"I'm looking for a poof"

This is the sorry phrase I recently had to use with several shop assistants.

In French, beanbag is “pouf” – tricky to pronounce, not quite ‘poof’ but something like puf, using the ‘u’ sound from rubrix cube.

Anyway, I was determined to find one.  Our apartment has great big full length windows that let the sun stream in during the day, and that offer a great view over the street below with all the shoppers and tourists and fancy inhabitants of Le Marais going about their daily business.  I decided it would be ideal if I could plonk a beanbag next to one of the windows and while away the hours with a book and a cup of tea from my great people-viewing vantage point.

But to find a beanbag in Paris is impossible!  After learning the necessary vocabulary I set out on the streets in search of my pouf.  I tried all the likely spots – department stores and furniture stores, home-wear outlets and bedding places.  Nothing.  Not a pouf in sight!

After weeks of searching I decided I was destined to remain pouf-less.

But then an early birthday package arrived from Mum – a pouf!  Hooray!  A pouf sans filling of course (I can’t even imagine how many thousands of dollars it would cost to post a puffed pouf from Australia to France).

And so began my next quest – with an equally unfortunate phrase to ask the bewildered shop assistants

“I’m looking for balls for my pouf”.

"J'ai besoin de billes pour remplir mon pouf".

The search took me across three Quartiers and finally to the fabric district near Montmartre.  It is a great area packed with dozens of fabric or ‘tissue’ outlets, the biggest and grandest and most famous of which is the Marche Saint Pierre:  like a giant Frenchy-fied Spotlight, with a long and glorious history and oodles of charm.  Creaky wooden staircases, a big clunky elevator, ream upon ream of fabric and everything to fulfil your wildest haberdashery dreams.

So the quest, which ended with a nice fat pouf in my lounge room and a floor covered with a million white polystyrene billes produced many fun moments:

Number 20:  going on a crazy chase all over Paris, haranguing stressed shop assistants with my nonsensical requests.

Number 21:  finding my beloved billes!  A great mountain of them – proudly on display between reams of red and black sequinned material (the Moulin rouge is just around the corner!) and shiny leopard print velvet.

Number 22:  going home and filling my poof with billes – who doesn’t like the feeling of digging your hands into a mass of beanbag balls?

Number 23:  flopping down on my lovely fat pouf.  Aahh.