Paris - finally

From the pics online, I thought the hostel I'd booked in Paris looked a much more friendly and sociable place than where I stayed in Strasbourg. It was, but only slightly. A sign in the reception and social area said "we want to keep a friendly and warm atmosphere in the lobby, so we don't provide WiFi access in the rooms. Come down, connect, and share a moment with us! That's the youth hostel spirit." When I got there, the place was packed. Every single person had their face buried into a phone or laptop screen. No one moved. No one looked up. Silence. What an atmosphere.

I went for lunch in a cafe that was only semi-busy, but the way the waiter behaved you'd have thought the entire population of Paris had descended upon the place all at once. He was bad tempered, flapped about constantly and met every request with an open-armed invite to look round the half filled restaurant that he seemed to be suggesting he was barely keeping on top of. A couple of American businessmen dared to make more than one request at a time and he responded by holding his hands up in front of him, palms together, and bowing to them mockingly. Suffice to say, I liked him immediately.

I decided to try steak tartare for the first time in my life, and it was rubbish. Raw beef tastes of nothing, raw egg tastes of nothing and the only flavour I got was from the raw onion, gerkins and capers that came with it. A beer cost €8.50 - I had just eaten raw meat, but that nearly made me puke.

As much of an utter pain in the arse as she is, it was nice to meet up with my friend Helene in the afternoon. We went to the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain to see an exhibition of the sculptures of Ron Mueck, which were unsettling to say the least. His human models are creepily ultra-realistic and he plays with scale to such an extreme level that you're either freaked out by the vastness of his subject matter or disturbed by the intensity with which his miniature work depicts its grotesqueness. My favourite piece was called Young Couple and from the front it appears to be a sweet, heartwarming sculpture of a teenage boy and girl stood together, arms around each other, and he with his head bowed towards hers. But circling around the piece reveals the back of the figures, and you realise it's not an affectionate embrace at all, but a violent, oppressive one, with the boy yanking back the girl's arm in a viciously spiteful grip. That's art.

'Couple Under an Umbrella'

'Young Couple'

In the evening we met Helene's boyfriend Jonathan for dinner. He's a really nice guy from Madrid who has two sisters who live in Slough. Not sure who would swap Madrid for Slough, but still. After some food, wine and a little French-bashing, they invited me for a stroll along the Seine, but I didn't want to get back to the hostel too late. Plus it would've been a little less romantic having me along. Maybe.

It was hometime the next morning. I headed to Gare du Nord to catch the Eurostar back to London, which I was feeling pretty ready for. As I was queuing to pass through the ticket check there was an explosion, and several hundred people ducked in unison like the world's shortest flashmob as sparks, smoke and flames billowed from the top of some train's engine. The air stank of burning. Luckily it wasn't my train. Oh, and also that no one was hurt. I made it back to England in any case.