Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everybody! Can you believe it's 2012? because I sure can't! 2011 passed by so fast and looking back it was filled with lots of good memories and sad ones too. So much happened and so much changed that who knows what 2012 has in store for me, but hopefully it'll get better!

What I thought would be a quiet night, turned out to be a great night and I couldn't be happier! There's a group on Facebook for au pairs and there was a couple of girls organizing to meet up and go to the Eiffel Tower to celebrate. To get to the Eiffel Tower I had to take the metro for the 1st time all by myself (yes I'm a big girl now) and well of course I ended up getting lost!

I thought I would be fine and figured it was simple enough. On my way there I was being thankful for my years in Montreal taking the metro to go downtown since it made me metro-savy...or so I thought. Apparently the Parisian metro is much more complicated than I thought. I mean the whole concept is easy, same like Montreal but it has a lot more lines, a lot more stops to change lines but the most confusing part is the underground hallway to get to the metro lines. That's what messed me up! I felt like I was trapped in a labyrinth, I kept going up and down stairs and turning to different tunnels following the signs and trying to follow the crowd since they all seemed to be going to the same place.
After 20 min of getting lost because I misread the direction of the metro, I finally managed to get to the stop I was meeting the other au pairs at (of course I got lost a few times more trying to find the next metro line I needed to take hehe).

We all walked together to the eiffel tower but to our disappointment there was nothing to do. There's usually fireworks at midnight but of course the one year that I'm in Paris they decide to not have them, go figure. So we stayed a bit and walked around trying to find a good spot that wasn't too packed with people (it felt like all of Paris was at that same spot). The tower was so beautiful! I couldn't believe I was looking at it, it looked so magical, it made me feel so lucky to be here.

After 2 hours of just walking around and waiting for other au pairs, we decided to go to St. Michel to go to a bar since there wasn't much to do at the Eiffel Tower but than to look at it. After waiting for the RER (it's like a train) and walking some more (my boots where soaked, completely soaked by the time I got to the bar) we finally found a bar in the street called "Rue Mouffetard" close to the Pantheon. It was such a cute street! I loved it and it was perfect because it was full of young people since it's a student area. We went to the "The fifth bar" which was a really small bar and at first I thought we weren't going to have much fun in there but oh I was wrong.

2012 greeted us with french boys (random ones) saying bonne annee! and giving us kisses on the cheek. Then we all started dancing and screaming and just having fun. We were in the basement of the bar and everybody just started to get together and started dancing and just enjoying themselves.I'm so glad we had fun and that it wasn't boring because I find that New Years can be pretty disappointing. You make plans for so long and you have high expectations, but then the plan doesn't work, people don't agree with what to do, it's not fun etc etc. But this was the opposite and we didn't even plan anything. So next year I'm just going to go with the flow and let life take me where I'm supposed to be to start the new year.

One of the funniest (but kinda scary if you where that person) thing that happened to us is that we were all dancing away and having fun when we hear a loud pound on what seemed to be a door. Me and 2 other girls where a bit confused and wondered where it came from. It was a really loud bang so it didn't seem normal. We followed the sound and found out it was coming from the boys bathroom. We thought people might be doing the dirty, a loud dirty lol. So we just asked if the person was okay, and we got another loud bang on the door followed by even more louder and desperate bangs. This time we knew something was up and realized that the person was stuck in the toilet! There was no door nob! So we shouted to the person to wait and that we were going to go find someone to open the door. To make a long story short, after 10 min. and continuously loud bangs (I don't think the person could hear us at the beginning that we were trying to open it) the person was set free. The girls and I were curious to see who it was, wondering if it was two people doing naughty things who got stuck in the toilet (wouldn't that be funny), but guess who it was? An old man! Well not that old, but he was in his 40's. He was all sweaty and he looked so frightened and kept saying thank you to us. We gave him a big hug because we felt bad, and he just kept saying thank you, you're so nice and blowing us kisses (not the creepy kind, the one people do with their hands to show gratefulness hehe).

Then after a few more hours of partying the whole group decided to head to another bar since that one was getting too crowded (and it was so so small!) but I went home (I still have a 3 am curfew even though I'm in Paris, I need to figure a way around it!).

Well, I hope everybody's new year started great, it gives you a bit of a boost and hope that this new year will be full of good moments.