house messy: Paris, France

I ran out of storage space for pictures on Picasa so I haven't been able to upload and pot pictures for the past week or so. This is a shame because it is difficult to recall and record everything that happened in Paris (which is the entire point of this stupid blog). I paid for a higher storage capacity so hopefully I can stop more current with these posts.

Anyway.

Paris was (is!) amazing. Beautiful, magical, romantic, everything you want it to be and expect it to be. One week was not enough. As we travel from place to place I keep a mental list of the places I want to return to in and explore in more depth and Paris is absolutely at the top of that list. Or maybe just France in general.

Our apartment was more of a closet, no bigger than my mother's bathroom. Tiny. Less than 100 spare meters. But it was perfect with its miniature sized fridge, oven and sink. I didn't even mind that our bathroom was just a hole in the floor. Not. Even. Kidding. Our shower had a great view of the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower, which I'm kind of in love with. We walked to it every night. Stared at in, took pictures of it, laughed at everyone who was taking picture of themselves "holding" it (then did the same thing). One of my favorite memories is eating Nutella crepes while watching the Eiffel Tower "sparkle" and hearing everyone cheer (like it was a Christmas tree lighting up... so funny/dumb/great).

The scariest part of this trip so far was getting a hair cut in Paris. My hair has been pretty much falling apart since we left. It didn't help that I forgot to bring a brush. After much deliberation (and googling) I decided to go to a well reviewed salon de coiffure. And of course no one spoke English. Not that I was expecting anyone to (I was in France, after all). But a girl can hope. Suffice to say, it was stressful. I was so nervous that I was sweating profusely (not uncommon for me, I'm sure you already know). In my excited state, I started responding to people in Spanish. And I'm not even fluent in Spanish.

The hairdresser assigned to me was young with nice hair--a good sign I thought. Next came a very confusing hair wash during which I (accidentally) agreed to a €20 conditioning treatment and annoyed the hairstylist so much with my lack of French that she ended up yelling at me a few times before storming off to talk to the someone who I assume was the manager. Although I can't be sure, I think she must have been talking about me, if the finger-pointing and eye-rolling was any indication.

I was trying to decide whether or not I should just leave when a different woman came up and led me to a chair. Clearly I'd been pawned off on this poor lady who, quite frankly, did not look to pleased with her new client. But we ended up working out a pretty good system in which I showed her a picture of the hair cut I wanted and she disregarded it completely and did whatever she felt like at the moment. But whatever, hair grows right? And hopefully it grown fast.

Oh, I forgot to mention, not only did I get to squat over this beauty a few times a day, but we were living on the 7th floor of an 8 story walk-up. So we climbed 127 steps two to five times a day. (Yes, 127 steps. No, the math doesn't add up. But I counted every time so I'm sure.) Point being, my ass is getting pretty firm.