It wasn't difficult to find the hostel but it was late at night and I felt very conspicuous with my backpack and slightly lost look in my eyes. Luckily no one mugged me or anything! I was just thinking that it would be just great to get all the way through this trip and right at the end encounter some of the worst luck. I suppose staying in room 17 of Peace & Love Hostel in Paris is kind of unlucky because it is 121 steps to your bed. After that climb I wanted nothing more but to fall into my third-tier bunked bed. I wasn't very happy with the hostel at this point, the climb and lack of space in my room being the most prominent concerns. However the next morning I discovered that the three-bed room had it's own en-suite bathroom, including a shower! Granted, it was probably the smallest shower I've seen; I could barely squeeze into it and once I did there was no bending over to pick up the soap. So the bathroom plus the view of the river and intersection below was enough to make up for the deadly staircase climb.

So I drifted off to sleep while watching the snowflakes fall through the silver of window not blocked by the curtains. With no real reason to get up I didn't set an alarm. I leisurely started my day around 10am when the housekeeper came in to clean and didn't actually leave the hostel until around noon. My own goal for the day was to get to the Louvre which was not as much of an adventure as I would have liked. The actual visit was quite incredible though. Everywhere you look there are master paintings or sculptures. I wandered through aimlessly as first getting startled when paintings I studied in Art History jumped from the wall at me. A Caravaggio was particularly intriguing to me and I just couldn't get enough of looking at it, right there, right in front of me. I of course saw the Mona Lisa too and was surprised at how big it was. People always told me they were surprised at how small it was so maybe I just had really low expectations. It was neat to see, but pretty unreal you know. I mean we see the Mona Lisa all around, so seeing the real one doesn't seem all that different.

Me and a big vase that's probably famous, I was too distracted by playing with the mirrors to find out

I got kind of sick of paintings and people so I tried to leave the Louvre. It ended up taking me 45 minutes to figure my way out of that place, I just kept wandering down dead-ends. Granted they were dead ends full of really old Egyptian wall paintings and Roman statues but dead ends nonetheless.

A famous Venus statue, kept seeing this one while I wandered around looking for the exit

After finally making it back out the big glass pyramid, I was left standing in a rainy Paris street, hungry and tired and sick. It didn't take much effort to find a place to eat though because as I was walking by, a man ushered me into his restaurant and sat me down. At that point I didn't care that this was probably overpriced, I just wanted food and warmth. The crepes I ordered were actually quite good and decently priced but they got me on the bottled water. Oh those tricky Parisians.

I continued wandering down the street by the Seine, hoping to wander upon the Notre Dame Cathedral. I kept passing pet shops with cute puppies in the windows, so I finally just went into a couple of them. No one talked to me, thank goodness, so I was free to fill up on fuzz-therapy without any French directed at me. I miss having pets!

I did make it to Notre Dame after all and I stayed a bit longer because the organs were playing and the atmosphere in the fading light was really something.

Interior of Notre Dame Cathedral, pretty cool building

I ended up meeting Danielle a bit late because of that, but I didn't have problems finding her place so it all evens out in the end. The bar Sarah had suggested was closed so we went to an Irish pub and I got a Guinness, poured right this time. Danielle and I caught up with things over our drinks and, later, over falafel. In the end we parted ways at the metro station, on either side of the pink line. Trains are quite nice and romantic in the way that you can wave goodbye as it slowly pulls away from the station and winds around the corner.

Yet another Guinness shot, this time in Paris