As we munched our crepe, we decided the best place to start was to go visit our friend Louis.
I pulled out my cell phone, hopped on my “mobile web” and went to
http://www.louisvuitton.com/.
Nothing happened.
I tried again.
Nothing happened.
Then, I noticed in very tiny letters on my very tiny screen, it was telling me that since the
LV website is done in Flash, and since my phone’s web browser doesn’t support Flash, I was out of luck.
Let me just mention that most websites now-a-days have a Flash component.
I quickly realized just how useless my phone would be for viewing actual websites.
Undaunted, I simply went to http://www.yellowpages.com/ and typed in Louis Vuitton, New York City. Aha! I had about 10 listings from which to choose. We were at 50th and Lexington, and the store I found was at 625 Madison Ave. Madison Ave is only two blocks over from Lexington and we didn’t figure 625 could be that far away. So, we walked over to Madison and tried to determine which way to head. After a little trial and error (i.e. walking one way, realizing the numbers on the building were going the wrong way and then turning around to retrace our steps) we started heading the right direction.
Along the way we stopped in an adorable children’s boutique. While we weren’t exactly greeted at the door with a warm smile and a hearty hello, I didn’t really notice at first. Then I started looking at clothes – and at prices. Baby shoes for $195. Sweaters for $250. Pants for $120. My friend Sarah turned to me and quietly whispered “Who shops here? Madonna?”. After looking around for a respectable amount of time, we headed out and back to our mission at hand.
After walking for what seemed like forever, we realized that we were in the 700 block of Madison and that somehow we had missed it. We backtracked a bit until we finally found 625 Madison Ave. Now I could see why we missed it... it was an office building. Not one retail shop in sight. Just an expansive marble lobby with a lone security desk and an elevator bay. We had found the offices of Louis Vuitton. Not the shop. Argh. I pulled up Yellow pages again and did a second check for LV. I quickly realized that the next reasonable entry was at 350 Park Ave. Where we had just come from. Alllll the way back where we started. Perfect.
At this point, having wasted an hour in our hunt, I thought perhaps we should check and see where Petite Bateau was located. It was listed at 1100 Madison Ave. While we were close, we had learned that city blocks in NYC don’t operate like other cities (i.e. addresses in the 400s are not all on one block followed by a block of 500’s… you can have 400s stretch for blocks). So we did the smart thing, hailed a cab and headed to Petite Bateau.
Luckily for us, it was right were it was supposed to be, and we got to go peruse all the adorable French fashions for our little ones at home. Since these clothes were not at the exorbitant prices of the other shop we had visited, I was able to pick up a couple of outfits for Coco and smiled to myself while imagining her having fun with Daddy at home.
After ringing up our purchases, Sarah and I headed out of the store discussing our plan to hail a cab to take us all the way back to the LV store on Park, and then to take the subway all the way downtown to the financial district to hit Century 21. Our chatter came to a halt the minute we stepped outside the store. It was pouring down rain. As we stood under the scaffolding surrounding Petite Bateau we looked at each other in almost amused exhaustion, realized we were umbrella-less, and started to weigh our options…
…to be continued.
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