How I Find Cheap Airfare

September 22, 2015 by Erin 9 Comments

flight1

In this post I not-so-humbly bragged about finding (and immediately booking) a nonstop flight to Paris for $1 (plus an additional $640 in taxes). A few weeks before that, I booked a flight to Paris for a little over $700 total (nonstop on the way there, with a two hour layover at Heathrow on the way home). I thought I’d share my tips for finding good airfare deals, since I appear to be on a winning streak and a bunch of you expressed interest in how I snagged them. I wish there was some magical secret, or that airlines would lower their prices consistently with fuel prices, or at the very least that the basic economic principles of supply and demand didn’t really exist in this sector (there’s no reason the same flight to Paris in June should cost double what it does in March, just because more people want to go at that time of year, other than the fact that airlines are greedy mofos hellbent on making as large a profit as possible while screwing over the everyday passenger, and that is my manifesto against capitalism, the end.). But what my recent airfare scores come down to is persistence: a fair amount of website stalking, checking prices several times a day for weeks on end, and, unfortunately, luck. That $1 fare was gone an hour after I booked it, and if I hadn’t already gotten in the habit of checking frequently throughout the day, I would’ve missed it.

A word of warning: If you want to go to the Maldives and you live in Idaho nowhere near an airport, odds are it’s going to be expensive no matter what you do, so these tips might not prove to be too helpful. Sorry, kiddos! I’ve tried to make these as universal as I could.

So, here we go!

Black & White (And an Excerpt From the First Draft)

September 9, 2015 by Erin 3 Comments

Dubois turned the collar of his raincoat up, adjusted his scarf under his chin, and, shoulders strung up almost to his ears, stepped out of his building into the chilled rain that had persisted over the city for the past three days. It was a fine, mostly annoying mist, spraying him the moment the door closed behind him with a heavy thud. The usual morning soundtrack –a dog scampering to the nearest tree, the trash collectors rolling bins across the sidewalk, background noise to him on any other morning– had the sudden effect of being jarring, too loud, too accusatory. He hurried on, trying to make his feet move faster than his brain, trying to trick himself into forgetting the streets he’d memorized years ago. Right, left, left again. If he didn’t look up he could pretend he was lost. And that morning he needed to be lost.

The entire enterprise seemed entirely fucking stupid now, out of the suffocating confines of his apartment. His apartment. He couldn’t even think about it without feeling it was booby-trapped and rigged to blow. He had more still lifes than he knew what to do with. He’d taken three of them inexplicably, because they’d been there, available. And though he’d only spotted one at first, he later took two additional Henri Fantin-Latour pieces because his recollection told him they matched, that they’d make a perfect triptych of florals. Only he’d gotten them home and realized the colors were all wrong on the first one. Sleep on it, he’d told himself. They’ll look different in the morning light. And they had, only worse. As he’d lined them up on his dresser this morning, he’d become so nauseated and sickened by the sight of them that he had been gasping for air as he slipped on his coat and locked the door behind him.

I’m writing a novel. You can read more about that here.

Bookworm

September 4, 2015 by Erin 4 Comments

Antoine Laurain

Have you ever come across a book and just known you were going to love it, before you’d even read a word? That was the experience I had with both of Antoine Laurain’s novels, “The Red Notebook” and “The President’s Hat.” I stumbled upon the former on Amazon, where I usually go down a rabbit hole of “Books You May Like” to find things to add my library hold queue. The premise grabbed me immediately: a man finds a woman’s purse on the street, and in going through the contents to try to find its owner, finds a red notebook with her thoughts and scribblings and starts to fall in love with her. He also owns a bookshop called Le Cahier Rouge, the red notebook. It also happens to be set in Paris, translated from French, but truthfully, that it played into my Francophilia was secondary to how delightful of a book it was. A particularly beautiful, articulate excerpt that resonated with me, given what I went through earlier this year before I changed jobs:

An existence devoted to reading would have been his ultimate fulfillment, but it had not been given to him. He would have had to choose that path much earlier, to have known what he wanted to do…To have had a life plan. At first it had been interested to be recognized as a promising young banker, to climb the hierarchy, to have responsibilities and to earn a lot of money. Up until the day he had started to feel, dimly at first, then more and more clearly, that the man he had become was the absolute opposite of what he really was. Although the dichotomy weighed heavily on him, for a while the money he was earning was compensation enough, but then it could no longer make up for it. The gap between his ideal and his reality was too great. The weight turned into an anguish that was succeeded by the intolerable idea that he was wasting his life –or even that he had already wasted it.

I couldn’t put it down, and when I was finished, I wanted to hug it, re-read it, and find the author, Antoine Laurain, and ask him how he makes writing look so easy and good. (I also have a thing for the name Antoine). Immediately after finishing “The Red Notebook”, I picked up his other, earlier novel, “The President’s Hat” from the library, and started it yesterday. I’m more than halfway through, and that I can’t stay home from work to finish reading it and rub it on my head in the hopes that some of Laurain’s beautiful faculty with words will transfer to me by osmosis or something is torture. Mon dieu.

Really, kiddos, you have to go read them. I haven’t read anything as charming and perfect in a long time. What are you reading these days?

Afternoon Tea

September 1, 2015 by Erin 23 Comments

Last week, my mom and I went to afternoon tea at the Sofitel. For $35 per person, you get a mimosa or bellini, a pot of loose leaf tea, finger sandwiches, scones, and an assortment of mini desserts. All the trappings of traditional afternoon tea, but with a slightly French flair (macarons!), as the hotel itself is French (everyone greets you with a delighted, “Bonjour!”). My mom had purchased one of those half-off deals, so we only paid $35 total, which I admit was still a splurge for a Wednesday afternoon but the perfect excuse for a little indulgence. I turned my mom onto Rooibos tea, and we downed a full pot each (and our bellinis) in record time. We had the perfect unspoken arrangement when it came to eating, too: she ate all the sandwiches, and I got all the desserts. Hooray for being an only child!

We have been playing with the idea for months now of taking a girl’s trip to Paris next March; next year marks 15 years (!!) since my first (and her only) trip to the City of Light, and also a milestone birthday for her (I won’t say how old she is, in deference to her vanity, but let’s just say she was 35 when she had me and I’ll be 30 next year, ahem. I’ve been stalking flights and itineraries for a while, and over tea we decided to just pull the trigger on a $900 ticket that had a layover in London, either on the way there or the way back, I can’t remember. It was going to be my birthday present to her (and a selfish present for myself. Paris! Again!) but more than I was entirely comfortable spending, given I’m only working part-time and will have just been to Paris in November and am going to Spain in April. But, Paris! Maman’s ~~65th~~ birthday!

I came home from tea and went to book the flight, only to find that somehow, for some reason, as if imbued by the magic of tea and macarons, fares had dropped substantially in the last day. I wouldn’t have to pay $900! There wouldn’t even be a layover! A roundtrip, direct flight from Philly to Paris next March cost me –are you ready for this?– a whopping $1. ONE. DOLLAR.

One Dollar Fare

Sure, taxes and fees added another $640, but are you kidding me? I’ve never seen fares that low. I had to book flights. (In another post I’ll tell you all my tips and tricks to booking flights, if you’d like. Stalking airline and travel websites has become a part time job for me.)

We’re going to Paris! Again!