Freestyle Swapping

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An apartment trade brokered by Craigslist isn’t for the faint of heart  When my mother suggested an apartment swap for my trip to Paris, I grouped the idea into a category of travel tips she’s full of that are probably brilliant but too eccentric for me. Other suggestions in this category: insisting on Red Cap service on Amtrak regardless of your age or ability to carry luggage so you can “skip the line and get on first”; always having your hair cut in an unfamiliar city for a new perspective; using foreign Laundromats for fun.  Furthermore, she hadn’t ever done a house swap of her own. Nor had anyone she, my boyfriend Tom or I knew firsthand. But her suggestion implied a swap to be the most natural course of action for a person like myself. And like her best ideas, it sounded like a challenge.  We conducted some very loose research on the swap phenomenon; this consisted of me reading the first three paragraphs of an essay that began “I now have a house in Miami, Switzerland, and Costa Rica!” and Tom Googling the term ‘apartment swap’ while watching Brothers & Sisters and later stating that he’d never seen a negative thing written about it.   I drafted a short description of our Manhattan apartment, a walkup in Gramercy, and posted it to Craigslist New York and Craigslist Paris. We were rather inflexible with dates so I wasn’t expecting much. But the following afternoon there was a reply. A Parisian artists’ collective was traveling to New York and wanted to swap their Oberkampf space. Did we think our apartment could accommodate five artists or more? No, thank you.  The next day, a second reply, this time in French. Clearly worded. They were a couple, open to our dates, and had an apartment in Bastille that sounded comparable. A good lead. I would respond as soon as I got home that night.   But as the workday progressed, normal hesitancies turned paranoid. If my posting was in English, why had she replied in French? Was it to seem more French? What were they hiding? Clearly, this response was from a creative New York criminal. I decided that our foray into swapping was over shortly after it had started. Her response was archived and we’d began looking for hotels.  Then a few days later, another email came from Annie, this time in charmingly broken English. Were we still looking, and could I please respond? Tom and I talked through details that evening. Logistically, sending our keys to France rather than leaving them to be picked up in New York would go a long way to confirm Annie’s authenticity. She told me that she and her husband had done a successful swap for a home in Switzerland last year.  We mutually decided to move forward and exchanged apartment photos over email. Hers, a pied-à-terre, was warmly decorated in Mediterranean colors and Ikea furniture. It was friendly, modest, and looked real. We exchanged basic information about my occupation, her seven wonderful grandchildren, and so on. Ultimately it didn’t take a lot of convincing before Annie, Tom and I decided it was a go. I put our keys in a white envelope and with an unceremonious trip to the Columbus Circle post office our swap became official. We received our respective keys on the same day, less than a week later.  I told my friends about the plan. Certainly we had assumed some risk. What if they found my credit card info and had a bunch of computers delivered to our place? What if they stole my identity? Or what if they just left the door unlocked?  Admittedly, though, the risk was a big part of the cachet. As a guy who is known around the office for eating the same lunch every day, (turkey and cheese on whole wheat, packed at home), I was suddenly feeling like an everyday pioneer. Not like a movie-character swap pioneer, but the kind that’s your friend, who has been eating the same sandwich five days a week since ‘04, and asks people to take their shoes off before they come into the apartment.  All in all, Annie and I exchanged maybe 40 emails, mostly about logistics. And then something funny happened. My earlier fears about criminal activity were replaced with a new paranoia: the social kind. What would Annie think of our aggressively sloping floors? Was our fridge clean enough? Would she be scared by the patients wandering down First Avenue, freshly released from the psychiatric hospital nearby? We even hired a housekeeper to come on the day before we left.  Some drinks at an airport bar and a non-eventful flight later, there we were, exhausted and stumbling off the Paris Metro in the 11eme at Bréguet-Sabin. We dragged ourselves to Annie’s street and then her building. If the whole thing were an elaborate ruse we’d need to charge a hotel room and deal with the serious repercussions back in Manhattan. But as we tapped into the digicode I knew this thing was in the bag. A 3-6-8-0. BEEEEEEEP. We dropped our bags and high-fived.  Our stay in Paris had the all the charm of a college study abroad. There were dance parties. There were dinner parties. We made French friends and ate French fries. We drank Champagne in Champagne.  Tom and I spoke with Annie directly only once during the trip: she and her husband thought our Manhattan apartment was too hot and wanted to lower the central heating. I left her a voicemail, assuring Annie she was having an authentic New York experience, and suggested she open the window. We didn’t talk again, but enjoyed every minute in her wonderful apartment and hoped very genuinely that they were doing the same in New York.  We had plans to meet during our only continental overlap, the hour after…
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