I haven't been writing on this blog for a while and I feel kind of bad but I have been working for the last two months and a half - which i hadn't done for a while!
After spending three weeks of vacation in Gleizé in July, Mike had to go back to Boston and I stayed with my parents, waiting for my visa to be processed. I decided to apply at L'Occitane, a company selling beauty products because I had already worked there last Christmas and I needed a job right away. Being a sales assistant isn't the best job ever but it can be fun and it is only temporary.
I like L'Occitane. They have very good products, made from natural ingredients. Working with those products everyday made me appreciate them even more. My favorite ranges are honey and lemon (the body scrub and lotion, the hand cream, the soap and the perfume smell wonderful), almond (especially the body cream and exfoliating soap) almond and apple for face care and cherry blossom for the perfume. The only downside of the brand, in my mind, is the price: the almond shower oil is amazing for both its texture and fragrance but I don't think that it is justified to charge 14.50 euros for something hat is basically soap and is going to run out pretty quickly.
I started working at a store on l'île de la Cité on August 8th. It was a very nice store in a nice area. I'd stay that 80 % of the clients were tourists and I loved that. I got to speak English of course but also Spanish and Italian with them. Our clients came from everywhere: a lot of them came from Italy, Spain, Germany, England, Ireland, China, Japan, the United States and Brazil but I also met some people from Canada, Venezuela, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, India, Korea...
The downside of being in such a touristic area - right between the City Hall and Notre Dame- was that our store was often mistaken for an information stand: we were asked all kinds of questions about how to go here and there -Chatelet, la Sainte Chapelle, Opéra, the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, the Latin Corner... Someone even asked my friend Oriane how to walk to the Mont Saint Michel! But the two things that we were asked to indicate several times a daywere McDonald's and B
erthillon (the famous ice cream maker).After working at this store for two months, and given that my green card wasn't ready yet, I continued working at l'Occitane in different stores inside Paris. I got to meet different types of people and I also had the pleasure of helping very weird clients including one who yelled at me because I asked her if "I could be of any help" and another one who tasted the hand creams that I was showing her. Yes, she actually tasted some of it and when I told her that hand creams were not supposed to be eaten, she replied very coldly that you have to taste everything that you put on your body, didn't I know that?!
Anyway, L'Occitane is a good experience (I am still working there for the next three weeks). I worked with wonderful people and even though I was thinking at first that the job would just be a way of passing time while waiting for my visa, I got to like it a lot. I used to feel a little ashamed of liking being a sales assistant, I was thinking of what the people from Sciences Po would think if they knew but I don't really care anymore. I am glad that I am liking what I am doing. I know that I wouldn't want to do that for the rest of my life because my project is to become a teacher and I am very motivated but I don't regret this experience at all.
