On Friday 5th November 2010, Dave & Kate stepped out of their hotel with the task of finding themselves a room for that night and some kind of accomodation which offered them a few days of stability. An apartment was the preferred choice but its not easy to book an apartment a day in advance.
Nothing much was showing up and so they'd take breaks from the internet cafe, going out for walks to give the mind a rest, and then coming back. Sometime in the afternoon Dave came across an apartment not too far from the area they were in and as a bonus it had a PC with internet connection. This would be a massive help in saving internet costs. They emailed the owners, David & Elizabeth, about checking in the next day.
Luckily, they were able to email back quickly and put things into action - 5 days in this apartment sounded good and after that they felt sure they would leave Paris one way or another. David & Elizabeth wanted a 100 Euro deposit before arrival and accepted paypal which suited Dave & Kate perfectly. The remainder was to be paid in cash on arrival.
At this point on their travels, Dave & Kate seemed to be plagued with money issues. They couldn't use their euro currency cards as they'd intended until a bank statement from their UK banks arrived at the family residence they had provided (since they had no permanent residence of their own now). This was another security measure from the Babylon Shitstem which seemed intent on halting things. They could only transfer money by direct bank transfer to their cards and this took a few days to process each time.
At 5pm they eventually found a hotel for the night... the same one they'd stayed in for 2 nights at the beginning of the week on Rue d'Amsterdam. After nothing showing up for their budget all day, it popped up on offer late in the day and so they once again were saved at the last minute.
They moved their luggage from the previous nights hotel to this one again, checked in and then went back out to hopefully finalise the apartment for tomorrow.
The dark forces were out to stop them yet again. When Kate attempted to make the paypal deposit payment she got a message from paypal saying they had frozen the transfer until further security checks were completed. This was going to take 5 days - they'd be checked out by the time it went through. No good.
Kate got in touch with David and explained and he very kindly agreed to cancel the paypal transaction and accept a cash deposit on arrival. Only thing was, the cancellation didn't free up the money back into Kate's bank account. So 100 Euros was unavailable to them for 5 - 7 days.
They were left that night having agreed to this apartment and not even sure whether they could get any of the money out their banks for it. At 11pm that night they made their way to a cash machine where Dave tried to use his UK debit card to take out a chunk of the money. He almost expected Chris Tarrant's face to appear on the screen and ask if he wanted to phone a friend as they waited those long seconds while the transaction was being processed.
Jah didn't let them down. The cash came out and they were able to go back the next morning and withdraw the rest. Finally it looked like they were about to have 5 days of stability in which something could happen to keep Europe alive.
