Paris - Day Sixty Seven

The night train from Rome to Paris treated me surprisingly well. I slept like a smacked up koala bear in my crowded cabin that night. I'm not sure if it was residual tiredness from the pub crawl or the couple of beers that were bought for me in the restaurant car by Miguel, a lovely Chilean guy travelling with his two teenage daughters, but I was out like a light as soon as I hit my tiny tiny pillow.

As you may have gathered from the last post, I hadn't planned to come back to Paris just yet, but ended up here as the result of drunkeness and a lack of job satisfaction from the harpy at the international ticket desk. I'm not complaining though; arriving in Paris at 9am on a sunny spring morning is the sort of wonderful experience that makes travelling worthwhile.

I sauntered to the metro station, skipped easily across town, and in no time I was checked in to a clean, spacious and comfortable room in my hostel (click to check out the photos) right next to Bassin de la Villette, a spangly stretch of canal. Paris was beautiful when I started my trip here back in March, but now that spring has really kicked in it's just stunning. The trees are all in blossom, people are laughing and relaxing in the streets, parks and along the waterside, and beautiful women are suddenly wearing far fewer clothes than they were before.

I did very little in the few days I stayed here. I soaked up the sun outside the Sacre Coeur, ate lunch in Montmartre, caught up with my journal writing in street cafes (looking like an arty ponce and loving every minute of it) and generally just basked in the general goodness that fills the streets of the city of lights at this time of year.

I also finally buckled - finish line in sight - and got a haircut for the first time in three months. I hadn't planned to go so long without a trim, but after a while it seemed like it might be a fun idea to try and do the whole trip with a steadily expanding barnet.

It turned out not to be a fun idea at all.

For the last month or so I've been getting plenty of laughs by telling everyone that my hair makes me look like a lego man. Over the last few weeks I couldn't help noticing that the laughter was getting louder every time, and that people had started to through in casual little ad libs like; "you're right, you look like a right tosser" and, "stay away from my kids."
The time, I realised, had finally come.

So I bit the bullet and shelled out for one of the pricier options in town (I justified it to myself by the fact that the girl who cut my hair could speak english, and this was worth the extra cash. The fact that she was also Swedish and extremely hot played no part in my decision whatsoever). Now my bizarre, apparently naturally occuring side parting has gone - hopefully forever. Instead I have a sort of shaggy mop which looks like I just woke up with a hangover. For a while I thought this was because I kept waking up with hangovers, but I experimented with sobriety for a couple of nights and it's definitely the haircut rather than the booze. The hot Swedish girl liked it though, and at the end of the day if that's not a good reason for liking your haircut I just don't know what is.

The other significant development from my time in Paris is that I've booked a ticket home. I need to go back for a friend's wedding, and realised that if I planned properly I could also make it back in time for the stag do and my mum's birthday. Not to mention the fact that I'm getting a bit sick of wearing the same three t shirts, my money's nearly gone, and every now and then I wake up in a cramped hostel bunkbed after a beautiful dream about my lovely king-sized bed back home. So I'll be catching the Eurostar back on the 20th of May. Not long left then.

I'm only going to be back for a few weeks though, then stage 2 of my masterplan swings into action. At the moment that's increasingly looking like a more full-time move abroad...