Be careful! 220 V can kill.

That's what my mom said to me after I told her about my first electricity incident. The night of my arrival, I was organizing my room and I decided that I wanted to plug in my iHome player. I used the US/EURO converter that I bought in San Francisco to plug it in. As soon as it was plugged in, the clock illuminated much brighter than usual, but everything seemed okay. Except that the plug was making a strange sparking, popping type sound. I thought maybe something isn't right, but before I could do anything, the current blew out. The plug was smoking and that outlet along with 2 others on the same wall were no longer working. OMG, seriously Leela, do you have tear up the house on your first day!? Couldn't you have at least waited a week, or even a whole day? Damn. Not to mention that I now had to buy a new AC cord for my iHome player.

Following too closely was the second incident. I brought along a US surge protector outlet strip on the premise that instead of buying a bunch of converters, I could just use 1 converter to plug the strip into the wall outlet and then plug all of my US plugs into the matching outlets of the US strip. Seems like a good idea, right? Well I thought so too. Until I went to plug it in and it blew out the electricity again! A single pop and the whole house went dark! God help me! What's really going on?! I was totally shaken up and nervous. I was trying to explain what happened while they were trying to restore the electricity. I felt rush-of-anxiety terrible. This was when my fear of plugging things in fully materialized. The electricity was quickly repaired and Monsieur plugged my power strip in and unplugged it to test it and it worked fine for him. Still I was too afraid to try again. 1 week passed and I really needed to plug my stuff in. The battery in my toothbrush and camera were completely dead. Plus I really needed to do something with my hair. Tomorrow I will try it. I kept postponing it to tomorrow. I finally built up some courage. Just plug it in. Remember when Monsieur did it, it was fine. It will be fine. I kept reminding myself in hopes that I would believe it. I held my breath and slowly plugged in my power strip. No popping. No smoke. Yea! Everything was working pretty well. Granted my blow dryer was blowing extra hot and the charging base for my toothbrush was generating quite a bit of excess heat. But it was working! That was the important part, right? I had to be extremely careful with everything I plugged in though. The heater for my wax was so hot I had to unplug it after only 4 minutes. It was smoking and smelled like it was on fire. And after plugging in my flatiron for approximately 1.5 minutes, it was too hot to even use on my hair, if I still wanted to have any left. So I learned to be very attentive. I ironed my clothes on the lowest setting. I turned off the power strip whenever I left and unplugged everything that wasn't in use.

The third incident (which I fervently pray is the last), was when I plugged in my flatiron for the second time. I unplugged it after maybe 45 seconds because I sensed that it was getting too hot. I picked it up and it had left burn marks on the towel it had been resting on. Then the ceramic plates fell off! Seriously fell off! My Farouk Chi ceramic flatiron!!! It had gotten so hot that parts had melted and the plates came off. I love that flatiron and now I don't know what to do. I am soooo distraught. There must be some way to salvage it! Super glue? Something? Oh why the flatiron? I guess the bigger issue here is that I need to get a transformer to enable my appliances to work properly. But really, what am I supposed to do without my flatiron? Sad times.

Note: For all of your smarty-pant, observant people thinking, wait a minute, I thought France uses 230 V? Yes, you are right.