My Apartment in Paris

For those of you who didn't get a chance to visit me while I was in Paris, you should definitely come and visit me when I'm in Oxford. But since you didn't get a chance to climb the seven flights of stairs to my tiny apartment in Paris, I'm posting these pictures so you can see where I lived.
In Paris, the buildings are not allowed to be above a certain height, so in most residential neighborhoods, there are seven floors of regular apartments, and on top is a floor with tiny apartments once occupied by the maids. Because of this former relationship, these tiny apartments are often owned by the people living in the (much larger) apartments on the lower floors, who rent them to people who don't mind walking up seven flights of stairs every day, or to students. Because no one cared about the maids when building these buildings, the first seven floors are reachable by the front staircase, and now, the elevator. The eighth floor (called the seventh by the French, who count the ground floor as level zero) can only be reached by a back staircase. In my building, the back staircase was reached by walking past the building's trash receptacles and through a courtyard.

The apartment itself was tiny. It was so small I couldn't even take two pictures of it that didn't overlap (see the same white table in both pictures). The bathroom was behind the curtain in the top picture, and it was tiny too. Only one wall was straight, and the other was the slanted part of the roof. And yet, I loved that apartment. It was tiny and it was on the eighth floor, but it was my home in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris! And I really liked the pink and green striped curtains.