.

I’d say about 45 seconds later… POP!!! Complete darkness and no sound coming from the rooms around us. Especially the one next door where the TV was blasting through the wall less than a minute earlier. Did I mention all of this was going on shortly before 2am in the morning local time????!!!!

The wretched smell of burned electronics filled the room and I yanked the charger off the wall. I opened the window to let out the stench and wondered what to do next. Dana finally talked me into calling the front desk (yes, I was actually considering not calling. Total embarrassment, I say.).

I called the desk and the woman who answered spoke only a little english. I said, “We have no ee-lec-tri-ci-tee.” She replied, “Please come to zee reception desk. Bring your key. I’ll give a new key.” I guess she only picked up the ‘eee’ sound and thought I had a problem with my key card. “No. I have no power,” I said. “Oh, come to reception and I’ll give you towels,” was her response. Something wasn’t clicking. She asked for a moment and got a colleague on the phone who spoke very good English and the phone call was over quickly with her on the way up to the room. In the meanwhile, Dana looked in her French phrase book and learned electricity in French is pronounced eh-lec-tree-cee-tay. Guess I wasn’t close enough.

Helped arrived a few minutes later and she asked for the small chair out of our room so she could reach the circuit breaker above our door. After trying to reset all of them, still there were no lights in our room. She offered to put us in a different, electrically-equipped room but we declined. Too late, too much stuff to move. We didn’t need power that night anyway. No A/C. No alarm clock. Not because there was no power. There was no presence of them so we were okay with sleeping in the dark as we normally are.

Whenever we returned to the room after Dana’s fight with climbing the Eiffel Tower the next morning, the power was in full force. I was scared I damaged the wiring in the hotel or something that would drive our travel cost up but it only ended up costing me the life of an innocent USA-only Energizer battery charger. Poor thing never had a chance.

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