Day 48 -- Paris

Tuesday, 24 October 2023

The past two days, my ATM card didn't work. I don't typically need cash, but I'll need a little bit for the laundry in the basement of the hotel. I should only need one more batch of laundry, but I only have about two euros of cash and coin left. The ATMs displayed "this action isn't allowed by your institution". That's odd. It worked a few weeks ago, and I told my bank I'd be in France through the 29th. I opened a support case in the mobile app yesterday and they replied that there was a fraud notice that they asked me about, and because I didn't respond, they blocked my card. They couldn't unblock it via the in-app support, so I'll have to call them. But they are only available during US business hours, so I'll have to wait a while.

What to do while I wait? I know -- I'll walk more of Saint Ouen. I started out by trying to see if I could get to the riverside road that is closed for construction from some other approach. I could get close, but I didn't find a way to get to the sidewalk. There might have been a way if I went through one of the homeless encampments along the Rue Terneaux, but I decided against that.

I worked through some more parts of Saint Ouen. A few streets that are marked as valid walkable streets on the City Strides map turned out to be private gated alleys. I'll update them on openstreetmap.org later. 

I ended up going by the Notre Dame church again, and this time I got a photo of the embedded steel rails that they have for their gate wheels to ride along. Presumably to avoid wearing a groove in the stone.

Rails for the gate wheels

Detail of a gate wheel and a rail

I was starting to get hungry at about 4:30 p.m., so I looked for restaurants that were already open. Nothing spoke to me, but a promising pizza place -- Fino Pizza -- opened at 5:00 p.m., so I kept walking and timed it to get there around 5:10 p.m. Alas, they were still closed. But there was another pizza place not much further along that was open -- Emir Pizza. Delicious!

The nour pizza at Emir Pizza

The walk back to the hotel after dinner got me to about eleven miles for the day, so that was enough.

I called my bank and after a bit of a hassle proving who I was -- they wanted to send a text message to the same US number that prevented me from getting the fraud alert in the first place -- I got authenticated and they unblocked my card. [I found out later that it wasn't even my US cell phone that they sent the fraud alert to. They left a voicemail on my work phone. I'll need to get that straightened out later.]

All that walking amounted to 43 more streets completed, 37 of them in Saint Ouen. Only about 30 left.

...doug